Update Time: Argle Bargle Bugs! New Trailer! New Logo!

So, like the new logo? I sure do!

I hope everyone is ready for the upcoming weekend and the (hopefully) fun that it brings. I know I am looking forward to a couple days off!

Mr. Rao was gracious enough to make some really, really great trailer music for an otherwise mediocre trailer that I made (I should have taken a film class in college). Please check it out here:

So what has been going on lately?

I've been working steadily on making various visual/graphical improvements; just about all of the party members have been added to the game world (and are thus now recruitable) along with the Steward for your housing area which will help manage your retinue as it grows.

The Shimmering Mirrors are all set up over the world. Depending on how the sun or moon is reflecting off of these mysterious prisms, touching them will take you to different places. These mirrors are a form of fast-travel with limited control. Though, it might be best not to touch them at midnight...

The Mark and Recall spells are all set and working perfectly. I made another spell which is kind of neat, Wizard's Eye, which will transform you into a little glowy ball and zooms you around the area so you can see what's around.
I pretty much finished all of the monster spawn templates, so now it's just a matter of copy and pasting the appropriate spawner into each section of the game. There still needs to be a few tweaks, but nothing major. A change was made to allow for monsters to occupy more 'space' than before. Previously, monsters occupied one tile, regardless of how big their art image was, which made for some odd clipping issues with some of the graphics and environments. However, appropriate monsters will now take up 2x2, 3x3 tiles as necessary. This means you could flee a monster by running through a narrow area that the creature is too big to fit through.

I've just about finished all of the crafting recipes and items. Using the appropriate items/areas will allow you to craft certain things. For example, using a blacksmith's forge allows you to craft metal weapons and armor. Using a wood-working kit allows you to make wooden weapons, armor, items, furniture, etc. Using a Fine kit (a kit used for making small, intricate items typically) will allow you to make rings, necklaces, tools, and various other items. A sewing kit allows you to make cloth armor, bandages, and the like. There are hundreds of craftable items.


Zounds! Bugs!

A good portion of the code was re-worked to make the whole game run smoother and quicker, especially on lower-end machines. For people with good desktops, there won't be much change in performance. But if you have a 5+ year old laptop that was never really good to begin with, like me, it pretty much doubles the FPS. Buuuuuuuuut...

With this changes came a bunch of new bugs and crashes. About half of the crashes have been fixed already, and thanks to Mr. Rao, I found a couple more today that need to be fixed.

See this picture here?

'Tis a lie! A new bug has made it so that ships only sail on land, and not on water. An interesting dynamic, sure, but I much prefer my ships to sail in water, but I just might be conventional. Gonna need to get that fixed, too.

Mr. Rao also pointed out that he was devoured by Dire Wolves outside of the player housing area, something that is not supposed to happen because I specifically wanted only chickens, sheep, and regular (non-dire) wolves to spawn in that area. But luckily that wasn't a bug, it was human error on my part for accidently spawning Dire Wolves instead of regular wolves. Sorry Mr. Rao!

Another peculiar bug involves the item system. Whenever you drop an item, it should, in theory, drop at your feet on the ground wherever you happen to be standing. However, instead of dropping the indicated item, it drops something completely different. So if I want to drop a cloth robe, it instead drops an iron sword. I drop an iron sword, instead it drops a frost leaf. That's gonna need to be sorted out as well.


The Mystery of Map ID099

There is a region in the game called Map ID099, also now simply known as 'The Twilight Zone'. Whenever a portion of the world is created, it is created on a blank 'map' and assigned a map ID, going from 1 to X (whatever the ending number is). So the first map I make is Map ID 001. The second map is Map ID 002. And so forth. I have many hundreds of map IDs. However, for some reason that defies all logic and reason, the game absolutely refuses to acknowledge the existence of Map ID099. The game pretty much wants nothing to do with it, and it pretty much doesn't exist. Only it does, and strange, wonderous things happen there.

Since I can't use Map ID099 for game purposes (since the game refuses to acknowledge its existence), I use it sort of as a building zone for templates (things I can simply copy and paste to other maps instead of making each one from scratch). This is where I began building my monster spawners. When I was testing out the monster spawners on a normal map that the game recognized, the monster spawns were not working properly. There was a bug. The monsters spawned, you could fight them, and when they died they crashed the game entirely. That was no good. So I went back to Map ID099 to examine it to see if it was some error I caused. I didn't change anything because I couldn't find anything wrong with it and when I tested the monster spawn in 099... it worked. I took the spawn and placed it back in the normal map... it didn't work. Map ID099? Worked.

So the same exact monster spawn that failed to work in the game would work in this place that doesn't even exist according to the game... Same coding, same everything... It is a place of magic and wonder, where broken code works but can never be part of the game itself.


Anyways...

Going forward, I am hoping to get all of those bugs squashed soon. I am going to keep updating the visuals and adding more and more NPCs to the world. I need to place the spawners in the world as well and set their appropriate spawn areas.

I am going to close out this updat with a smattering of various screenshots:


This big fellow is Dreghar, one of the Kickstarter backer characters. He is a rather large and powerful man, but there is more to him than meets the eye.

Here are some combat images. Note: The battle message window has since moved from its rather obtrusive position to the top of the screen since I last took these screenshots.

Some houses within a wooden barricade/fort:

Ruins of House Westmark, at the southern edge of the Dead Woods:

The House of Eastmark has obviously fared better than its sister House:



In the desert north of Eastmark:

In the depths of a dungeon located in the Ferocia mountains:



On the Isle of Creeping Vines, at the entrance to the dungeon Simultas:



Wandering through the Blood Wood:



I will see you all next update!

New Year, New Updates

I hope everyone had a great holiday season and New Year. Hopefully you got everything you wanted done last year and made way for the new and exciting things that this year will bring (like the end of the world!)

I received Skyrim on Christmas and I will admit, I did not get as sucked in as I thought I would. There will be a few spoilers ahead, so tread carefully if you have not yet played. I spent Christmas and most of the following day playing it, but after that it sort of went out of my system. I dabbled with it off and on since, getting myself up to level 22 with full legendary dragon plate and such, but I don't find myself as enthralled to it as I was to Fallout 3 (the reason I bought an X-Box 360 originally). The game is entertaining and fun, no doubt about it, and visually impressive. But all that is a veneer for fetch quests and kill 10 bears quests. The music is of fantastic quality, but often inappropriately placed. Having a full orchestra going with choire vocals chiming in, bringing the whole scene to a climactic high is wonderful... but not when I am buying potions. And the really sad, morose town theme when I am fighting a dragon is a bit awkward as well. I am beginning to hate dungeons because they all look -exactly- the same with the exact same textures and for the most part the same draugrs, bandits, and spiders. The single most epic thing that has happened was a mistake when I killed an imperial noble on the road (I hate those guys) and when I went to Whiterun, the guards all started to attack me, but half the town came to my aid and there was a giant fight. I ultimately reloaded it to a point where I did not kill the noble, but still, that was my best moment thus far.

I just want to make mention of something that irks me with modern games. The quest hud. How is it my character magically knows the location to every single mythical and ancient relic just by having someone tell him to go and find it? Granted, in a 3-dimensional world as large as Skyrim's, you need something to orient you, but pretty much all of the mystery and exploration is moot when you have an exact path laid out for you for every. single. quest. objective. It makes it so that I don't pay attention -at all- to the quest story or NPCs and just bounce from one arrow to the next until I finish the quest. Bah, I say. But that's just me.


Anyway, moving on to Aleph!

So I got some new software which I am loving. I am altering the character/monster art for a couple of reasons: 1.) to make characters/monsters stand out more from the background, and 2.) to give characters/monsters a more sort of retro look from the early 90's. I've added a faint black outline to the characters which makes them standout more and give them the sort of retro look, and I replaced their old shadows with simpler ones that come from the game palette itself instead of the software program used to make the characters. The old shadows were multi-colored and purplish and did not really jive. I like the look and feel of the characters now, and I won't need to redo everything, just modify what I have. Plus, now characters/monsters are more consistent art-wise with items and objects, making everything gel together better.

Though, I -did- redo the main characters. Nothing wrong with the old ones, but the new ones look more heroic in my mind:

The female version of the main character still needs a bit of work as far as the isometric directions go (notably the down-right one) but otherwise I think they look pretty spiffy. Here's a few more examples:

I also whipped up a boat which I thought came out pretty nice. I had to make it smaller than 1:1 scale because if I kept it at that ratio it would have been too big to control properly and caused all sorts of issues, so I scaled it down. As of right now, the boat is the only item not 1:1 scale.

The old main characters will be used for another purpose after I modify them. I am also going to be redoing some of the Kickstarter rewards to make them a bit more badass and epic.

I've finished pretty much all of the monster spawners, so once I place them monsters will start popping up as necessary. There's a couple of new monsters I added but need to finish up their art, including some pretty badass bosses. I began working out loot tables for treasure chests and other containers as well, and will be setting up the bank system soon (this allows you to access a certain inventory from any town that has a bank, making it so you dont need to travel back to your housing area for extra gear or storage). I've added the end fight to the game and have been working backwards, so today or tomorrow I will have the full 'main quest' finished and playable. I incorporated a Kickstarter item into this... having said item will give you an extra option at the end of the game, allowing you to choose a different ending.

Mr. Rao made a new and extremely kickass and epic version of the main theme which I will use for the opening main menu. It actually reminds me of Skyrim's in the sense that it makes me want to grab a battle axe and start rocking some dragon faces.

Once I have the main quest all set in place, I am going to add in more NPCs, items, quests, and such and just gradually fill up the big ol' world I spent forever laying out.

If you haven't submitted your Kickstarter reward idea yet (there are only a small handful who haven't) then now would be the time to get it in.

Thank you all and I hope your new year is starting out as nice as mine!