Entry #4 - AI concepts, saves, new classes

Some time has passed since I’ve written anything but it doesn’t mean no work has been done on the project. Quite the opposite: a lot has changed.

Concept artist

First update isn’t very positive. As I mentioned earlier, I started a collaboration with a character artist some time ago. She was young, very talented but also inexperienced. While the portfolio looked cool and she had finished some internships already, I expected that it can be a bit hard on the “professional quality of service level”. And well, I wasn't wrong. She started quickly, with several sketches and ideas that looked promising but weren’t really exploring the main themes I suggested to her. Honestly: she provided ~8 character ideas, that were mostly variations of maybe 2 distinctive concepts. I gave her some feedback, asked her directly to rework some simple work I already had + create some more, completely different concepts. And again, most of the work she did was just simple quick sketches, with very little value. Also response time and attitude got very bad, this whole process took well over a month. A bit disappointed, I paid her the first half of the agreed compensation (walking away with no actual value) and finished our cooperation. So yeah, I will have to search for a concept artist again. As a side note, she never managed to create anything that would fulfill all the characteristics that I asked for. But Midjourney had no issue with that, spitting a decent representation of what I was looking for after an hour of trying. So next time, I will probably use AI generated images as a starting point for a concept artist’s work.

Save game & menus

During the last playtests, I’ve discovered that properly testing the full flow of the game that takes ~3h is getting a bit inconvenient without a save system (surprising!). And my plan for the future was to add even more stuff and progression, making it even more difficult. Thinking about this, I decided to slow down the gameplay rapid expansion and focus on adding save system and gameplay speed controls. I went through several online tutorials on how to do this, simplified what i could, cut out most laborious pieces (so my saves aren’t 100% precise) and voilà! I can now save and load game whenever I want. Super useful and took me only like 3 afternoons to implement. I’m very happy about it, because saves system is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and was really scared of. But in the end it wasn’t half as difficult as I expected. As a side effect, I’ve created a prototypy in-game menu and main menu. This will be super helpful as i want to cook the first build and try running it outside of the editor for the first time soon.

Moar gameplay!

Before switching to saves and menus, I’ve spent a lot of time on adding new content based on existing systems. Surprisingly, they worked pretty well, I didn’t have to rework too much stuff. So what is new?

• Character gain XP in different categories and can choose a profession after reaching some level.

• There are 2 finished professions: Agility and Strength based. Third one based on charisma and magic is in progress.

• Characters with professions can use more advanced constructions and work in basic constructions faster.

• Added several new constructions, both defensive and resource producing. Created ammo production workshop and mechanical parts production, which are both derivative products. 

• Improved ui in several places, for example adding notifications when things happen (new enemy wave, characters death etc).
  

Next steps

There are several big things I want to do, that will move game forward pretty quickly:

• I need a new map that will facilitate all the new features that I’ve created. Current one is not really suitable for that.

• I want to finish the design and implementation for the 3rd profession, which is shaman / sage type. 

• With more gameplay, characters specificity and different defense mechanisms, I need corresponding enemies and better waves management. Right now it's not really convenient to manipulate enemy spawning data. Still don’t know how to do this. 

•  As I have a lot going on in my personal life, I will probably slow down a little in the upcoming weeks.