March Update : Taverns and forges, building a world one room at a time

Firstly, we just passed 30,000 wishlists on Steam. Considering we keep a pretty low profile, have no demo nor a release date in sight, this is super encouraging. People are interested in the game, you guys believe in us and we're super motivated to deliver the best retro RPG we can make.

Secondly, it's been a big month of technical work on the engine, particularly around the editor tools.

Probably the biggest breakthrough for us is now David ( co-creator and artist for the game ) is now able to use the editor tools I have been building , and is creating buildings with them.

The Editor Tools are a massive suite of things ( as documented last update ), and are in various states of completion , but the most feature complete are the map building tools themselves. Now, David can fire up a build of the game, create a new map such as a tavern and start putting it together using the various lights, props and characters he has put together over the months.

We've been iterating over it every day or two, finding pain points in the workflow. It's the kind of stuff you want to get right early because when you're going to be using the tools so often, you don't want certain steps slowing you down. For example, originally when switching textures for a prop, it would open a new full screen window - but that took a way a bit of the immersion in the scene. Now, just a small window opens up ( and it's searchable, looking for a door? Type "Door" and you'll see all the options. )

Here's a timelapse video showing David putting together a scene. The first time he attempted to build a tavern, it took him the best part of a day. Over a week or so, we improved the tools and now he can do it in 10-15 minutes!

The end result now has proper lighting, shadows on characters, decals that can have parents ( so a candle can sit on a table etc ) and proper pathfinding for NPCs.

One other subtle but important change, I've now replaced the generic 'blob' shadows on characters with more accurate shadows. Notice the first image, then see the tavern below.

David's also been working on improving all the character portraits in the game. These are fully customizable, different hairstyles, hair behind and in front of armour, scars, accessories etc. We wanted to recreate the old portraits from games like Might and Magic and I think these work really well. Over the months we will add in extra skin colours, hair options and of course armour and accessories, but even now you can create quite a variety of portraits - and of course you can edit these at any time by clicking on your character sheet. Steam post image

Same goes for character figurines - you can edit these at any time. There are archetypes like "weapon and shield" , "caster", "ranged' etc, and you can have variations on these - change the colour scheme, what hat you're wearing, what weapon , and it's all fully animated. This took so long, the aseprite files we have for the characters have so many layers!!! The end result though, really nice and most importantly, really customizable. These resemble the Gold Box games style heroes pretty faithfully, that was one of the things I liked about the old SSI games - being able to customize these pixel art characters to make them your own.

One of the biggest headaches for me this month was pathfinding. Something that players take for granted as something that 'just works' , can be a real pain. I'm using Godot to build the game and it has pathfinding support but because the game uses a unique mix of grid based and physics based collisions, I've had to do a lot of work on it to get characters to move where they should. It's not 100% accurate yet but for the most part it's working well - you click an area, the party moves there and avoids tables, fallen debris and so on. Same for NPCs, they can follow waypoints and also just move randomly around the room if we choose to have them do that. We're of course fully supporting both keyboard and mouse controls ( what a pain to implement !) with the hope that it can be easily ported to console down the road, because I think this would be an awesome experience on the Nintendo Switch, for example. With the map editor now fully functional (and it now being April, yikes!) , my focus now turns back to combat. I think maybe 5 months ago I had started working on combat, but I realised the editor tools needed a ton of work and I didn't want to start 'yet another system' before the others were polished.

So I think the next 3 months or so I'll be working on all aspects of combat, from battle formations, to turn based movement , basic enemy tactics, attacks, dice rolls, taking damage, all the fun "D&D / Pathfinder" style gameplay we've come to know and love ! Speaking of those RPG systems, we are not locked into one particular system yet. (Though I can guarantee it won't be D&D, we do not have the license!) . We initially leaned into Pathfinder's ruleset but its far too complicated for our purposes, so I'm thinking it'll be a much simplified version of their open licensed rules, with a lot of my own customised stuff to make it suit the game. But it will still feel familliar, with armour class, hit points, str, int, cha, dex etc.

David's doing at least 5 new props for all the buildings every day as well as new tilesets, and soon he will turn his hand to the bestiary of monsters we will be throwing into the game for the party to face.

Anyway, lots ahead, looking forward to sharing more with you each month. One last picture for you, here's a hard working smith at the forge! A very appropriate picture of how we're feeling right now, tinkering away.

Cheers, Oliver Joyce and David Aron

Whiskeybarrel Studios + Nostalgic Realms