October 9th, 2018: Progress Report

Wow, it's already October! Which means that it's almost the 1 year anniversary since Meltys Quest came out! Time is flying by way to fast.

Now for today's progress report, since the last progress report I've taken a break from working on the skill tree stuff to do other stuff. The first thing was to make a Patreon with Sachinama to have a more official public face for the development of Pina and the Hero's Amazing Tale. More details will come in the future when that Patreon is finished setting up but the only thing you need to know is that I will continue to use this Patreon as sort of my private blog talking about things like what I'm doing recently, and how my health is like, etc.

After working a bit on the Patreon stuff, I've been working together with Sachinama to brainstorm various aspects of the game together. We've finally decided on how Pina will look like. Next we're currently discussing aspects of the story and characters.

Finally, on what I've been doing on the development side of things, I've been designing and implementing various minor subsystems. One of them that I coded and then ended scrapping by the time of this Progress Report was a simple line of text on the Menu that was supposed to help remind the Player what their current objective is. And well, I've currently decided the screen real estate space taken up by that is better served displaying other information instead. 

Since the last paragraph has been too vague so far, I'll reveal one of the information that will displayed instead, which is the "Party Level." In RPGs of this type where there are multiple party members, usually every character will have their own experience level and such. That's a given right? Because it's how it has always worked for every other RPG. But for our game, I'm abolishing individual experience level, instead everyone will share the same "Party Level." Defeat enemies, finish quests, and then when the Party Level raises, everyone in your party will get stronger at the same time. 

You may be wondering, "But why Rem, what's the point of doing that?" Well, in this game, characters will join your party at different parts of the game. And here's the main secret: on a certain difficulty mode, the enemy encounters are predetermined and limited. So I don't want the player to worry while playing on that mode on whether they should fight an enemy encounter now or save it for later for when there may or may not be another character who will join the party and they want that potential future party member to also be able to get the experience points. And there's another caveat to that point too, in not knowing whether or not another party member may join im the future and therefore denying that party member from getting experience points, they might just turn to searching for a walkthrough to find out when the last party member will join, which just spoils the game for them in more ways than one. So I'm cutting all that unfun stuff right in bud by having everyone share the same experience level, thus the "Party Level."

Now as to what I'm planning to do next: I'm probably going to continue working on the second Patreon (and when it's ready of course I'll explain the full details here), and go back to working on the skill tree stuff.