Happy April! I hope everyone had a good March! This past month was more chugging along as usual on the graphics update, but here’s some of the cooler stuff we’ve been up to!
Day? Night?
We showed it off a bit last month, but we’re putting in time-of-day shaders! We showed off the sunset one last month, so here’s our nighttime one!
When the game was first conceived, we wanted to have a dynamic day-night cycle for the whole game. Except that is a heck of a lot of work. So we now have it for select maps during select story segments to help set the mood~
We’ve been told that it’s much more impressive in-game so we hope everyone looks forward to seeing them in action!
Quest Popups!
Another small thing we’ve done is include these quest popup icons whenever you gain a new quest. In the old demo there wasn’t any indicator, and that was fine since it only had main story content. But as we move forward with the new demo, we’ve realized that it’s a big improvement to just know that you’ve picked up a new quest or finished one! Plus, talking to some NPCs will trigger sub-quests, so it’ll be good to know when you’ve picked one up~
Debate Improvements
Bit of a ~spoiler~ but we’ve been making some interesting upgrades to the Debate Battle System. If you don’t want to hear any of it, best skip to the end.
In the current demo, during the tutorial section, there is a merchant you speak to, to get some bread. In order to convince her to hand it over to you, you need to gather a set of facts from around town and use them.
We’ve talked about it previously, but some of the upgrades we’ve done to the Debate Battle System is to divide gathering statements into three types: Facts, Testimonies and Evidence.
In the current version of the demo, there’s three statements and only one guy has the one you need to advance through the main story. In the new version, these three are now testimonies and gathering all three will produce a statement for you, which you can use in the debate.
Cool! This means we can have less facts, but more meaningful ones.
In the grand scheme of things, no one really cares that one bread seller in Vuni is not selling well, but it being a symptom of a larger problem and being used to back up a conclusion (i.e. poverty in Vuni) is much more substantive.
And there’s more~!
Another minor improvement we made was to add support for custom actions during a debate. For instance, our merchant friend is a merchant, it seems obvious that she might just offer the bread to you to buy. In the old system, this wasn’t possible. To do something like this the debate would end and you could be given the option in a cutscene of sorts. Now she’ll give you the option to buy the bread instead of trading it for info.
This’ll open up more possibilities for more interesting options, so we hope you look forward to it!
What’s Next?
Going forward we’ll be continuing to work on the demo update. We’ve been getting a lot of feedback from testers and the build is very stable so we’ll be adding in a bunch more content in the next month! We’re steadily approaching completion, look forward to it~
March 2019 Progress Update!