Okay I am getting into the nitty gritty here in fixing the smaller details just to ensure that a session can run as smoothly as possible, while also maintaining some concept of abilities. There is going to be a lot of balancing and reworking the abilities, but I think once I lock down everything else for smooth combat, it'll be way easier to manage.
List of things that needed to be changed or updated, with what I did and how.
- Players need to build Passives up: I'm not sure if I want to have this as a manual checking of a box or something that happens as the player moves their token. Going to sit on this one for a bit to determine best course of action.
- Loot drop isn't working: This turned out to be quite a hassle in determining where the failure was happening. The idea is that once a creature is marked "dead", it should be automatically turned into a loot table. There is a unique .csv file that is assigned to the creature and once the players go to loot it, the items are deposited into their inventory. Well, I didn't think outside the box enough for this. Initially, this was to be handled inside an encounter. During the testing, I just wanted to mark a creature dead and for my players to loot it just to see if it worked. Nope, this didn't work. I had to actually go through an encounter with them just to get the creature to turn into a lootable item. I need to fix this so that as a fail-safe, I can just auto-kill the creature and it turn into a loot container. Turns out I also need to double check as to why the loot isn't being distributed by the entire group and why everything goes to the first player to hit the "Loot" button.
- Bring the bigger words down to more understandable verbiage: I wanted to have my entire bestiary in a more wordiness sense because in the end, I want this to be a compendium of smart individuals. Per one of my players, I need to take it down a notch because some of the words are too much.
- Fixing vendor mod/upgrade information: This was actually something I personally noticed that none of the players mentioned. When they purchase a mod, they don't know what it can socket into. After fidgeting around for a good implementation, I ended up going with a similar workflow as the upgrade with the upgrade vendor. So now, when a player is shopping, when they click on a mod, it opens another line below which displays what they have in their inventory and what that particular mod can slot into. For the upgrade vendor, I did a little bit of a change that shows what item the mod is compatible with. Since my upgrade vendor is built a little different from my normal vendors, it got special treatment.
- Players would loot a creature, but item might not be equipped by player: This is actually a returning issue that I've faced in the past. I made a lot of changes to the vendors and their .csv files over these past few play sessions, but failed to keep the loot-system module and the creature .csv files up to date. So when a player looted a creature, the armor they received wasn't usable because of outdated fields. I might make a script to run and repopulate the fields, but since this was just 1 item, I might just compensate him for the item.
- Players could edit the mini dossier windows: While I was troubleshooting the whole creature-into-loot-container, one of the tests I did was giving players ownership of the creature itself once it had a status of "dead". I forgot to take this out and found out via my testing character that I could edit the mini dossier window. Thankfully, this doesn't affect the actual full-fledged dossier of the creature, so nothing lost. Reverted ownership to GM only and they cannot see any of the finer details (things that don't matter to them as a player).
Not a lot that needed to be fixed before focusing in on abilities. A lot of these didn't surface until the previous dev log fixes were implemented. Some of these were fixed during a play session because I didn't have access to my testing character. Thankfully, one of my playtesters shared their screen, so I got to see what they saw while I fixed the problems.
This is half of the problems I have listed that need fixing. Since the next play sessions are not until November, I figured I could share this set of fixes, then start working on the next set after Group 1's date. There's some combat fixes, ability adjustments, and general housekeeping fixes that are left. Hopefully I can get these sorted out before the groups conclude this expedition!
I reopened my Ko-fi shop! It isn't full of the rewrites, but there's a few in there right now. I plan to work on updating at least three a week, which would put me to completing it around the time my mini showcase happens in December. I also have the pattern ready for my flagship creature, but I'm debating on the main material. If I get another donation on Ko-fi or a subscriber on Patreon, I can use that to fund the material purchase. Either way, it's happening.