Kandria
Kandria's patch for the vertical slice demo is out!
As before, you can get the new update from itch:
Here's the changelog of fixes reported by people:
Fix NPCs blocked by elevators
Reported by NagFix wall adjacent ropes clipping you into walls
Reported by Selwyn SimsekFix wall jumps letting you climb indefinitely
Reported by MonrothFix elevators crashing when colliding with NPCs
Reported by Hot PotatoFix text input box cursor movement
Reported by ribbitfaceFix feedback form input bleeding through to cheats/dialog
Reported by ribbitfaceFix reset button not working correctly
Reported by MonrothFix quests that require enemies being defeated not completing sometimes
Reported by Nag, Simon WeisFix save animation retaining velocity
Reported by Janne PakarinenFix Catherine getting stuck in odd locations due to retained follow state
Reported by Janne Pakarinen
As always, thank you very much to everyone that reports issues! There were a bunch of other issues that we noticed internally that have been fixed as well, as well as some visual and performance improvements.
Most importantly though we introduced a new system to describe linear quests in a much more robust and simple manner to before. Naturally this is achieved with a bit of Lisp macro finagling. A sample quest line like that could look like this:
(define-sequence-quest (kandria leak)
:title "There's a problem with the water pipe."
(:go-to (leak1 :lead catherine)
:title "Go to the first leak."
"| Follow me!")
(:interact (catherine :now T)
"| Ah damn, watch out for the wolves!")
(:complete (wolf-spawner)
:title "Defeat the enemies")
(:go-to (leak2 :lead catherine)
:title "Go to the second leak."
"| Phew, hope there's not too many of these...")
(:complete (wolf-spawner-2)
:title "Defeat the enemies"
"| Go get em!")
(:interact (catherine :now T)
"| Thanks! I don't know what I would've done without you."))
The above sequence has you follow catherine's lead, listen to an interaction once you arrive, fight some enemies, move to the second leak, fight some more enemies, and then listen to a final interaction.
With the new system the quests automatically trigger dialogue at points, removing the need for the player to manually initiate it. Overall this makes the quests feel a lot more snappy and less confusing. We still need to tweak things some more as the triggers can be quite abrupt at the moment, but I think this is the right way forward.
We also revised the spawning system, which vastly improves the mushroom gathering quest and the fight scenes during the first quest.
Finally we got rid of the quicksave system, instead opting for manual saves at specific safe locations. This was done to avoid a nasty class of bugs from strange save configurations, and to force us to consider better design, as we have to assume that players might not have saved for a while. With quicksaves it's easy to make challenges too steep and frustrating as you can assume people save all the time. Having to quicksave all the time is also immersion breaking, so there's just a lot of downsides to it.
Tim
This week has been a mixture of doing some final script edits for our new trailer, fixing some remaining bugs from the recent quest refactor, and fixing user-submitted text bugs (thank you!). I also spent a fair bit of time using Nick's new sequencing system to improve the first quest in the game, where you follow Catherine deep underground; this makes it much more trigger-based and reactive, rather than the player having to manually trigger the next stage each time. This should really streamline quest implementation going forwards too.
Next up
So, I (Nick) am going on holidays for the next week. I haven't had a proper break since December of last year, and I had started to become disillusioned and pessimistic about the project, which both generally made my mood shitty, and just lead to much reduced efficiency in my work. After some convincing by my fellow teammates I decided to take a week off.
It's not a long time and I'm sure it'll have gone by before I know it, but I think it's good to be able to stop worrying about Kandria for a bit. Take a breather.
Anyway, I'll be back next weekend. Immediately after that is the US Games Industry Week, a week with panels by industry experts from the US, organised by Swissnex, who'll also be sponsoring our attendance at GDC Online in July. Looking forward to it!
In the meantime, I hope you find some time to try out the new demo, or play through Eternia. Thanks, and I wish you all a good week!