Mothers Day Update
Happy Mother’s Day everyone!
As you may or may not have heard, I’ve started a new job recently, so updates will be slower coming. That said, I have worked on some things this weekend so here’s what’s new.
More Encounters
I’ve expanded the existing encounters, especialy around goblins and kobolds. I addeed a few minor features to allow for some more interesting interactions, and in fact there’s one particular encounter I’m very proud of where you can interrupt two bands of bickering goblins and participate in a three-way fight. I was really excited to see that it basically just works, which means the ground-work for hirelings is well in place (see below).
The kobold encounters also have a lot more variety but I think could still use some more revision. I’m still trying to find some interesting interactions there. I also have plans to expand the undead encounters, but I’m a little stuck at not having sprites for them. I’d love to have some zombies and maybe a necromancer. Eventually I might just crack open Penzilla’s existing work in Gimp and see what damage I can do.
Expanded Memory
I spent a lot of time just playing the game and tuning the prompts, and added more memory to the system on what you did to inject into the context. This will hopefully help tie things together better, and fix problem like when the quest giver doesn’t seem to realize that you’ve failed to find what they were looking for.
While I was in there I also added pronouns to all the characters, and you’ll see during character creation now you’re asked to select your pronouns. The LLM is pretty good at guessing, but I figured since I was in the prompts I might as well give it more concrete data to work with.
More Battlegrounds
“Battlegrounds” are the isometric maps used during combat. I’m still working on getting complete coverage – notabley I don’t have any unique ones for towns or temples. But besides that the combats should look now like they match the terrain you’re in. I use Tiled to generate these and have it down to a science, so making new ones is very easy. I just need to figure out how to get some buildings into the tilesets for towns and temples.
Bugs
Yup, fixed a ton of bugs. I’m sure there are more. There are always more.
What’s Next
I want to get hirelings in - which are basically NPCs you can hire to fight alongside you. I think this will make combat a little more interesting, and it will give you something to spend your gold on. I’ve already proven with the arguing goblins that the system can handle more than two factions, and I think adding an entity to the existing player’s faction should just work. Famous last words I suppose.
I also really want to get more debugging tools in. Right now while testing mostly I just crack open the database and monkey with the data directly to force the game into the state I need to test. It works - but there’s certainly a better way. A few debug commands would go a long way.
Hopefully the the number of big unfinished features is diminishing, and I can get into a cycle of creating more content and just testing and iterating on the code and prompts. Somehow though every time I check the box off of a feature in my roadmap, two new ones seem to magically appear at the end.