Dev Ramblings (Quest Tracking and QoL Improvements)

Hello there!

We have another Dev Ramblings for the upcoming update. Like the last one, it’ll be a bit of a ramble about the inner workings of the game, but for those who just want an update on progress and how things have been going:

We are still on track to release on Halloween. I am still determined to keep our “once a month” release schedule. We’ve recently finished the biggest part of this update, which is the new Quest Log/Tracking system. More on this below, but it should make it much easier for players to track and discover what content they have and have not done. It is also the subject of this Dev Ramblings. It’ll be tested out in the Beta, which should be released in a day or two. Now, onto the rambling!

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One of the biggest systems I’ve wanted to improve for a long while has been how we handle Quests and Stories in LaaB. It is one of the key parts of the game, but the system itself has never been uniform or centralized. This is mainly due to when the first major quest was added, Noah: Booster Shot, I was still very much learning how to use Twine to do certain things. This led to each quest/story event really being its own thing and each working in its own way; often leading to confusion on my part about how each one worked or having to reinvent the wheel whenever a quest wanted to do something a little different.

So, we’ve spent the last little bit designing a new, uniform quest system and converting all the old quests and story events to it, along with touching up and improving the triggers for them. This improves things both internally and externally. But before I get into that, I should define what the 3 types of “quests/story events” we have in the game. These are all handled under the same system now and all share the goal of advancing the plot and world of the game, but behave a little differently.

The first are Events. Not like the random events you see in the world, but the one-time events that occur under certain conditions that you can only see once per save. Think of this like Jackson’s event with his little brother and dad or Arthur & Richard’s introduction at the mall. ‘Events’ are one-time scenes that generally only have a single passage, with maybe a choice or such in the middle. These are pretty simple, but gives little bits of life throughout the game world and help us advance the characters in little, fun ways.

Second are Stories. These, like Events, are self contained and occur all at once. That is to say, once you start a Story you will go through the entire thing. An example of this would me “Michael: Little Bear” or “Noah: Stormy Night”. The story starts in a location and you are ‘stuck’ in the story until it finishes. There are multiple parts and choices, but you don’t get released from the story until the end.

Lastly, we have Quests. These are basically stories that have ‘breaks’ or ‘objectives’ in the middle. Sort of like a series of Events or Stories attached together. An example would be “Noah: Booster Shot” You have an Event at the start, then an objective, then a Story once you take Noah to his appointment. These are the ones that show up in the Quest Log and generally have ‘steps’ you go through one at a time.

Speaking of the Quest Log, we’ve improved the look and functionality of it to be easier to read. We still have some touch-ups we want to do for it, but it is already looking much better:

Now, these “types” are mainly used by us internally to define how the content will interact with the system. Externally, I still refer to all three types of Content as Quests/Story Events, since that is a good general way to describe them. The main reason we wanted to define these three types of content is since they all behave differently in the system. In the new system, every single event has four stages it could be in:

Unavailable: This means the conditions for the content has not yet been met. Everyday, at midnight, the game will check every currently Unavailable Quest and, if conditions are met, move it to the next stage. For example: “Noah: Booster Shot” requires his Social to be 50+. So, if you end the day with 50 or more Social for Noah, the Quest will be available.

InActive: These are the quests that have their conditions met, but have not yet been picked up by the player. Once a quest is ‘InActive’ you just have to go to the trigger spot under the right conditions. For example: “Noah: Booster Shot” has the Triggers of “Weekend | Before 4PM | Player’s Living Room. So simply go to this location on the weekend before 4PM. Simple enough.

Active: This one is special as only really Quests will be put in the Active Stage. This means the quest is currently in your Quest Log and you are actively doing it. Such as once you’ve been told to take Noah to his appointment, but have not done so yet. Events and Stories don’t go into the Active Stage, this is because once you start them, you are stuck on them until you finish this, so there is no point moving them to this stage. You pick them up once they are InActive, then they go straight to Completed once you’ve done them.

Completed: This one is simple, it means you’ve done the content. You’ve done the quest, seen the scene, and experienced the story.

This may seem like a pretty simple and obvious system, and it is. The old versions did use something like this, though the issue was it wasn’t uniform across all content and many content pieces needed special treatment for one reason or another. But, we’ve finally taken the time to update all this to a nice, new system that makes adding new quests and one-time events SOOOO much easier. I can’t understate how annoying adding this stuff was before hand.

But this is what LaaB is. I was but a novice when I started working on it, and I still am, but a slightly more experienced novice. But, as mentioned before, my big goal now is to bring existing content up to snuff. Both Classmates to Lucas’ level and the game systems to a more finished and streamlined version. This also allows us to deal with issues noted by players. Once of which is how hard it can be to know which content you’ve done, what content you still need to see, and how to see it. So, with that in mind, let me show you the new Quest Journal:

Located in the Bedroom Journal, this will list every single Quest/Story Event in the game. Whether Event/Story/Quest, it is here listed under the category, which is in most cases the character it is around. Now, in normal gameplay you will simply get a list of the quests and what stage they are in.

|-???| = Unavailable

|-??? (Available)| = InActive

|-QUEST NAME| = Active

|-QUEST NAME (Completed)| = Completed

This means you can know what content is left without spoilers.

However, as you can kind of see in the picture above, if you have Cheats Enabled, you will see the Requirements when the quest is in the Unavailable State and the Trigger Conditions when it is in the InActive state. This should help you with figuring out how to get that one piece of content you’re missing. This is a major quality of life addition I’ve been wanting to add.

But we have one more QoL addition in the Notification System. You may have noticed that, when we updated our sidebar a few updates ago, we added a little message icon on the top right of it. This has been sitting there, unused, before this, but now it is fully functional! This little button will “light-up” when you have a new message. This is stuff that we want to tell the player or stuff we think they should know. Right now, it really only tells you about new Quests you’ve picked up that are available in your Quest Log, but we plan to migrate things like the Homework/Detention Reminders, and other things there once we’re sure the system is working.

But that’s all for this Dev Ramblings. We hope you’ve enjoyed this little peek into the new Quest System along with these QoL additions that should improve the player experience. Update should be out soon and Beta within a few days to try these out! Next update will be doing the same to the Social Menu and see the return of Character Journal Entries, for those who remember those. But that’ll be a ramblings for another time.

Thanks again for your support! And check back soon, we may have one more ramblings to show you before the update is out!