V0.61 - Prison & Interrogations

Patreon LINK.

New build is here! Patch notes below.

First of all, I like to thank everyone for participating in the previous poll and for writing all the feedback. To be honest, it's a lot more comments than I anticipated because I don't usually get many comments on my posts, but nevertheless, I did read them all. However, I wouldn't be responding to them individually.

I have not decided on the button mashing as of v0.61, however, there were a lot of good discussion touching on other areas of the game. So I decided to take another look at some of the "old" game mechanics and give them another pass. In particular, separating how the H-content is handled during battle and in safe areas (such as Town) is a good idea. So I think you'll find that the H-content in safe areas is a lot more ergonomic now.

The new feature in this patch is the Prison map. (Because Dungeon was taken already) In there, you can interact with your prisoners/captured units. Talk to the Receptionists for an overview of what you can do in the area. In addition, there were some confusion on how to get your allies to engage in H-moves, so the Receptionist is a good opportunity to clarify on how to do that. Hint: the "Go!" and "Escort" commands.

- Added new Zone: "Your Room," this is a replacement for "Tent" area
-   You now start the game in "Your Room" rather than "Town"
-   "Tent" area is now inaccessible, but if you wish, you can go back to "Tent" via the command: m_goto "Tent"
- Added new Zone: "Prison," here you can get close and personal with your prisoners
-   Accessed via talking to Talia in town, talk to the Receptionist in Prison for an explanation of the area

- H move changes:
-   In safe areas, the player can now instantly escape from any friendly grabs and devices
-   In safe areas, Allies will no longer attempt to escape from grapples and devices
-   The "Grabbing Escape" Meter will not show up when neither party is escapings
-   In safe areas, H-grabs lasts x2.0 times as long (H-damage reduced by 50%)
-   In safe areas, friendly units can now interact with units already placed on devices, but they still wouldn't carry and place them onto device
- The "Escort" Command now also commands allies that are currently grabbing somebody else to cease that immediately
- You can now get up from downed state with less than 50% of total HP

- Stats rebalance
-   Command Point increase per level changed from 0.5 to 1.0 per level
-   Command Point bonus per INT/CHA changed from 1.0 to 0.5 per point
-   MIG and DEX now gives a 5% escape rate increase per point
-   CON and WIL now gives a 10% increase in HP regeneration per point

- Added a "weaponSwitch" tag under "canDo" that determines if the AI units can switch between ranged and melee weaponry.
-   Also requires the unit to have valid melee/ranged weapons in inventory to switch to
- Elf units in "Woods" can now switch between bows and spears
- You can now find supply-refills in containers
- Added the entire "demon_set", "wolf_tail", "kitty_tail", "cat_ears" and "toy_gun" to the Strange Merchant until when they can be acquired in game again
- Removed acquiring new weapon and armor upgrades (the +1, +2, etc) from the game, they will come back in the future in a different form

- Added new Map metadata flag: "saveChanges", if set to true, then the game will save any changes made to the map like the "Tent" area
- Game no longer tracks changes to unique units belonging to the enemy and wild team
-   this should make authoring new unique enemies easier, as previously edits in the unit json file is ineffective because it is shadowed by the saved unit state
- Added a "can_not_guard" under weapon_move_set to indicate that particular melee weapon can not guard

v0.6 - vine traps

Patreon LINK.

V0.6 is here! (I scaled the version number by a factor of 1/10).

The main feature in this patch is 3 additional vine animations + player peaceable traps. Includes the vine trap of course. You can buy them off a particular NPC in town.

The other set of feature is preparation for the "story" related stuff. It includes a bunch of new features for authoring quests and dialogues. Also fulfilled some requests from modders as well. I am including the changes for documentation purposes, you can ignore them if you are not interested in modding.

One thing to note is that I plan to do away with the random "meet a potential ally" in Dungeon mechanic and instead allowing you to "Rescue" potentially allies at end of quests lines and for completing a zone. That's what the focus for the next couple of patches will be. Also, there will probably be a save-file incompatible patch sometime in the future as well.

Changelogs:

- Added 3 new vine animations
- Fixed rebinding console key not working properly for closing the console input, you can now type in ` key if you rebind the console key to something else (this should solve some problems for non US-ENG keyboard not able to type in ' and ")
- Implement a global resource: "Supplies"
- Command Limit gain per level increased to 0.5 per level from 0.33 per level
- Command Limit gain per CHA decreased to 1.0 per level from 2.0 per level (to 1.5 from 2.33 if including level bonuses)
- Int now also increases Command Limit at same rate as CHA
- Int now allows you to carry 25 more supplies per point. Need to refill supplies to see it's effect
- Implemented trap kits that places traps. Consumes supplies on use.
- Implemented "gas_trap" functionality
- You now start the game in the Town area instead of Tent
- Maps now only spawns pre-placed unique units if they are not in your party / reserves
-   Saphira is looking for a companion, you can find her in town if she is not in your party (her dialogue will be updated in a later patch)
- Added new HUD to open "Inventory"/"Equipment"/"Stats"/"Options" on bottom left of screen
- Removed 'setting area "Forest" failed' warning at end of Goblin Lair
- Reduced damage of longbow and kunai to compensate for the fact that they weren't balanced for infinite ammo at beginning
- Fixed couple of loading mod resource bugs
- // ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
- // the following is for modders/ those who are interested in the internals
- // ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
- All quest states are now saved globally instead of saved at a per quest giver level
- Game will now track which dungeon/zones you have completed in addition to tracking which dungeon/zones you have unlocked
-   for "old" dungeons, they are considered complete when the player finishes the last floor in the dungeon
-   for maps, they are considered complete when the player reaches a "task" with a (internal) "type" of "victory"
- Dialgoue: added new <COND_SAY> for (conditional say) that is only availiable if the <QUEST_PREREQS> are met
- Added new types of prerequisites for <PREREQ>s:
-   <COMPLETED_ZONE>: checks if the player have completed a zone (dungeon/map)
-   <CAN_GOTO_ZONE>: checks whether the player currently have access to a zone (dungeon/map)
-   <HAS_MEMBER>: checks whether the player have at least a unit of the same uid in party/reserves
- <QUEST_REWARDS> can now use <EFFECTS> as a reward. This uses the same trigger effects system as in .mapData.
-   Note: must be in a map (and not old style dungeon) for this to work
- Added new trigger effects:
-   "goto_zone": teleports your party to target map, bypass any access restrictions
-   "give_item": places items into player's inventory
-   "spawn_units": spawns group of units of team at region
- Quests can now be marked as repeatable if there is a "<REPEATABLE>":true tag under <QUEST_PREREQS>
- Added a test map for testing the new dialogue stuff. You can access it by m_goto "dev_quest_test" in the console
-   data/_quest_ref is where the reference is

A Poll

The vine moves are pretty well received, and for next patch, I added a few more variations.

In the current patch, only enemies are able to use the vine moves, so naturally, people want a way for them to use vine moves on others. However, since the player is not a tentacle monster, having her able to summon vines out of the thin air is kinda weird. But there is an alternative, I am going to allow the player to place traps, and the vine trap is one of the traps the player can place.

The traps are implemented as items that the player can equip and use. There are two ways to implement this:

 As a regular consumable item that each use will consume one stack of the item and the player will need to rebuy more of them in the shops.
 Implement it as a kit, with infinite uses, however, each use will consume from a global resource pool (“Supplies”). This global resource pools is shared across all items. So for example, assuming 2 types of traps: A and B, each consuming 50% of the global resource per use, the player can place either 2 As, 2 Bs or 1 A and 1 B. This global resource is refilled whenever the player is healed.
So here is the question: which method do you prefer?

Poll LINK.

Some other news, @Mike W released an impressive mod with new elf outfits, weapons and more! Get it here!