Next monthly check in! Just going to dive right in with little introduction this time.
My
bestiary is now up to 26 entries. As I progress into this world
building, I've started coming up with more variants in a few of the
latest entries, such as the Exira and the Lanternling. Obviously,
there's a bunch more that have been created with variants, but I need to
stop myself from doing that "feature creep". My main focus is to get a
healthy amount of variety in my bestiary by December. Once that target
is reached, I can go crazy and develop more of these. I already know
that I will be changing my information on my book-lore entries, adding
stuff, deleting parts, etc. That's mostly because as I create these
creatures and my players playtest the game, things change. Nothing will
be super drastic, however. Just, information changes as the system
develops. I'm starting to loosely think about the taxonomic ranking of
things due to how many variants I'm coming up with. Maybe a whiteboard
with pictures and string is in my near future.
Moving on to the
actual development of the system. I'm going to be honest and say that I
didn't work on half the stuff I mentioned in the previous dev log (dev
log #2). We've only had 1 session since the previous dev log and this
one due to scheduling events for the rest of the community over in
Discord. Also, I had to really sit down and work on things for this last
session pretty substantially. Let me go over that now.
The market
system module was a doozy of a build. I needed it to work with
everything else that I've built, with room to grow for future
renditions. The breakdown of this session was 2 NPCs that were vendors
of specific fields, such as a Weapons vendor and an Armor vendor.
Obviously, these sell more than straight up weapons and armor, but also
mods and generalized items that fit within those fields, like trail
rations per se. There's another NPC who is strictly mod specialization.
As of right now, he is strictly another vendor, but his role is going
to get more technical once I figure things out. I'll come back to this.
Next NPC is a storage NPC. I didn't get to making that interaction for
my players, mostly because I had some question as to how they would like
things to work. Finally, the main focus NPC in the local central hub
(LCH). This one has nothing that I need to develop anything for. This
NPC is essentially just a traditional one you encounter in most games.
So
the 2 main vendor NPCs were the main focus this round. I went the same
route as I did with the loot-table-generator (LTG) module, where I
upload a .csv file and it provides that info in a virtual store. There
is a refresh inventory because reasons (which came in super handy for
this last session) and some information that is for the GM eyes only.
For the players, they are initially provided with all items in a
vertical scroll market window, with categories listed as option sorting
buttons. For example, if a player wants to look at mods only, they press
that Mods button and only those things are listed. Everything has a
name with information, the tier, category, slot, affinity, and stock
shown to the players. There is a Buy button, which essentially just
helps make things quick and efficient. There is an additional "barter
roll" that gets performed once the player hits that Buy button. If they
roll high, they get a discount. Low rolls get full price. This was
initially done to engage roleplay, but I quickly found out that this was
a bad idea. It did generate some nice chats, but overall, it was too
messy. There were some options that I, as the GM, could see but the
players couldn't. They voiced their opinions of being able to see a
little bit of what I see, mostly in the pricing, which makes sense.
I
made it so that in the chat window, it shows who is buying what item,
which then gets put into their inventory immediately. Turns out that I
forgot to put in the code of WHO is buying WHAT. Doesn't really matter
now since the roleplay idea is out the window, but I'm still going to do
it because I want to know.
One of the biggest problems for my
players was something I soft-locked on my end. So I'm working with items
that have a tier level associated with it. If you've played any kind of
video game in the past decade, you would know this as a tier, rarity,
value, whatever. Usually they have a color range associated with them.
Since I'm a Guild Wars 2 player, you go from white - blue - green -
yellow - orange - pink - purple. If you're playing Path of Exile 2 right
now (as I am), then it goes white - blue - yellow - brownish-beige. You
get the gist. Well, I've been working on this for this game. I don't
have colors associated with things, just a T1, T2, T3, etc. Turns out,
somewhere in my code (I have a feeling of where exactly this is) I have
tiers being treated as player levels. My players couldn't purchase
anything above a T1 item. Only way I figured this out was when people
were just spamming the purchasing buttons and the chat display telling
me what was going on. This was ironically also the moment I realized I
needed the chat ping to tell me who was buying what. Needless to say, I
need to fix this.
The mod specialization NPC is on the to-do list
of making the interaction happen. I'm not exactly sure as to how I'm
going to build it. I really liked what Hellgate:London (I think it was
this game at least) had for their mods and upgrades - simple. You would
place the item in the main area, then click on an upgrade slot and it
slotted in the mod. As for this situation, depending on the complexity
of the upgrades, the player might be asked to leave that item for an
adventure. I'm really not sure how to go about this in regards to
managing things like this, but I've got an idea, which is going to be
covered in the next part.
The storage NPC. As I mentioned earlier,
I didn't around to building this one at all because I really wanted my
players to give me ideas for it. Overall consensus was a grid window
that showed you what was there, or even a list. I could try toggling
either view, but I'll have to see on my coding capabilities for this. To
further on this, someone had mentioned being able to see what you have
in the storage via your character sheet. They wouldn't be able to
interact with it, but they could at least SEE what was in there. I
actually really like this idea and will implement it. Which this brings
me to the previous section. For the mod specialization, I might add in
another tab/section that shows players if they have something with other
NPCs, like a pick up order or something. This could also get upgraded
into the whole side quest tracking idea that a lot of video games do.
But, feature creeping is real and I need to pull myself back.
Alright,
so I've got more stuff to work on, plus the previous dev log stuff to
do. I'll be busy fixing things over the next 2 weeks because that is
when the next sessions are scheduled. Once I get things done, I'm really
hoping the pace picks up and that we can really dive into the stories.
Also, my 2 groups of playtesters are going to be on separate adventures.
How exciting!
Check back next month for where things went right and where things went
wrong. You can always check my weekly posts on my Patreon and Kofi, or
follow me over on Mastodon for daily blurbs.
