July started out a little rough. I learned a valuable lesson in not updating the game a couple of days before taking a week off, as it turns out that if something can go wrong. It will. There was a frustrating bug in the code that caused the game to crash every few minutes caused by trivial progress bar colour filters. I was quick into getting hotfix out as soon as I made it back. Apologies for that one.
Anyway, work began on 0.8 straight after that whole debacle and I’ve been hard-at it with new systems, mechanics and features since then. I’ve been really interested in improving the way that you manage your Heroes in the game. Up until now they’ve been pretty happy just doing whatever you tell them but, for a while now I’ve wanted to have them push the player back a little bit. So I’m introducing a system much like that of Theme Hospital, The Movies or most other Tycoon Games that had this feature. PAY HAPPINESS. As your Heroes skills improve, they’ll start demanding more pay for their services. Refuse them an increase too many times and keep them unhappy and they’ll leave your service.
This should cause players to pay a bit more attention to their Heroes and will make them think a bit more about who they’re choosing to send on a quest. I really like that it’ll make everything a little bit more difficult and cause the player to reflect on their choices a bit more. (That’s the idea, anyway) If they get too demanding the option to sack them will always be there, of course.
Similarly, I’ve added an increase in maintenance of stores with each level they grow. It didn’t make sense that buildings placed at the start of the game could be paying out 100/1000’s of gold a month but only cost 10 gold to maintain. So expenses will be much more scale-able. However, if the player decides they’re not making enough from a store for it to be worthwhile they can now also close the store temporarily. This will stop adventurers using it and cost no maintenance for as long as the store is closed. Alternatively if they just decide that they don’t want the store to grow and disable leveling, instead. This should make it easier for those over-spenders to avoid breaking the bank and give the player a bit more control over their month to month finances.
I’ve also started tweaking some of the in-game dialogues and help files to make them more useful. I’ve found a way to highlight keywords in big lines of text easily. So I’ve begun going through the initial dialogues at the start of the game to try and make key areas of the help stand out a little better.
The main focus of this update though is to get the education system in. I actually really like this design for the school, which will attract adventurers and allow you to task up to three heroes to teach classes and turn adventurers into fully-equipped, fearless Heroes. I’m about halfway through implementing the mechanics of the system, (there’s a lot of pipeline stuff I need to add to get it working properly) I’ll hopefully have it completed by the end of the week.
It has opened up some new ideas for me though, I’ve been wanting to implement some nice little late-game mechanics and a number of events that only the most hardcore players will be able to uncover. I can’t go into too much detail yet but all I’ll say is that it may involve a series of conditions that the players must meet in order to construct an interdimensional portal, retrieve a mystical weapon and slay a dragon…
Maybe I’ve said too much…
Anyway, that’s the gist of what’s being going into the game. I’m hoping to get the update out by the end of the month to celebrate the first anniversary of release into Early Access on Steam.
More news on that soon.
All the best,
Matt