October 29, 2015
Trials in Tainted Space
29 Comments

ScalebuttsI’m not dead, honest. Bess didn’t get the better of me, although it was touch and go for a while.

Straight off the back of Bess, one of the single biggest additions of content to TiTS to date, I started working on Savin’s latest dungeon-creation. UNFORTUNATELY FOR MY SANITY, said content makes heavy usage of something we’d discussed doing months ago, and provisionally scheduled for post-Myrellion-story-completion.

We are now post-Myrellion-story-completion. Which means I’ve (already) spent the last week or so refactoring combat entirely, from the ground up. ‘WHY?’ I hear you ask? To add proper support for group combat to the game, both for groups of enemies and NPCs to support the player in combat. The former will probably start to show up in a lot of places. Savin already has a fair few dungeon encounters in the game that technically should have been implemented as proper group fights, but a lot of the code lacked support and testing for it. The latter though is going to be pretty much exclusively reserved for special story arcs along the way; we’re not intending on allowing the player to slum around with their waifus in combat full-time or anything like that.

I’ve made good progress on it, but I’m still probably something like a week or so away from getting it out of the door. There’s a LOT of little bits and pieces all over the game that has to be touched up to support this, not least actually fixing up the combat encounters themselves once the underlying system is in place. The time I spent fiddling with Silence is coming into its own here, as I’ve already solved a lot of the non-obvious problems and made a small scale version of the system there- a lot of changes to make to how its being presented need to get done, but most of the work itself is simply converting the existing combat attacks to the correct format and adding in support for various things (like actual AoE damage to attacks that should have it) along the way. That said, I have KaraQuest 2.0 already rough-coded, pretty much the only thing it is missing are the fight implementations, so expect a big fat update soon™.

Now then, on a TANGENTIALLY RELATED NOTE.

Nearly a year ago now, a fantastic artist (and now friend), BNG, started to piece together his own game. Born of the desire to do something similar to CoC but with a far more artistically focused design, he’s been chipping away for months and months, slowly learning and piecing together ideas and designs to build his own game- something similar to what Fenoxo and the rest of us have been building here, but with a unique spice and different direction taken. The game design is starting to come together….

cs-plugpost

I’ve been roped in to help design some of the technical aspects and weigh in with some advice that I’ve picked up from my time working on both CoC and TiTS. We’ve butted heads quite frequently on a lot of things, most of which isn’t necessarily apparent up front but is only learned through experience building these kinds of games. I’ve also slammed down some phat code beats to get things moving along, but my ability to contribute has been limited thanks to other commitments. Like actually working on TiTS to name but one.

He’s posting up details about the game over on its blog, so if you’re interested go check it out!

Arts by Stereo and BNG respectively.