0.29, Major Updates On The Way

I've been pretty quiet on this front, largely because I wanted to wait until I had something definite. Now that I have something more concrete I can confirm! This is a bit of a long read, but essentially it highlights what's coming.

HF largely has 3-4 main features for it's gameplay loop. Sadly, only one of them is really fleshed out at this point, the social aspects of building relationships.  Even this aspect of the game could use some improvement, and hopefully soon that will be fixed as well (being able to choose which gift you want to give someone, for example).

Today I'd like to talk about two other aspects of the game that aren't fully integrated the way I like, crafting and exploration.

As you know, you can visit the various locations of the world to get objects, fight enemies and whatnot. Ideally, that system is supposed to look like this:

When you visit a new location, the items you acquire will change based on how "leveled" that particular location is. In other words, by defeating the enemies, collecting materials and then using some mana to level locations up -- you can then get better, new and higher quality materials to make increasingly better items.

There are other aspects of why improving a location can be good, but for now I want to focus on the items you may gather and here's why--

This ties hand in hand with the second major revision -- the items in game. Ideally, items should have several qualities they currently do not. An example :

Glow Moss
Quality 125 of 999
Categories : [Plant] [Fungus]
Traits : [Antidote] [Healing] [Quality Enhance]

In the example above, Glow moss has three traits that, when used during a synthesis will transfer to the new item.

If you're using Glow Moss to make a potion for example, you'd gain a potion with antidote, extra healing power and a boost of that item's quality.

In this new system, quality would determine how effective an item is. So those potions that only heal 15 points might actually heal 150 if they are high quality and maybe even more if you have traits that bestow extra healing.

This has always been my intention for the crafting / item system of the game but this month I've really put a strong effort into building the system that would allow for this. It's now pretty close to complete at this point and I just need to do a few minor things like displaying inventory properly. (Oh, and the inventory is getting a revamp as well).

When taken together, both of these additions will open up new avenues for gameplay where you don't need to perform the same social actions all the time and you can do other things.

Also, along with this I learned how to improve the quality of the videos I add into the scenes while also making them more compact. They also loop perfectly now.

This, coupled with a strong focus on extending the main story and some side stories are now the focus of 0.29.

I will endeavor to release this ASAP (as usual, my target is the 28th, but that may change to the 31st as I attempt to get as much stuff in as possible and also do some very rigorous bug testing this time around).

- Ren