Unity Port: Update 6 - Old Kingston

Good day Knights, Knaves, and Mages! The team has been hard at work transferring Towergirls to Unity, and things are wrapping up for the main systems. Soon we will be focusing on Kobold Princess.

In the meantime, we have been working on a core piece of content which was lacking in the GMS version of the game. We've been streamlining the beginning of the game and its tutorial process, and in general doing our best to ensure that playing the game will be a more intuitive and enjoyable experience for everyone. To that end, we've slimmed down on the character creation options in favor of giving each origin unique flavor and potential down the road. You'll see what we mean.

In order to provide the player an "anchor," or a location you can always return to and collect yourself at, we are implementing a hub area. Welcome to Old Kingston, in all three of its glorious dimensions.  

[See main picture- central area of Old Kingston, still in development.]

Old Kingston is a sort of run-down slum situated below Kingston proper. It is neither well-maintained nor is it beautiful, but after High Forest was attacked, it seemed a far safer place to Kingston's populace than the terraces above.

[What wonders await at the furthest end of the back alley?]

While the Ser we know and love from the charts is mostly a nomad, we think it's important to have a solid area designed to cater to his necessities. Several NPCs, many of them new, operate stores on the streets of Old Kingston. Among them you will find a dedicated blacksmith, a raunchy sorceress, one particularly filthy bastard, and other new faces. We hope everyone will find them as fun and interesting as they were to draw and write for.  In addition to the shops and dialogue, it will provide a few other important services, including a place to store items to unclutter the inventory.

New content isn't the only thing on our list, however. A number of fixes and adjustments have been made to improve stability and performance, and more additions and changes are coming with the upcoming patch.  So far we are sitting at:

Unreleased 0.503

- Non-essential dungeons can be exited at their first room

- The party can now be moved around the overmap

- Overmap Pathfinding shows how many weeks are expected to arrive at the destination

- The territory info screen is working

- You can now enter dungeons from the Overmap (actual dungeon levels and text locations)

- Basic overmap info (party movement, target, position, camera, etc.) is saved

- When loading to the overmap, and no dungeon, the game will no longer try to also load to a null dungeon

- The dialogue panel can grow to a large size and/or fade out the background

- The parser has added functions pertaining to the dialogue panel

- Item and BBOS popups now appear over most other UI layers

- Added a parser function for deleting existing NPC's

- Added another parser function for deleting NPC's if certain quest criteria are matched

- Dungeons can have parser functions plugged into them and ran on being loaded

- Enemies can use most abilities now

- Item prefixes/suffixes/quality are loaded and saved correctly

- Trash/poor item quality can apply to most equipment

- Cutscenes have been added to the game again

- Encounters/battles can now have special defeat conditions and effects

- Doorways can now be disabled until a chosen quest reaches a particular stage

- The overmap underground toggle has been readded

- The overmap territory search function has been readded

- Rewrote a bunch of the parser- conditions can now be set/used-with any parser function

- Conditionals also now work with dialogue options/choices

- Added an 'if game week' conditional to the parser

- Added a 'shop' function to the parser for opening shops

- When showing a tooltip, and a second tooltip of an equipped item, the two will no longer overlap

- Unequiped items can now increase the stack size of an existing item, rather than only making a new stack

- Emotes are now mostly working.  We also, as you might have guessed, added a parser function for emotes

- Item suffixes are somewhat working

- Narrator text now appears correctly during the dialogue typewriter animation

- Shops are readded and fully functional!

- Ending the turn is no longer possible while dialogue, a shop, or a cutscene is active

- Base accuracy has been increased to 95% (from 90%)

- When returning to dialogue, from a shop, the black background now no longer needs to fade back in

- Shops can now operate on BOOZE instead of currency

- Darkened the dialogue box to make text show up better in bright areas

- Flags are now definitely saved and loaded

- Fixed weapon tooltips to show the correct addition/subtraction terms for the average damage result

- Clipping through colliders and falling through geometry should occur much less frequently if at all.  Similarly Ser can no longer* fall off the map when changing rooms.

- Fully* functional** Old Kingston hub

We are getting very close to having all the old systems in place- all that remains is some kingdom management, armies and army battles, and few miscellaneous information screens.  We're expecting the hub to be 90% functional around/about the first week of June, followed by readding Kobold Princess' content, which shouldn't take long at all.  After that we'll be calling the Unity Tech Demo our actual Demo instead and things should get exciting.

Also here's a few more screenshots.

[Emotes]

[Fully functional shops- lots of items still need data moved over to Unity]

[Territory information screen with placeholder images, along with the WIP overmap]

[New, unavoidable tutorial popups that should be legible on all screens]