Content Content Content!

The last days were all about adding content. I made the first complete quest, I made the biggest map so far, I balanced the existing mobs and I made a new tileset which I will soon use for the first real dungeon. But there is still a lot of stuff to do before I got enough content to go public.

Attack particle effects

My buglist is shrinking down to the "that code will be replaced anyway" and "freak accident which happened once during development" categories, so I started something new. Attacks now create projectiles which fly from the caster to the target. That makes combat a lot more immersive:

Mining system

Just a concept for now.

Resource gathering is an important part of every crafting system. An important resource would be ores and minerals mined from the depth of the earth.

It would, of course, be unthinkable for a wizard to take a pickaxe and perform manual labor to excavate minerals. Like everything in Pecosia, there is a branch of magic dedicated to these kinds of jobs: Geomancery.

Geomancery is the art of using magic to sense minerals in the earth and getting them to the surface. A geomancer hunting for ores needs two spells: A detection spell which tells him where the minerals are hiding and a mining-spell which gets them to the surface. More advanced minerals do of course require more advanced geomancery spells to find and mine.

Detection spells:

Prospect

The first spell cast by a geomancer visiting a new location. It tells them if and which minerals can be found on this map, but not where.

Probe

Tells the geomancer if there are mineral deposits in range and how far they are away, but not in which direction. It does so by telling the caster the level of mineral radiation at its current position. The closer they are, the higher the radiation. However, when there are multiple deposits in range, their radiation adds up which could mislead the geomancer.

Sense

Tells the geomancer the direction of the next mineral deposit, but not how close it is. When there are multiple deposits nearby, the vector-product is created and the angle of that is shown, so again, multiple deposits in range can be misleading.

 

The Mining spell

When the geomancer believes that she found the deposit, she will use the mine-spell. It will reveal any mineral deposits in range and turn them into items which can then be picked up. The mine-spell is much more MP-costly and slower to cast than the detection spells. So while a geomancer which just casts it randomly might find a deposit once in a while, one which uses probe and sense will be much more successful in the long run.

 

All of this should not be hard to implement. But before I start I need to work on some bugs. I am using a spreadsheet for a while to collect any bugs I find but do not feel like fixing right away, and it has grown quite long. Some are of the we-can-live-with-that-for-now level, but there is also a very critical bug which makes the whole network system unresponsive under some condition which I definitely need to take care of before starting with any new features. There are also some worrysome bugs which are not that critical, but very hard to reproduce. Multithreading is hell.

Fighting NPCs

I added the ability for NPC scrips to turn NPCs into mobs and revert them back to NPCs when defeated. This will be very useful for quest scripting. I want to avoid those cliché "Kill 10 rats" quests. I want quests which actually tell a story and are not just excuses for mob grinding.

I also did a first quest where you retrieve a stolen item. The player finds the thief and talks to them. Then the thief  turns hostile and fights the player. Well, that's the basic plot. The details are of course much more fleshed out (don't want to spoil).