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[purenickery]

I got inspired and decided to go ahead and add in a basic version of it!



All of the items are currently sorted by their in-game ID, but I can add in a filter to sort them alphabetically as well. And eventually everything will have a unique name there's just been a lot of copy-pasting in my past

[RujiK]

That's a lot of hair! Shaggy to the max.

[purenickery]

That's a lot of hair! Shaggy to the max.

One of Cody's goals with the art is making it look believable, which entails super scraggly hairstyles for common town-folk, since in medieval times that's what their hair would probably look like  There's plenty of other hairstyles for players to choose from though!

[purenickery]

Still working on that multiplayer functionality. I've gotten combat working pretty well with multiple people however the latency isn't exactly where I'd like it quite yet. Anyways, gif time!



The movement data has to get transferred to the server and then back out to all the players in a way that it can smoothly interpolate so getting that to a perfect place is going to be pretty difficult.

Another thing we have to announce is our

Website!You can visit http://www.questica.net to check it out 
It's still relatively early, but the basics are all there.

Until next time ladies and gents 

[RujiK]

You can poke people?!?!?!? Aww yiss, I love harmlessly annoying other people. Pokee master.

[purenickery]

You can poke people?!?!?!? Aww yiss, I love harmlessly annoying other people. Pokee master.

Haha, it was mostly for me to test how the hit reactions work  But we are definitely going to leave in shoving people around so you can move them if they're in your way (or if you just want to annoy them)

[purenickery]

Finally, this has been on my to-do list since around 3,000 BC, I've rewritten town generation! Before, there were blandly laid out towns with little variation or excitement to be found inside. This would work for a simulation of modern American suburbia but alas I've spent far too much time there.

I implemented an algorithm for towns where it randomly places houses on the grid along a somewhat normal curve, causing more houses to be clustered in the center with a few on the outskirts. A wandering path is then generated between the houses with paths to each house being generated aftwards. Here's a few gifs of the process!






Now I just have to generate random people for each house with random jobs and personalities. Hopefully we can get all those different stats to shine through in how they talk and act as well

Here's a little image of what they look like with all the houses actually placed!

[EJlol]

The .gif looks cool. But aren't you worried that there will be to many houses? Most RPG's have ~10 houses at most. Beyond this it's quite hard for people to remember all the houses. What if I find found an interesting NPC inside the house with a quest to kill rats or something? After I have killed the rats, there is no way I will find that house again...


Here are some examples how other RPGS solve it.

An example game (Golden Sun):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/index.htm#GoldenSun

Bilibin, Tolbi and Kalay are good examples for big cities. While giving a city vibe, they still only have ~8 houses.

Another example (Pokemon):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/Pokemon-FireRed&LeafGreenVersions-CeladonCity.png

This city actually does have lots of houses. However notice many houses look the same and lack a door with a path towards it. If you count the real buildings there are only a few houses left.

[RujiK]

Does your town building math stuff also have the ability for square-ish shaped towns? Not all towns are so lengthy in one direction. Also towns built on intersections seems pretty normal.

[purenickery]

The .gif looks cool. But aren't you worried that there will be to many houses? Most RPG's have ~10 houses at most. Beyond this it's quite hard for people to remember all the houses. What if I find found an interesting NPC inside the house with a quest to kill rats or something? After I have killed the rats, there is no way I will find that house again...


Here are some examples how other RPGS solve it.

An example game (Golden Sun):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/index.htm#GoldenSun

Bilibin, Tolbi and Kalay are good examples for big cities. While giving a city vibe, they still only have ~8 houses.

Another example (Pokemon):
http://vgmaps.com/Atlas/GBA/Pokemon-FireRed&LeafGreenVersions-CeladonCity.png

This city actually does have lots of houses. However notice many houses look the same and lack a door with a path towards it. If you count the real buildings there are only a few houses left.

Thanks for those references! And now that I think about it I know exactly what you're talking about. Those gifs show cities that are much bigger than what we were planning on having but I think we might need to go even smaller now 
I know Cody wanted the cities to feel really crowded and busy with many NPCs walking around, so maybe we can also try and figure out a way to distinguish important NPCs or ones you've interacted with differently from the rest of them.
I do think it would be pretty cool to see a bustling town full of NPCs all trading with eachother.

Does your town building math stuff also have the ability for square-ish shaped towns? Not all towns are so lengthy in one direction. Also towns built on intersections seems pretty normal.

Right now we're trying to keep the whole game mostly horizontal. That way the player always has a direction to go and wont get lost in the world. Also having a horizontal world makes things like towns, rivers, and cities easier to generate. More of a castle-crashers style  also it feels right for the game playing around in it

[gimblll]

This looks like a really awesome project, keep up the good work!

[EJlol]

I know Cody wanted the cities to feel really crowded and busy with many NPCs walking around, so maybe we can also try and figure out a way to distinguish important NPCs or ones you've interacted with differently from the rest of them.
I do think it would be pretty cool to see a bustling town full of NPCs all trading with eachother.

In most games this is done by reusing the non important NPCs all over the game, while the special ones have their own unique look. By reusing the NPC's you can create a crowded and busy city, while still show the difference between important and not so important NPC's. Another clue is that most important NPCs actually never move. They don't walk around town, they don't even walk in their own house, instead they always stand still and wait until the heroes approach them. In Golden Sun they gave even another 2 clues. Important NPCs had a face picture, while unimportant NPCs had not. And after you had talked to them they kept looking at you, until you left the map (this always freaked me out though).

Hope this gives you some ideas.

[purenickery]

This looks like a really awesome project, keep up the good work!

Thank you!! :D

I know Cody wanted the cities to feel really crowded and busy with many NPCs walking around, so maybe we can also try and figure out a way to distinguish important NPCs or ones you've interacted with differently from the rest of them.
I do think it would be pretty cool to see a bustling town full of NPCs all trading with eachother.

In most games this is done by reusing the non important NPCs all over the game, while the special ones have their own unique look. By reusing the NPC's you can create a crowded and busy city, while still show the difference between important and not so important NPC's. Another clue is that most important NPCs actually never move. They don't walk around town, they don't even walk in their own house, instead they always stand still and wait until the heroes approach them. In Golden Sun they gave even another 2 clues. Important NPCs had a face picture, while unimportant NPCs had not. And after you had talked to them they kept looking at you, until you left the map (this always freaked me out though).

Hope this gives you some ideas.

This is absolutely something to think about and it's been on my mind for the past few days. The feel we're going for in this game is "finding you own adventure" and "being the character you want to be". To me at least, part of this is not telling the player who should be important to them or where they are supposed to go, but rather giving them to tools to meet people they would find interesting and guiding them towards places that would grow their character. I think we'll be able to find a way to create semi-large cities, putting a pretty good number of NPCs in them, and guiding the players to who they would want to interact with.

Maybe you want to get better at smithing so you could find the town's blacksmith and talk to him about how to get better. Or maybe you want to find an adventurer to learn more about the world; you could find someone wearing foreign tattered clothes and talk to them about where they're from. Once you talk to someone we'll put in an easier way to find them again, being alerted to where they are in a town if you want to talk to them again.

I think this is similar to how it works in real life -- you meet people that interest you and you can find them and interact with them even though the world, and even schools, are really huge places. Obviously we'll be testing it out (and feel free to join us in that process ) and figuring out which system works the best.

Maybe it won't work out to just throw players in a giant adventure sandbox but it'll be easy to change if that's the case. Thanks for bringing this all up, it's forced me to start thinking about it more 

[purenickery]

I thought I would give a quick update on how things have been going lately. Mostly there have been quite a few little changes but nothing major really to share. We've found a great musician to add to the team, so finally the game will have a soundscape to go along with it. If you want a preview of what the game is going to end up sounding like here's a small preview of music for the main menu:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/55403585/Main%20Menu%20A%201.2%20256kbps.mp3

Along with that music for the main menu, I've also been redesigning the main menu since I really didn't like the old one too much. Here's a preview of what the new one looks like!



I've also been editing the world generator further to allow farms to generate in the little towns. Later they'll be generating random little vegetables for you to either grow or steal from people (might make them a bit angry though).



Our artist has been designing some monsters for the game as well. One of the core ideas we want to go for is that the game both progressively gets more difficult as well as more weird and bizarre. Here's a look at some test monsters for the game!

[tom-martin]

Hey, this project looks great guys! I love the new monsters. I can't wait to see what crazy environments those guys live in.

[purenickery]

Hey, this project looks great guys! I love the new monsters. I can't wait to see what crazy environments those guys live in.

Me either! Cody always comes up with some pretty awesome creatures and environments and we haven't officially decided where all these will be coming from. Thanks for the comment! 

[purenickery]

As the brand spankin' new title suggests, me and the pals have been having some talks lately and Kickstarter is starting to seem more and more like a good idea. And hey, might as well jump on that band-wagon while it's still going at full-horsepower  We wouldn't launch it for another few months while we prepared a kickass campaign and finally got a demo ready for the game. We're just realizing we're pretty sick of working at grocery stores and would much rather work on the game full time.

I know a lot of you out there have run successful Kickstarter campaigns in the past so do you all have any suggestions or warnings before we get our hopes up too high? We'll happily take any advice or criticisms you beautiful people have 

In other news, I've got a wolf-buddy now 

[RujiK]

No kickstarter experience but as a person on the internet I am an expert in everything so here is my advice.

I really like your game (This is probably my most visited devlog) but currently I wouldn't back it due to lack of content. I know you plan on waiting a few months but I think you need LOADS more content before Joe Schmo will dish out some cash. Show me some enemies, some bosses, some npc interactions, different terrain types, some farming, building, destruction or whatever you have planned. Any cool feature you plan on adding later should make a brief appearance in your trailer.

Also really stress your positives. Like I've seen a lot of trailers that just say "A procedurally generated world" but don't really show it. SHOW me how cool your generation is and all the crazy stuff it can make.

And the last tip that I see the most, don't fill the screen with nothing to look at but a few words of text. I hate it when the screen goes black and all the trailer says is "Explore" or "Survive" or something boring. Just put the text up with some gameplay in the background! Don't give me nothing to look at!

General advice from a nobody.

[EJlol]

At least the most important gameplay mechanics needs to be flashed out. I like this game because of the procedural world. But I have not seen any combat related mechanics. How does the fighting work, do I need to button bash, or is it more tactical than that? Is there any magic, and if so, how is it going to be used? Until now I have not seen any epic quests. That's why its called Questica, right? Will there be one big main quest or several small quests. In fact I have not seen any talking NPC yet. How will I be able to judge whether you are able to write strong/funny NPC's? I don't know whether this game uses save points, inn's or something else. I Also have not even seen any building I could go inside yet. So many questions are unanswered yet. This game feels far from complete making the risk that I won't like the game in the end (or that the game won't be finished) to big.

Don't get me wrong, I do like the game so far, and I understand it takes (lots of) time to develop the game. But if you want to have my money, you are going to need to show me a lot more of the game first.

In short, I agree with RujiK.

[purenickery]

Thanks a lot for the responses guys! I definitely value your input as you two are some of the few who actively reply to this blog. You guys rock!

As such, I'm absolutely going to hold off actually releasing a kickstarter until we have more of the actual game to show. As I've probably mentioned before, I've been working a lot on the "guts" of the game, and this is a mighty beast of a game, as in it's visited McDonalds a few too many times and it's just got a really giant gut hanging out there. But, I've just recently gotten to the point where I've decided there's enough modding, multiplayer, and generation framework to start adding in actual content.

Me and another programmer buddy are fleshing out the combat at the moment so hopefully we'll have something interesting to show on that front really soon. I've also been getting various things like farming, smithing, and mining working and looking nice.

I also just recently bought a new (read: used but better than my laptop) desktop for me to develop on and test multiplayer etc. After a few agonizing hours trying to figure out why in God's holy land Java was refusing to work (pro-tip: DO NOT put special characters in your Windows user profile name) I finally got it all set up. That combined with getting combat better and thinking about possibly doing a kickstarter have gotten me back to the point where I'm *really excited* to be working on games again.

In short, there should be some actual content for me to be showing off really soon 

(and I'm not sure if I'll be able to write super strong/funny NPCs since the plan is to have them all be procedurally generated, but I will do my best!)