We’ve have a busy few days sorting a bunch of loose ends and also answering some design questions that had piled up. Basically I’m trying to clean off a bunch of quick tasks that are cluttering up my todo list. Here are a few examples:

Buff and Debuff tooltips

The game already had tooltips for separate stun, bleed, poison and haste icons, but there were no tooltips for general buffs or debuffs, just a green or red arrow icon.

So I finally coded proper tooltips that list all the current buffs or debuffs (see image above). There are up to 6 possible debuffs and 9 possible buffs, though it’s highly unlikely you’d get them all at once. However, I did need to code a tooltip that can change size depending on how many lines it needs to display.

Firebomb Blunderbuss

This weapon is based on a real naval weapon that Helen researched. In the game we finally decided to make it 100% unblockable fire damage instead of part normal damage and part fire damage as that was overly complex. It’s a late game item and is pretty cool.

Smoke Bomb

Originally we had a cool idea about using the smoke bomb to cover up some of the enemy’s cards in smoke. However, this was going to take too long to code and because it should only last one turn so that the cards aren’t covered up on the player’s turn, it meant that it wasn’t going to be much of a hindrance.

So we repurposed the item to increase the number of cards the enemy requires to get a combo. This was pretty easy to code as we already have a potion called Clarity which reduces the number of cards required to get a combo. Also I made sure Clarity cancels out the effect of Smoke Bomb and vice versa.

Bits and bobs

I also did a few other things such as:
– Made floating text that says “Resist Alcohol” for when an alcoholic potion takes effect but your character manages to resist due to having the Sailor’s Trousers outfit item.
– Tweaked the enemy AI to use attack buff potions when their weapon is charged or nearly charged and not to waste them when they have uncharged weapons.
– Made soap always disarm the other weapon if the first one is already disarmed.
– Improved inventory management so that when you drop an item on the inventory it doesn’t pointlessly scroll if the item is auto-sorted onto an on-screen slot.

Polish List

I also moved a bunch of tasks to the “Polish” list, which I may do after release. These aren’t bugs, just things that, as a perfectionist, I’d rather see improved.

I do this because I found out years ago that the only way to maintain sanity when coming up with cool little polish ideas during development is to put them on a separate list that is not part of the main To Do list. This way they don’t distract me from actually finishing the main game.

OK that’s it for now, back soon with more!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 18th, 2017 at 1:24 pm and is filed under Developer Diary, Game Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.