Voom wrote:Love the mic drop. I wish twirlimp comes back from his heavy workload. He helped quickly resurface the menu sections including skills and inventory. If I'm not mistaken it will be applied for the next update. He also experimented with ranged weapons and combat mechanics associated with them.
I am alive!
I honestly had to check my old thread to remember what I had added: the UI changes includes sorting/categories to skills, inventory, and shops.
There are also the new preset changes -- which I assume are considered UI changes, but I'll separate them just in case Zukero prefers to postpone their inclusion.
I'm going to load my modified game onto my phone to see how the preset UI looks because I absolutely forgot.
I'd expected that by new year's I'd have cleaned my code and separated the UI changes so that they could be applied ASAP, but even though my semester is officially over there's still a project that requires another week (any longer and I'll be in serious trouble so trust that I'm motivated).
Rest assured that my vacation extends till late January, and I have a laughably small workload after that (to balance my earlier hell, ying yang and all that), so consider me back in action!
Overview of old work:
My changes to ranged weaponry and monster AI are rather experimental -- in the sense that they need to be integrated thematically, since the mechanics & interface seem fine, although monster AI is rather sticky spaghetti code (compared to other game sections) and I had only *just* managed to make my changes bug-free enough for casual playing (who knows what might pop up under heavy testing).
I had made sure that all monster & weapon changes are backwards compatible with current monsters, so unless specified explicitly, all monsters will behave as they had before, and can be modified at will (or new monsters added).
The added monster behaviour basically depends on their line of sight & courage against pain: if they have low HP* or can't see you*, the monsters would flee in the opposite direction when attacked, otherwise they would follow you for a set number of turns*.
(* means the values are modifiable)
The only reason I added the monster AI was because of the ranged weaponry to be honest, since the old monsters would just stand motionless while you snipe them.
I don't even
remember why I added ranged weaponry -- I think I just saw a suggestions thread and added them because I never play melee myself if I can help it.
So this was a long-ish post and thanks for reading, I was just summarising my old progress -- partly because I needed to remember it myself, and to allow you to catch up with what had happened so far.
Voom wrote:
AT is quite unique. It is pure RPG. It's immersive yet it feels like just don't know enough and so you explore every inch looking for clues. It honestly reminds me of Pokemon. You are slowly discovering who the bad guys are and what mischief they are up to. It's absolutely great. The weapons and equipment needs to be reworked. The story is one thing, but the theory crafting with builds is what keeps me coming back.
I'm open to suggestions, really, as I've worked with weapons/inventory/combat and I know my way around their code now.
I personally believe that there need to be more unlockable aspects of builds that unfold with the story and more skills/"classes" that can be learned through a quest. This would help prevent newcomers from having too many choices and would also give more substance to the plot.
But that's just me -- I think *everything* should be learned & unlocked through quests -- and I'm more interested in what
you would like implemented.
Almost everything I added was a player suggestion (but I can't confirm it after so long) and you guys really know the game much better than I do.
There's already a lot of game content packed inside for next release
so I think UI suggestions would be most relevant (but might as well brainstorm mechanics changes from now
)
Nice to know you haven't left us for good. AT is a unique project: open-sourced, free, creative, thoughtful, and backed by a well-rounded community (artists, coders, mapmakers, content creationists, translators). The whole 9 yards. You are definitely a part.
But it's more than that. It's also how to calculate stats fairly b/c after a certain amount of progress, equipment stats are meaningless. For example, 5 hp means a lot to a lvl 4 char but is meaningless to a lvl 45 char. There should be a theoretical limit to stats, imo. But this would require an overhaul.