Alpha Devlog 7: Progress Report

Here's another short update on everything that has changed since the last devlog. A new tech demo will be released somewhere next week.

Equipment Sets

When you equip multiple gear of the same type, you can now get a custom set bonus. For example, when you wear (probably involuntarily) multiple pieces of the prisoner set, your class gets forcibly changed to prisoner. Allow Aura to explain:

Tutorials

Common heard complaints about the tech demo were: "How does this work?", "What is going on?", and "Help!". To remedy this I added a bunch of tutorials, these will pop up while playing, and you can also find them all in one place. This means that even people who haven't played DD1/2 will now understand what's going on.

More Equipment

I've added 60+ new pieces of equipment. I'll showcase five of them here:

The latex set: a set that has a chance to spread latex gear to empty slots or allies.

The drone mask: a mask that limits Intelligence and Wisdom, but maximizes Strength.

The royal dress: a dress that weakens you in combat but increases the loot you(r party) gains.

A posture collar: a collar that prevents you from targetting the first rank, but increases your carry capacity (as all ponygirl related items do).

Sword of Pacifism: a sword that prevents you from using physical attacks, but increases your healing done and received, uncursed by performing dungeon runs where this adventurer doesn't deal any damage.

Cut-Ins

For some moves the puppets I use aren't sufficiently flexible. In those cases I can now use cut-ins. Images that flash on screen when the move is performed. These take the skincolor and other adventurer stats into account.

Grapples

The idea behind a grapple is that an enemy attacks a player and grapples her, preventing her from moving until that enemy has been sufficiently damaged. In the meantime, this player takes damage during every enemy turn. This is surprisingly hard to program, since you need to temporarily remove the player from combat, have a new animation for while the player is grappled (taking the player characteristics into account) and then correctly release the player. Add to that, that it should work with saving, and some edge cases, and this took a while.

An image doesn't really explain it, so see it in action on https://twitter.com/i/status/1692501043949535346

More Goals

I added a bunch of development goals, so the same ones don't repeat while you're levelling up. Instead of the 8 in the tech demo, there are now 45+ per level, with higher levels requiring your adventurers to complete more complex goals.

Minor Stuff

Devlogs normally only talk about the fancy new features, but keeping the code healthy is also important. Since it isn't interesting I don't mention it here either, but a lot of refactoring constantly goes on behind the scene, to make sure I can keep progressing as smoothly in the future. As Uncle Bob says, "the only way to go fast, is to go well".

Future

As said in the beginning, I'll release a new version of the tech demo next week. Hence, there's now a full feature freeze while I get everything working smoothly (and some equipment effects also still need to be implemented). I'll give a new roadmap once that tech demo is out. I'll also set up a Discord then, since that's what all the cool kids do these days.

I also have a ko-fi page now, in case you want to give me money without receiving anything in return!