Lately I’ve started the week by playing the game and recording every issue I encounter – errors, annoyances, sources of confusion – in a list. Then I filter and prioritize items based on criticality (how necessary is this to play the game?) and effort. Some issues are moved to Legend’s backlog; they’re captured but may or may not be addressed in the future. These are typically low criticality and high effort issues. The remaining items go into the week’s todo list, where they’re sorted by highest to lowest criticality. It’s been an effective way to stay focused on the most important tasks.
The biggest problem with Legend currently is that maps lack variety. The history generator provides a scenario (e.g., natural cave, cultist compound, bandit output, bandit outpost currently under attack by skeletons), and the scenario dictates the room types. Most scenarios don’t have enough room types yet. A bandit output, for example, is mostly guard posts. Fighting bandits over and over again gets old. So, new room types are definitely in the near future.
Multiple Stat Modifier improvements were completed this week. While playtesting, I kept running into issues caused by missing or incorrect Stat Modifiers. For example, arrows weren’t causing damage because the equipped bow didn’t have a base damage stat. In many cases, items and actors were still using legacy Stat Modifiers that hadn’t been updated, for example the legacy Damage Star Modifier rather than the new weapon type-specific Stat Modifier. I updated the entity importers to set the correct Stat Modifiers and remove the legacy Stat Modifiers. I also reviewed every Stat Type and explicitly defined and documented the relationships, something I should’ve done at the start. For example, there are separate Stat Types for melee and ranged attack evasion, and a general evasion Stat Type that applies regardless of the attack type. The evasion calculation takes the attack-specific and general values into account. I also added rules to the run-time entity configuration validator to flag these configuration issues.
In addition to the Stat Modifier work, another 25 bugs were fixed. 50% of the bugs of late have been due to configuration issues caused by the Stat System overhaul. These are generally easy to fix, although sometimes the issue exists across multiple entities and requires updating the importer script. Some long-standing, difficult-to-fix bugs are getting addressed each week too.
Next week I’m traveling and won’t be working on Legend.