I’m still working toward play test 2 readiness. The play test is a month late, on the surface due to a spike in hours worked in my day job. The less obvious but more impactful factor is having a vague definition of readiness. Obviously readiness isn’t when everything’s done; there will always be a backlog of new features, improvements and fixes. Deciding how much is enough is not so obvious. I repeatedly found myself staring at the todo list, unsure of what needed to get done before the play test and what could wait. To reduce the decision space, I narrowed the scope of the play test. Only a single level would be playable, using only a single theme (Cavern), and only a single player class (Knight). That took tasks involving other themes and classes off the list (for now), as well as some other concerns such as player progression. After fixing a few bugs that cropped up this week, adding missing sound effects, and fine-tuning combat stats a bit more, I’ll be ready for the play test.
- New content. None of this was necessary for the play test. I wanted to use the free time I had on my flight back from vacation, but I was too tired to code. So, I added some more content for the Cavern theme.
- Enemies: Zombie, Bear, Giant Scorpion.
- Status Effects: Disease
- Room Types: Animal Lair, Spider Nest, Camp, Abandoned Camp
- Objects: Campfire, Campfire Ring
- Triggered event chance of occurring. Triggered events previously occurred 100% of the time. Now they can be configured to occur a specific percentage of time. This is useful, for instance, when an enemy attack that sometimes causes a status effect such as Poison.
- World history event type validation, expanded actor and item type validation. After the type prefabs are loaded, validation methods look for configuration errors. This complements design-time validation and helps prevent bugs downstream.
I’m backpacking most of next week. I’ll be off the grid and won’t be posting a weekly update.
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