For the last several months, I’ve primarily been writing updates and data rehashes on Tumblr, then lazily reposting one segment here. So why don’t I just drop that pretense and say, ‘hey, if you want updates, just go to my Tumblr instead.’ Of course, I don’t plan on doing anything here. It’s definitely an okay way to quickly find info about certain aspects of the game.
But for basic news, in whatever manner you wanna call it? Yeah, that’ll do good enough.
Testing Fun-times Reborn
After aeons working the fields of sowing more dialogue across the world, I decided it’s time to cut losses, get some serious testing done and throw out what’ll probably be the final ‘incomplete’ alpha/demo/whatever. Very few sidequests are around, the last four endgames aren’t done, the NPCs of Whiterock and Sapin generally don’t have dialogue, and the desert’s second scenario can’t be started (and the third is probably unstable), but other than those, it’s done. Minus, you know, the thousands of bugs hiding between here and there.
So it’s been a while, but these Testing Fun-times is partially my own working notes for fixing bugs and partially a roadmap proving that game-completion is possible. I try to be lively, but this could be some boring, unintelligable trash without understanding. It also probably looks like I’m having an argument with myself. This time I even threw in some screenshots to make it more palatable! This is continuing from a save started in October. So this is starting from having just left Damian’s Necromancer Camp, the first ‘town’ of the game. So we’re just about to enter the first proper field boards.
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Enter Pillar, the third in a series of spells that APPARENTLY share their name with pre-existing functions within the engine. Further, I SWEAR the spell worked fine in the past, so I’m honestly kind of baffled. The first two of its kind were Earthquake, which is used in-engine for shaking the screen, and Blight, which is something involving Blue Light. It’s a simple fix; just rename the function to something else like Pillard or Earthquaker everywhere, while keep the spell name itself the same, so it appears totally normal in-game. But it’s a real head-scratcher to figure out; nothing really points to what even caused the game to panic. You just gotta guess which enemy tripped up so hard and go from there.
Next issue is a little manner with the Progress Log. You’re supposed to return to Damian after getting an artifact. I put a notice in the Progress Log for it. That’s fine. The issue is if you didn’t have any artifacts to begin with, it just give a blank entry. Not a hard fix, but a pretty basic oversight on my part.
After missing about 8 times in a row, I decided to yet again to drop the Evasion of some early game foes, and slightly raise their own Attack to compensate. I know it wasn’t fully called for, as I still had like a 75-80% chance to hit, and there’s multiple ways to boost accuracy further, like Focus or dropping back to Copper weapons, but none of that would feel natural or good to a new player, who just wants to hit things real hard right away. If you’re a weirdo who plays on higher difficulties, their given stat-boosts will put them back into the range where Copper weaponry and Focus are still handy.
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Further progress on Swamp encounters led me to think that the difficulty is pretty good. Standout award goes to Crimsonia for being a massive threat to Clair while a complete joke to Draug, who is immune to Poison, which a Crimsonia’s Lethal Stinger delivers in droves. It really shows the importance of positioning.
That said, perhaps players don’t start with enough healing items. I’ve doubled the starting amount of potions and Ambrosia. Further, if you run out of Ambrosia early enough and someone’s dead, Lucy will automatically give you some at a discounted price if you talk to her, although she’ll put you in negative money if she has to. This prevents total unwinnability early on.
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Now’s time for one of my favourite parts; shopping! This is usually pretty straightforward and unfulfilling in most other RPGs, but Draug’s Resurrection just DUMPS you with options here. It’s why the first real town, Estaria, has a big open marketplace, despite its northern climate and Russian trappings. You just get thrown right in there and see firsthand how many options you’re given.
So, um, enough patting myself on the back… I, uh… don’t have enough money for craaaaaap. Sorta intentional; now that you’ve seen your options, it gives you another goal to work towards. Tying gear into levelling up only makes this more pronounced. Anyway, with my funds, bought an Iron Halberd. Clair’s pretty ineffective out of the box, especially if she gets hit by a Palsy, she’ll have trouble even doing physical damage. It kinda sells her as a mage, which isn’t wholly wrong. Right now, I think I wanna give her some real teeth without using MP. Draug already had an Iron Axe from Lucy’s shop. I imagine almost everyone will buy that from her, since the game nags you to upgrade Draug’s equipment first. Still rocking default armour, and can’t afford any tomes yet.
Next session, I’ll be heading to the Northern Wastes. My ideal goal is to take what I think is the most commonly taken path through the game, and of the two recommended ‘first artifacts’ I imagine doing the ice level first, instead of near last, is probably more appealing than a forest to most people. Getting another skeleton versus some rando priestess chick probably leans in the Northern Wastes’ favour. I dunno, I’m probably terrible at reading people.
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Thinking on last session and some fairly serious concerns involving Clair and Palsy lowering her Attack to the point of uselessness, the prime culprit, Lumiamps, have now been switched to use Enfeeble instead, which lowers Defense. So now they’re more threatening to Draug than Clair, and in a way that is more fun for starting players. Having someone do zero damage isn’t much fun.
Also thinking on those fights, there’s been an incredibly long-standing issue of the player having no particular use for a certain character, so they defend with them to pass their turns, but it just ends up their turn right away, anyway. So in this vein, Defending lasts longer, but also takes more Charge. Yes, there were circumstances where you were Defending to bait an enemy closer or waiting for an ally to buff you or debuff a target first, but just sitting on your hands, waiting for someone else’s turn happens far more often.
As soon as we’re outta the gates, we’re introduced to the first (and basically only) guest party member, Jess. Originally, Jess was put here because of a fairly huge spike in difficulty that I’m pretty sure has been hammered down. Original purpose aside, it’s another introduction to a party member who starts far stronger than Draug or Clair. Now, a normal person would just carry on, but I gotta do dumb testing crap. If you try to take Jess too far away from the intended Northern Route, Jess’ll warn you about it, and you can choose to turn back, or let Jess leave. And–
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Oh, lovely, my most hated form of errors, the Unexpected kind. These are the WORST, because I have no idea what’s responsible. And, despite the warning, Jess is correctly gone and marked with a Progress Log about permanently recruiting them. So it looks like everything worked properly. –Oh, here we go. Jess’ departure program was trying to send me to ‘Nirnwood Trial’ not ‘Nirnwood Trail’. How predictable. Mispelling words as other actual words, my eternal nemesis.
Okay, dumb testing outta the way, battles are now trivially easy for this strech with Jess’ hand. Except for Ashps, which are mid-game monsters. And boy, did it have other issues. The Ashp tried to cast Ashfall (fire damage + Silence), but couldn’t find the method. Weird that the Cinderwing earlier didn’t beat it to this. It got misplaced when I condensed the magic programs into sets instead of 500+ loose files, because seriously.
Another Ashp move, Constrict, ALSO caused issue. It’s supposed to Bind, and do more damage to bound targets. It was mislabelled as an extremely unique skill, which it wasn’t, so it didn’t go through normal channels, resulting in weirdness. Also easily enough fixed, albeit hard to track down what was causing the weirdness. And then it turns out it was also trying to throw in the foe’s full HP as a damage parameter, making to do extreme damage when fixed. I kept that concept of healthy foes able to constrict better, but trimmed it down significantly. Now, all in all, it’s a very deadly skill if you’re already bound, and almost harmless otherwise. It needs support from other enemies to shine. We’ll see how often that comes into play.
I’m not thrilled at the number of bugs so early in, must say, easily fixed or no. This is much worse than I was expecting. This is what happens when you add or update like 300 spells without any actual testing, I suppose. One more for the pile; Raddishers didn’t have an MWin file (which, for monsters, is used for that corner image when its their turn. Monsters don’t usually speak). That’s not even a programming mistake.
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Also, taking back what I said about monsters being too easy. A pair of Cinderwings quite intelligently used Powder (lowering Fire resistance) and followed with Heat wave / Ashfall to burn everyone to the ground. Ultimately, they killed both of their partners in the process (worth noting; I’m pretty sure their Bellower buddy is pretty resistant to fire, so that’s gotta be embarassing for it), but almost took Draug and Clair with them. Another really good, tense fight.
Oh, it looks like this is where testing’s gonna stop for this week. Going into the Ruby Sanctuary results in a cutscene, that, while it works, the area is completely ruined by like 25 NPCs that don’t yet have defined time routines or dialogues staring aimlessly into space. Ruby and Dorrum were to last two areas that still mattered that are behind in dialogue. I guess I better get back to that now.
Recruiting the recruited
Today in my ceaseless tirade of adding more NPC dialogue, party members now have unique lines for each location they show up in. They’re a fair bit meatier and give some insight into character’s relationships with that particular town. Between all members, there’s nine pages of text just for that. It’s never more than a single dialogue box before the ‘choose who to swap’ prompt, and while doing this, I standardized the way this was done. Before, characters had an annoying habit of having one line in their local dialogue, then a second generic one within their benched program, resulting in two textboxes of filler fluff.
Aged Out
The start of April marks Draug’s Resurrection being eight years old. Hearing that fact kind of gives me an existential crisis; at this pace, if this takes much longer, I’d be able to make maybe one or two more games before I’m literally dead. I actually had some more writing here, but I accidently deleted it. Mostly more whining about a lack of purpose to put out a demo / beta / buggy-but-basically-full-thing / whatever you wanna call it. Re-read the previous entries; writing mountains of NPC dialogue is taking a long time. Also time-of-day placement; a couple places that I thought were done were not. At all. It’s what happens when you get bored of one aspect and jump to another without leaving well-planned notes.
On a very directly related note, though with a more positive spin, I did some long overdue cleanup on human foes’ movesets and fiiiiiinnally actually made buffs and debuffs scale properly, instead of being a pre-determined static number. They might not sound like much, but they’re definite improvements. The potential downside to the former is that most human foes are much more prone to go full ham on spending their MP, which might have weird effects on their item usage. I’ll have to see in testing, I suppose.
Grey Morality
As NPC dialogue-ing winds down, the only guys left are mostly those heavily related to sidequests. Initially, Draug’s Resurrection wasn’t really going to have much, if anything, in the way of sidequests. Scope creep. Some of them are certainly kind of just ‘there’, but far more than the artifacts, they actually set up far more interesting moral conundrums than the main game could.
The one that I wanna gush the most about right now is the Antonio quest. As far as prominence, it’s right near the top, as it’s deeply tied in to the main villain (Damian) and one party member (Donovan). Antonio, a general of Sapin, sends some scouts to try and hunt down and kill the necromancer Damian, and Damian promptly kills them. This is the first actually legit evil thing Damian does, and new little events like this do a lot more to make Damian a villainous presence, despite his positive attitude towards Draug.
–Anyway, to the interesting point. The quest ultimately boils down to a morality question. Killing Antonio makes Damian more friendly towards Draug, which can have significant positive affects towards the endgame (there’s also other things that affect Damian’s opinion of you, especially regarding Thrall, but also dumber things, like commissioning an artist to make a statue of Damian). But killing Antonio is itself certainly an evil act; he’s basically just doing his job, as Damian is without a doubt a threat to his people. Is it better to kill a mostly innocent dude for the positive, potentially world-changing outcome that may indirectly follow? Or is doing nothing the more ‘good’ option? Further than that, Antonio is the father of one of the later potential party members, Donovan. He’s ignorant of his father’s (potential) murderer, but there’s no guarantee he won’t find out what happened later on.
Morality was supposed to play a big part of the game (I mean, when you pause, there’s a compass-thing for the four alignments right there), but that largely got sidelined. Especially regarding early scenarios. I’m really, really happy at any opportunity to bring that stuff back in. I guess I’m just feeling a little smug at how well it all fit into the core narrative. Having just said all that, I’m still planning on sidelining work on sidequests until later. I undeniably have a focus issue. Hopefully getting some of this down and out there will satisfy me for a bit.
Talking about talking about talking
So, the good news is that I’m about 2/3rds done getting an acceptable amount of dialogue for NPCs (about 4 different lines per person). The bad news is that I’ve still got a really long way to go. More good news is that I’ve actually been able to stash quite a few generic-y hint-like lines (stuff like how certain spells and monsters work), so it might just be a task of putting them on appropriate people in Dorrum, Estoc, and Sapin. It might instead mean that I’ll double back and drop them off on guys who already have ample lines. Which is the more the merrier, I suppose.
Hm, new goals for the year? After spending literally all last year on cleanup, I’m direly overdo to get around to finishing up the last scenarios and the four endgames. It’s mostly all there (at least the framework is; I’m probably giving past me too much credit), it’s just a LOT of stuff to go through. There was no point working on the end when the road to there was in shambles, right? I have to say, though, I’m getting some pretty interesting ideas for sidequests while writing some NPCs. I’d really like to do some stuff with that, but this isn’t the time. Getting back to testing and finishing the last parts of the game is paramount.
While I’m dribbling out thoughts, I’m definitely underselling my work last year. Shopping and battles are undoubtedly more interesting now, after all the weapon updates and the massive surge of monsters last year. To say nothing about programming in about 85% of the interesting/weird spells and skills. The last third of 2017 was spent on more subtle, subdued things, and maybe that’s why I’m depressed at the lack of visible progress lately.
Dissecting an NPC
Rather than apologize some more about how long it’s taking me to deal with like 400 NPCs, let’s stop and take one apart. We’ll take a brief look at Yuri, one of the many soldiers of Estaria.
She has five lines of dialogue throughout the game (not including the two ‘mainline’ events involving her, where she’s pretty background anyway). So, just talking to her, like any other random unimportant NPC. That number might later rise, but five is plenty. The lines are ordered as simple if/then statements. It makes the most sense to look at this from the bottom-up. The else { line is used at the start of the game, when none of the other conditions are met. She basically tells you to stock up on potions, rather than have spare change floating around. A gameplay hint. Not really revolutionary, but something I personally tend to forget about. ‘Gotta focus on getting that shiny Silver Tomahawk ASAP’, right? Even if you bankrupt yourself in doing so. Ideally, it’ll make other players not fall into the same obvious trap I keep walking into. Despite. You know. Making the game.
Her next two lines are fairly conditional. Second from the bottom, she’ll talk about Gale’s recruitment event, if you’ve done it. The middle of the five is used after you’ve gotten at least one artifact, but haven’t yet done the Northern Wastes. There, she talks about Fire magic and how some of the monsters in that icy region that resist it. It pulls double duty as a gameplay hint and tells that Yuri herself is a fire mage. Whether that too is a gameplay hint for fighting her later, or is worldbuilding or what is your call. If the Northern Wastes was your first artifact, you won’t hear this line. You’ve already done with that region, so that info doesn’t matter to you, right? Until you do the Northern Wastes and haven’t yet gotten four artifacts, you won’t hear her talk about Gale. It’s relatively unlikely you’d see both those lines in the same playthrough. And keeping in mind that you have to go out of your way to talk to her, it’s even more unlikely.
Lastly, the ‘first’ two lines are more straightforward. If you’ve gotten 7 artifacts (basically, you’ve completed seven of the nine dungeons, in more traditional terms), she’ll say her ‘endgame’ line. Her second/fourth line comes in when you’ve gotten 4 artifacts, and is again a gameplay tip, talking about all the snake monsters that just became more likely to show in encounters, now that you have more artifacts, thereby ratcheting up difficulty, so to speak. Generally speaking, getting new lines at around 2/3 and 5/6 artifacts is how most NPCs operate, but most usually have one more particular line, either only showing when a certain region was done most recently, a specific party member is with you, progress on a sidequest, or what have you. A lucky few NPCs primarily talk about your party members or have a line for most artifacts. Those guys can easily get over a dozen conversations. Yuri personally just spouts her lines, but a decent amount of NPCs have conversations where your party members reply to the NPC.
There’s one more aspect of Yuri I haven’t re-mentioned. All NPCs have time routines, appearing at certain places, depending on the time of day. While she spends most of her day in the library of Estaria Palace, you’re not able to go in there freely until Gale’s recruitment or later still, depending on how events play out (or just simply don’t happen). And the library IS out of the way at that. A ‘normal’ player would only see her from 2 to 4 PM in the marketplace. Being generous, the player has about a one in five chance of seeing her on any given time passing through town (because night travel is a bad idea). And she’s one NPC. ALL of them are roughly that complex, and all of them are pretty easy to just, you know. Not talk to. Another fine picture of how massive the content is that’s packed into Draug’s Resurrection, and just how much can be completely missed or ignored.
Talking about talking
All about NPC dialogue this month. As mentioned in September, there’s a loooooot of ground to cover. Mostly, I’ve been working on simply going through spells, skills, weapons, monsters, and mechanics and writing anything that’s either insightful, helpful to the player, or world buildingy and just making a massive stack. I’ll figure out who those lines belong to later, but they’re primarily intended for guards and mercenaries and stuff, as they’d know that kind of info, and to kind of a give a feeling that you’re not the only person who gets harassed by random encounters and the like. Not terribly interesting stuff, but its legwork I’ve put off for far too long.
There’s some other minor things in the works, like a couple new NPCs, because I didn’t have enough already, apparently, a direly overdue update to buffs and debuffs, and a unique, vaguely stealth-ish mechanic related to one town. None of them are complete though, so I’ll not run my mouth.
Overtread
Not a ton to say about this month’s progress, really. The three major points of change are the new extended tutorial (mentioned offhand earlier), NPC work all over the place, and modifying the Gale sidequest.
The first two don’t need explanation, but for the third, it’s a sidequest where you split into two parties for a bit. The way you chose guys before was kinda slipshod, and now that there’s two new party members who could help out (Allen, however, will refuse to help), it would just get unbearable doing things the old way. So I took and finished the fancier endgame party splitter and retrofit it onto this scenario. It’s a lot easier said than done, though. Gale’s scenario is one of the first and one of the most complex parts of the game, so it’s fairly spaghetti on the insides. I vaguely feel like I should’ve left it as is, as it worked fine before, and chances of using Donovan and Oliver here are fairly low, but I think it feels more in-line with things. Showing off the multi-party thing properly early is worth points, too, I suppose.
Mute City
So I’ve been back to working on NPC routines for towns, and it’s been going great. It doesn’t hurt that it was almost done when I abandoned it like a year ago. However, as nice as it is to have NPCs around, a whole lot of them sure don’t have much to say. I’m trying to do a lot of writing for this, and looking at making sure everybody in every town has at LEAST three different lines throughout the game. Considering the total number of NPCs, it’s, uh, a lot. A lot a lot. Like, at least 600 conversations worth.
Oh yeah, and I also changed Estaria to have a blacksmith; it’s located where there was an empty market stall before, that you could buy tomes for spells that normally came pre-mastered; basically only existing for higher difficulty settings in which they weren’t pre-mastered. Shin’s the smithy, and his old routine got shunted onto a newish character, Liam, Marcia’s father, who has existed for some time but didn’t have a proper routine. It helps a lot, as now you can use any Iron or Silver Ingots you get pretty much right away, instead of holding onto them until you reach Dorrum, when they’re as often as not borderline useless by then. Also the normal blacksmith systems got updated to have the new weapon sub-types and SFX. That took about 200x as much work as adding a building and two people.
Also, all monster art is now finished! Hopefully for the last time this time.
Draug's Resurrection 