When I started working on this update, after releasing 0.5 at the beginning of April, I knew it was going to be a long haul and the past two weeks have absolutely proven me that. I’m not quite sure how best to explain how I’m feeling at the moment but the only way to describe it is that I feel like after two weeks of work I haven’t really achieved anything (even though I know that I have), every day that I’ve been working on this update for the past fortnight I’ve absolutely hated it because of just how much I knew I’d needed to change. Today, I’m finally at a point where I feel like I can present some of it and no matter how frustrating the past couple of weeks have been I’m really excited about where it’s now at so I want to share with you some of the new changes to the game.

 

I think it’s probably best to start with some context… For a while now, I’ve had my issues with the Questing system. I overhauled it completely at the end of last year to a something that kind-of-worked-and-i-was-happy-enough-with-it-because-i-wanted-to-work-on-other-stuff level however as I’ve pushed further and further into development, this crack in the gameplay had began to form, and the more I continued to work on “other stuff” the bigger and bigger this crack has continued to get, to the point at which I just couldn’t ignore it anymore. The Quest system was broken. It didn’t make any sense and although the ideas were there, my half-assed “I’ll add this in later” designing and lack of any real planning about how the system affects the game had caught up with me. This is why it’s been one of the biggest challenges since starting work on RPG Tycoon.  I now had to work out and identify just what has been going horrifically wrong with the current system that was in place which quickly became apparent as it being that the system has no real connection to the Hero’s you’re sending on these quests and no real sense of progression… at all. So upon discovering this, I knew that I’d had my work cut out because I had to begin to find ways of keeping the elements of this system that work and that people enjoy as well as removing and overhauling the stuff that doesn’t and find a way to tie it all down into the rest of the game mechanics. Some serious thinking time and 8 pages of notes later, I think that I finally hit a point where the whole thing came together to a point where I was happy with it.

 

The changes to the inventory system was the first piece of the puzzle to fix, in fact one of the most interesting things I’ve learned this past few weeks is that the whole design cycle is entirely co-dependant and I think that it’s probably why I’ve felt like I haven’t actually progressed with anything here. In order to reach the end goal of having an integrated quest system, I’ve had to overhaul different areas of the UI and game mechanics in a weird kind of circle. For example, part of this new update will change how you interact with settlements during quests, they now have a distance from your Kingdom which affects their attitude towards you – this is integral to the new Quick Quest mechanics which meant that in order to implement the new quick quest system I’d had to overhaul the way that the game handles settlements. I now understand the concept of one step forward, two-steps back all too well. I’m constantly having to change focus to different areas of the game that need overhauling in order to fit this integration in. Not fun.

 

On a more positive note, the first few stages of this overhaul are done. It’s not fully complete yet because as I mentioned before I need to focus on some of the other areas such as the Kingdom AI changes I want to make and more improvements to the Settlements that need adding in order to progress with Quests further but all in all I’ve managed to re-work the way that the game handles both areas of questing.

 

So what’s changed? In a nutshell, I’ve overhauled the quest system to make it much more progressive. It never really had any sense of achievement or anything that really forced you to think about the decisions you were making and no real reward for doing so. Now though, there’s a lot more features that make you think. A lot more ways to make the player feel like they’re actually getting something out of the system other than a pointless way to earn gold. Quick Quests (previous custom quests or free quests) are directly tied to Epic Quests – in order to get better options and results for your Quick Quests you need to complete Epic Quests and unlock them. For instance, the Approach mechanic is there for the player to choose how stats should be used to deliver a better performance such as focusing on Speed if a character is really fast etc. Initially, every approach is now locked except “Normal” which will focus on an average of your Heroes stats instead which is strategically a pretty poor way to approach most quest types.

 

 

Another example is that Settlements are now distanced from you and you’ll only start with the closest three randomly generated settlements available for you to help out. If you want to find more of them, you’ll need to complete Epic Quests, raise your Epic Level (more on that in a bit) and focus your endeavours on doing just that. Settlements will have much more of an impact on you, should you choose to help them and raise your influence with them they’ll be much more likely to reward you more for helping them. However, as a responsible kingdom they’ll also rely on you more. I won’t go into too much detail about this just yet, but their distance, happiness and influence will play a much larger part in the game alongside the Competing Kingdom AI.

 

 

I’ve removed the “add points to supplies” system for something a little more simplified. Basically, you now just select what to take with you out of a list of supplies such as “Camping Gear”, “Horses” or “Armour” etc. initially you’re only able to take 3 items with up to 8 items being available to you progress further. Each quest type and each settlement will have their own preference towards what works and what doesn’t, so you’ll be fed back information at the end of each quest towards whether the supplies seemed to be useful or not and whether you packed them in the right order. As well as how helpful you actually were to a settlement with the specific quest that you attempted for them. It makes a lot more sense to me to do it this way, but also should open up a lot more experimentation options and challenges in working out the best items to take with you on quests but should also be much easier to understand when you’re doing something wrong.

 

 

 

Finally, progression. Everything is dependant upon progression now. RPG’s are about grinding, so it just makes sense that a game about building a kingdom within an RPG environment would also include that. Up until this point it really hasn’t, but now the whole quest system relies upon levels and progression to receive the best results. When you undertake Epic Quests you’ll gain epicness points and grow your epicness level, as you unlock new epicness levels the types of Epic Quests you can undertake will increase. Initially you’ll start with a focus on patrolling, keeping settlements happy and roaming between them. Focuses are a great way to quests towards what the player wants to work on, should they be trying to take down a villain and their epic level is high enough they’ll be able to focus on slaying and attempt to take down the villain that they’re hunting. Alternatively, they may wish to focus on exploring and find settlements that are influenced by competing AI, gain more influence over that settlement than the AI and then steal the settlement’s rewards each month from that AI due to having more influence over them.

 

 

Similarly you’ll find that as you undertake quests at the start of the game now, it’ll be very difficult to succeed. You’ll suck actually because your Heroes will be completely inexperienced, the new mastery system relates to how often a certain Hero performs a certain action such as Epic Quests or Delivery Missions for Noblestone. The more that a hero performs these actions, the better they’ll get at them and the better results you’ll get by doing them. Quests are now very Hero centric, so much more attention is drawn towards Heroes and their stats.

 

 

I hope you can see how these changes will really affect the quest system and to me it’s already feeling like a much better system, something that shouldn’t need much more work under-the-hood. There’s still a few things left to add to questing, but they’ll probably be added a little later down the line.
 

The next major system improvement is Kingdom AI, here’s hoping it’s a little less complicated and stressful than the past two weeks. Eh?
 

I’ll hopefully get a video up at the end of the week to show everything off in more detail.
 

All the best,

Matt