Where we are ...

Last post was more about the technology behind game, this one will be almost exclusively about the game. I will cover changes that happened, happening and will happen before you will get TD3 to play around.

You guys probably remember  this one screenshot form last post:

I don't know about you but I kind of like this interface. It give me a lot of freedom in term of the creation and nice user experience:

• I can have up to 6 different answers in the same screen. 
• I can specify where on wheel I want to put each of the answers.
• I can easily reveal new answer when player gain more information.
• Answers can be pretty long.
• Selecting any of the answer have the same speed.
• There is no way to select answer by mistake (by default none of them is active). 

Only thing that is problematic with it is that it don't cover all conversation cases. This is the reason why I also added this simple view:

I won't claim that this is final state of conversations but this is really good start especially that not only UI work was done. In shadow of nice graphical frontend we have running pretty interesting backend which allow me to quickly script new conversations, change existing ones and generally affect all the important stuff like: quests.

Quests ... Ah it was funny trying to figure out how quest system would work in Little Big Adventure Remake. As you remember original game never had proper quest window. You could see where you need to go at holo map but thats all. I decided to add proper view so players never really lost track where they are in story.

This may sound like small thing but I think it is really important especially that I plan to add more content to the game. Thanks to that game will deliver additional experience for players that finished original game hundred of times. 

.. Uf this was a lot of text. So lets take break for some more visual stuff:

This view is really memorable for me. Thanks to it I realise how slow and painful designing UI is in engine :/ Some may think that suffering is part of creating stuff... Well I kind of prefers different approach: "don't like it ? change it". 

That is why I added scriptable UI where you can describe how UI looks using text. This is not perfect solution and still would love to have visual designing but for now I'm satisfied with it. In around 2 hours I switch to this new system: main menu, inventory menu and quest system.

If you curious, old way of changing UI would look like this way:

1. Change code
2. Save & Compile changes
3. Start game
4. See result in game
5. If needed more iteration start from 1.

New way for comparison looks this way:

1. Start game.
2. Change script.
3. Save.
4. See result in game.
5. If need more iteration start from 2.

Even with my pretty quick compilations this is still nice improvement in iteration speed.

After this interruption of technology details lets returning to game. Behind this view you also can find whole Quest Management System backend. It is fully integrated with dialog system and allow already on some flexibility but we will see how it will work in practice. 

This covering what was done. Now moving to stuff that happening currently we have Load/Save system which will sadly require some additional changes in engine design. I could of course quickly hack solution for it but I would prefer to do one that will be more elegant. For now I'm not really sure how to do it this way so I moved to some code cleanup and fixing bugs.

Except Load/Save only bigger thing that we missing for TD3 are notification in game (Opened Quest, Completed Quest, New Item and so on). The rest is just bug fixes and verifying that everything works.

Uff... And with that we got to end of yet another long post :) I'm would really love to hear yours opinion about this changes :) Would also be interesting to hear which other part of game you are also interested into.

Greg