Help me shape Chapter Two (poll time!)

Polls!  I need some feedback and polls seem like a good idea to get that! 😀

So, this is just a quicky wee post.  Amn-Duth City is taking pretty long to build up; there’s 70+ villagers and over 120+ conversational lines between them, some of them including pointless chit-chat, others informating city events and some even essential to quests!  There’s also thieves that will pick your pockets should you get too close, several merchants each with their own pricing agendas, trying to get as much of your money as possible and even another party member just itching to join you!

Chapter Two will be focussed around this city and the areas nearby, based around the central quest of catching the main baddy with a backup of several other side-quests to accomplish to help you level and get better gear, as well as find more characters and back story, including learning more about the Druids, if anyone remembers the mention of them in the Freelands.

Anyways, it’s coming along well at least, if slowly.  I’m not rushing it because this will be the focus of almost the entire chapter and no one wants it to be half-assed.  The city is fun to run around in because you do get completely lost, but there’s a lot of people scampering about and there will be hidden stuff to make it more worthwhile.  But, to the point, I’m not getting a lot of feedback despite views on both the blog and forums going up constantly, so am hoping that a poll might get me some better responses.  It won’t require you to log in to vote or anything, just two seconds to read and click, and it’ll all help direct me where I’m going, which is eaxctly what I need right now; I’m sorta floatin’ around in that “so much to do; where to start?” area and need something to focus on and build around!

The craftsman is one of the many merchants in Amn-Duth who will sell you various parts and pieces for various prices.  There’s a group of other marketplace salesmen who will also buy and sell gear at mixed prices in an attempt to scam you out of more than the items worth, as well as some who will actually sell you it even cheaper than normal!  There’s also a chemist poking around with all the best healing and restorative items.

The regional map is still a bit empty to look at, but not too much time will be spent on it, as it’s mainly a travelling section between the city and the scary-ass swamps to the east where you’ll have a quest to go in and visit in the name of saving a Druid!

I Passed! (+Amn-Duth Map)

I passed!  My first year of college (3D Animation, tyvm!) has been a bounding success, despite my sleeping disability knocking me out for most of the second semester, my attendance was awful but I still passed, and got a decent grade as well, considering how quickly I had to throw together some of the work 😀

So because of this, not really done hee haw today, just had a wee party of sorts with my mate!  Despite all the shit stuff goin’ on, s’kept me in a good mood and had a fan-fuckin’-tastic burger for dinner! 😀

Just started back on it the now, seein’ what I can put together while I still have some energy left.  Am building the Amn-Duth topside where you’ll spend the majority of your time within Chapter Two, or at least where you’ll be collecting your quests.  There will be a number of quests to collect and do in your chosen order, with your important quest at the end, to investigate this Drug Baron that was paying off Sheriff Garios!

The City Centre

What I’ve been doing mostly here is getting the city built.  It’s quite huge and the map is somewhat “bare” in the sense of a tileset, which is a bit of a shame but I was lacking in tilesets.  I would have made it a bit smaller to appear to look better, but I was drawing the basis of the map from the sense of Venice (as you might have guessed by the Chapter Two page at the end of the Demo) and when I was in that city I got lost.  I mean completely lost, the place is a bloody maze at the best of times, so I wanted my city to be a maze of smaller and large pathways and rivers and bridges and a hell of a lot of buildings you shouldn’t be going in, but with a brilliant big area in the middle.

I wanted you to feel lost within the map and have to explore and find some of the secrets and quests I’ll be dotting around, but since it’s still early in the game I wanted to keep it simple enough still, so it’s still quite basic.

The peoples of the town will be talking shite mostly and have little to say, but most of them will have one or two possible lines (as discussed earlier, all civilians have multiple different conversational lines) that direct you towards some hints about what’s going on, what your missions are, and most of them warning you about the fiendish pickpockets that steal your money before you even know what’s happened!  But then again, you can always go and find the thieves den and put a stop to them!

Known Issues with ABS Chapter One Re-release

I’ll be leaving this post to cover any and all discovered bugs and issues with the ABS Re-release  as I don’t plan on releasing and patched versions unless a severe, game breaking bug is discovered, and after going through several dry runs today, I’m fairly confident there should be none of that.  This will just be covering other issues so you can look through and see what bugs you may encounter, or add to the list if you find one.  Will also help me keep up to date on what I need to fix.  Hopefully this list will be fairly small by the time Chapter Two is out 🙂

I’ll mention if each issue has been fixed or not, but these fixes won’t be patched into the current version unless there’s something massive.  Assuming the issues remain superficial I’ll just fix them now and they’ll be sorted by the time the next Demo is released

The Wee Touches

After spending an hour now writing up a variable and dozens of conditional branches combined with self-switches so that each and every NPC, villager, and otherwise non-story-essential person will not only have different dialogue options when you talk to them, but never repeat the same line twice in a row, I start to wonder if anyone will ever, ever notice this.  Typically, a normal person (myself included) will just clicky a person once to see what they say.  Twice maybe, if they’re curious and happen to know there’s multiple chat options…but when you’re in an area with a half dozen people and have an exciting mission to go to kill a dragon or save the girl, you’re never really that inclined to keep testing the limits of the NPCs ability to talk shite to you, so all the other available chat options become wasted, lost, forgotten.

Yet I can’t convince myself to stop doing it and just leave it as a static chat box.  I just feel compelled to make sure that I’m trying to pay attention to the small touches.  They’re the ones that count after all, eh?