Exilian

OK, I'm going to tentatively start punting copies of this to a small group of testers. Please report bugs here, and also shout here if you want in on the betas but don't have a copy yet.

Open Bug Reports
> Apparently cities can vanish in some circumstances. Not been able to replicate this yet.
> Factions can declare war on each other multiple times for some reason.
> Saving in the tutorial doesn't work
> Staying at taverns when there's an end week and a quest trigger shouldn't avoid the quest trigger

Open Feature Requests/Plans
> Maybe make "you caught them unawares" more explicit when you fight unarmed fugitive
> Clarify search boost somehow
> Make last message clearer in log?
> High taxes needs a penalty for the AI
> Bigger or more common negative reactions to some bad quests from companions (eg assassination)

Closed Reports/Requests

Spoiler

Fixed in 012:
> "treasurer suggest"
> "Guildsmen... arrives"
> Getting the stick from the tree can sometimes cost money
Fixed in 011:
> "he is own room/tent"
> The altar event is frequently OP
> Check double spacing on "dangerous, and"
> More notes on weapon stats when swapping needed
Fixed in 010:
> Map now pans with player in centre (unless they're too close to the edge) rather than being so visibly separated into tile zones.
> Bottom right tile had onclick issue, now fixed.
> Wibulnib packs in farms seem to have a map clicking issue, now solved.
> Combat Stances has now been made incompatible with other attack abilities
> Updated core units file for tutorial
> Fixed and improved hotkeys across screens
> Should now say "silver" rather than gold consistently
> Players' relations with cities now have a bottom cap of -20
> Panning map makes it harder to discern when moving between map regions, which are important for some quests. (Hopefully resolved by varying map music by region & making region part of the z key readout)
> More hints for searching related quests in early game - given when you go back to the quest giver
Fixed in 009:
~None Yet~
Fixed in 008:
~None Yet~
Fixed in 007:
~None Yet~
Fixed in 006:
~None Yet~
Fixed in 005:
~None~
Fixed in 004:
> Bandit quest win may not be triggering if you fight it across a supertile boundary? (should be fixed)
> It says "clicked!" when you click the tutorial bandits
> Trying to move into enemy armies gives you the "impassable terrain" message
> Travelling armourer always uses "an" eg "an spear"
> Mark edges of map with a line of impassable terrain
> Note directions from city to city
> Hired swords may be OP
Fixed in 003:
> Add enter and backspace as hotkeys for aye/nay on decision screens
> Add hotkeys for battle commands
> How to heal your hero not explained in tutorial
> Troop upgrades not explained in tutorial
> Unclear for players what a troop can upgrade into: should show in army menu

Versions and Changelog
Current version: 011

Changelogs

Spoiler

011 to 012:

Spoiler

>

Spoiler

010 to 011:

Spoiler

> Romance: companions can offer romances to one another or the player, with fully-fledged romance plotlines. The core mechanic is that some romance activities are better or worse suited to different characters' personalities, and finding the right ones can let you progress through the romance better.
> Variable difficulty settings: now five options for this, two hard Roguelike ones, a super-easy Sandbox, and a lowered difficulty for new players as well as the "normal" mode.
> Character gender now can be set in the opening menus
> More character interactions where characters may approve or disapprove of the player and their actions. Includes e.g. expanding the sprites attacking woodcutters event.
> Honourable characters' sparring interaction now grants XP: this helps counterbalance the fact that Honourable characters are one of the most likely to object to the player's actions.
> City lords will now sometimes go out to battle with their forces.
> New city events that can come up in discussions: city rumours can comment on new rulers, current sieges, farm burnings, and elections.
> Mysterious altars nerfed somewhat
> XP gain for defender units increased
> Minor text and bug fixes

009 to 010:

Spoiler

> Map now pans with player. This slightly slows the game but seems to work OK in general.
> Autosave implemented.
> Music incl. mute key now implemented, and eleven different original songs can be found in taverns.
> Bravery and leadership now rolled into a single unified Spirit statistic.
> More detail added on what's in different areas of towns when choosing routes.
> Recruitment vignettes are now far more likely to give you some information about the character being recruited and vary according to character personality.
> Characters now have death scenes that vary according to their personality traits.
> New interaction vignettes available: these small random events allow the player to spend some adventuring points for a chance to improve their relationship with a character. 
> First six companion loyalty quests are available: one for each character class. Priests have a relic finding quest, sergeants must find an old comrade and fight them or help them rebuild their merc company, minstrels must go to the finest tavern in each city to play, scholars have a mysterious parchment of their own to decipher, squires must rescue an old mentor whose manor has been taken over by bandits, and rangers must hunt a particularly difficult creature. Companion quests trigger when the companion has high approval of the player. The relic finding quest adds three new enemies you could face: the Tower Gryphon, the Rostrulet, and the Spectre.
> Loyal companions will not leave even when morale is awful.
> Basic city events have started to be implemented: citizens will comment on one or two events when they happen, for example ruthless and iron fisted rulers may put the heads of enemies the player brings in up on spikes for a while which may be noticed around the city.
> Various bugfixes

008 to 009:

Spoiler

> Quest threading: Some lord quests now provide a new quest on completion.
> NPC companions can interact, talk, argue, and make friends or become enemies. There's a special interaction where you can spend Advp to resolve a dispute.
> New quests available: Potion making & Investigating landmarks
> New companions, Squire and Minstrel, added
> Starting quests and backstory added when you start a new game
> New companion abilities: Combat stances, Trample, Engineer, Calm Beasts, Critical Strike, Counterattack, Stand Alone, Camp Espionage, Panegyrist, Entertainer
> Upgrade your units at some city buildings
> Sea travel changed: you now walk to a sea tile and get a random time to wait for a ship (range varies by terrain type you're coming from)
> More variance in costs of opportunities
> Various minor fixes and name list additions

007 to 008:

Spoiler

> 2 new lord quests: trophy hunting and fighting duels
> Siege time - you now have to wait to assault a city
> Map stamina is no longer a standardly upgradeable stat, and resilience is now properly a separate stat to defence which can be upgraded in its own right
> Click go to castle to finish as well as start quests
> The quest log systems now change their text for some quests once you've completed a major element (e.g. the find person quest is different once you've found the person).
> Kinkladelets now have a different visual to kinklades
> Port cities can no longer get cavalry-only armies
> Various minor fixes and name list additions

006 to 007:

Spoiler

> Morale depth: more possibilities for both losing and gaining morale. Tavern stays can gain morale, and can prompt "buy the men a drink" events; getting caught in a storm while searching the wilderness can conversely lower morale. If morale gets very high you can get bonus XP for your troops or a small cash bonus.
> Ruined cart opportunity added and "decipher parchment" base quest created.
> New "eliminate a rival" assassination question, only given by rulers with the ruthless, conniving, or iron fisted traits.
> Character traits affecting gameplay:

• Honourable characters get upset if you retreat from battle or agree to carry out assassinations
• Kind characters get upset if you agree to carry out assassinations
• Kind characters will occasionally do good deeds in cities, boosting reputation among the local populace
• Welcoming characters will buy a round at the bar sometimes for a free morale boost
• Callow characters have a chance of avoiding injury thanks to being young and healthy
• Callow characters sometimes disobey orders when told to stop attacking an enemy
• Venerable characters will give tiny XP boosts to other members of your party as they share their advice and wisdom around
• Companions with "favoured child" will give you bonuses when election campaigning in a town
• Conniving characters may swipe some extra coins from you now and again
• Conniving characters may suggest you cheat in election campaigns
• Ruthless characters may suggest you try to intimidate your opponents in election campaigns
• Philosophical characters give you +1 search in cities before your men get tired of searching
• Philosophical characters may offer to organise debates during election campaigns
• Characters will get upset if you pledge things radically against their personal principles in an election campaign.

> City rulers who are sneering or conniving no longer give you such mean statements if you're part of their faction
> Welcoming city rulers have new additional flavour text
> New reclusive trait added for all character types
> Vignette events to show character traits added
> Lots of extra portraits added for major character types
> Limit on # scholar quests at any one time
> Character permanence added for nobles and scholars in escort quests - you can now get & shuttle around the same character several times in a game
> Companions can become lords, as can escorted nobles
> New terrain effect - charge ability for cavalry no longer works in forests, sieges, city fights, or tunnels
> Minimum number of cities at each map size (2 now absolute minimum)
> Hotkeys added in city menu
> Help (displaying hotkey options) added in city menu & battle screen
> Fixed bug where some seaside cities had no port

005 to 006:

Spoiler

> Areas of the map now have region names.
> Deep forests added
> People you're looking for can now turn out to be in taverns that you must then visit.
> Taverns now have flavour text and variable heal chance depending on their quality.
> Forest bandits now ambush you across the map - they can be spotted either by searching nearby or by a ranger character with the "spotting" skill.
> Ambush battles shut off the ability for the player to retreat.
> Captains and some NPC leaders can get the "rally" ability to return fleeing units to the battle.
> The tunnel network feature in cities is now a full scale dungeon crawl including tunnel forks, chests, and increasingly dangerous enemies.
> New enemy only in dungeon crawls: the Deciever. Takes on the look and stats of whatever it is fighting.
> Cutpurse thief event in areas with "maze of alleys": loses you some money.
> Charm sales event in "hero's statue" areas: the charm can revive your resilience or protect you from harm
> Pilgrim quest from city to city now exists
> Four legendary weapons have been added: you can gain one by completing a dungeon crawl.
> NPC cities can now sometimes train faction special units and armoured riders.
> Fugitive quest changes: you only get a certain number of battles to catch the fugitive, and fugitives will occasionally offer you bribes to let them go free if you defeat them in battle.
> Variation in hiring: rangers will now sometimes bring a small band of allies with them, and sergeants will ask for a prior payment.
> Companions now have personality traits in the code much like the city leaders do (this has no ingame effect... yet).
> Bugfix: text readout for find a person quest now tells you where the quest was for.

004 to 005:

Spoiler

> New special character type: sergeant. Has reasonable combat stats and the 'trainer' ability that lets him give XP to your other troops. Hireable if you find a barracks via city searches.
> New special character type: ranger. Has reasonable combat stats and some useful map skills available. Hireable via a forest search event.
> Ability to hire second-level troops via searches if you find a barracks or fortifications ward
> New quest: search for an NPC in another city. Given by standard city rulers.
> New monster enemy: Landfyches. Mysterious legged fish-like creatures that sit around on the shores of water bodies.
> New enemy/encounter: centaurs! These will either offer to tell your fortune (with various effects), or offer to join you, or will fight you.
> Your army should now return to its original order after troops flee, rather than returning the new troops to the end of the list.
> Bugfix: you could retain adventuring points between games (quit one game, start a new one, retain the total). Now prevented.
> Bugfix: NPC units get their HP restored after battles.

003 to 004:

Spoiler

> Added armourer as option in city search
> Added impassable mountains/water to map edges
> Fixed several minor bugs
> Changed image updates on main map, so fewer files are loaded and moves process much faster
> Added city to city directions as a rumour option when looking for rumours in a city.
> Dropped Hired Sword defence by 1

002 to 003:

Spoiler

> Added message pointing out that you type the hero's name in the white box, as this was unclear to one tester
> Enter and backspace added as "Yes" and "No" bindings for binary choice function
> Full set of key bindings for battles added: W for fight turn, A & D to switch Attack and Defence unit, S and F to switch attack and defence abilities on, and Z for retreat.
> Edited tutorial to clarify various points
> Army menu now shows what a troop type can upgrade into

001 to 002:

Spoiler

> Added more text variants for election events (2 rather than 1 for the ward amenity ones, and from 4 to 10 for ward targeting)
> Variable costs for ward and wealthy/poor targeting events
> Minor fixes to text widths etc
> Fixed problem with hero attributes list not refreshing after finishing the tutorial

I'd be happy to test.

I don't have heaps of spare time but I'm sure I can make a bit.

Few initial things, this is me trawling around the tutorial map

Observations

- You really can spam listen for rumors and search city
- I wanted to check my army menu within the city but didn't see a way so had to leave a few times, (accidentally ran a load of turns without realising in the process)
- I fought many times after searching the city - do you only get coin? I was expecting a district to like me more or some such. If they did there was no notification about it
- Hired swords appear to be op here, and destroying anything I encounter (ended up with an xp of 395). I'm no longer bothering with any citizens because I don't need to

Questions

- Is there a way to combine troops of the same type? I had a few citizens one with 2 one with 4 or so. Didn't matter too much since they seem to be cannon fodder but I did wonder

Bug

In the tutorial when I clicked on the bandits the information given was "clicked"

(https://i.imgur.com/UYfqNdk.png)

Nice...

(https://i.imgur.com/vCGIOzN.png)

Thankyou!

You shouldn't be able to totally spam search city - after about five searches it should require you to either leave & re-enter or stay in a tavern before you can use it again (it may later drop to 1 attempt before having to do that, but I don't want to go there until I've got more possible results for the searches). The search city feature still doesn't have that many possibilities - eventually I'm hoping to put more sidequests there etc. What you get on that very much depends on what's in the city to start with, it sounds like Harionasis just has one of the combat missions (tunnels or ruins); in other cities, Search City can give you a couple of sidequests, weapon upgrades, or some hiring options. I might accelerate improvements to City Search up the to do list. OTOH I'm OK with rumours being spammable, I think most players will get bored with them fast anyway and info-gathering (especially if you're running up to an election and want detail on all the districts of a five district city) can already be a drag so I didn't want to make it harder on people.

I'm really not sure where I'd put a button that allows you to check army menu whilst in the city - would a hotkey to do it be sufficient? You can check your army easily enough in cities you own (by going Castle -> Garrison -> Your Army) but I just don't know where to put the extra button to allow it in other cities.

Noted on hired swords being OP. They should be pretty decent line infantry that can take on e.g. kinklades, wibulnibs, and be about even to most garrison troops like pikemen, shield guards, etc - maybe they're just too easy to get as an upgrade at the moment and I need the boost to cost more XP. You can't get them straight off as a first tier unit except in the tutorial, they're usually an upgrade for Hired Ruffians.

There isn't a troop combine option, as I don't know how I'd do that without allowing the player to make huge OP super-units (and what I'd do with combining XP tallies, any other bonuses, etc).

Thanks for the tutorial bug, that's easily fixable.

And yep, there's a goodly number of Exilian references in there :)

Nice work with this game, Jubal.  A few things came to mind while playing the game:

I missed a number of blue messages while travelling. I would often move quickly accross the terrain, and once I noticed the message, it was too late to determine where it occurred. Would it be possible to highlight these events on the map? Leaving behind a question mark icon on the square would allow the player to go back if missed. Another option would be to interrupt the game and showing the quote (with possibly an image). Example: "You hear tell of local rumours that suggest that interesting things may be searched for in this place"

I found I needed to use a number of moves to determine where the end of the map was. I would move over to the edge and test whether I could move across. Even if I couldn't move across, it wasn't clear whether I was blocked by the end or a obstacle on the adjacent page. To confirm, I would then test each cell on the edge. I think it's possible to determine this by the message; for example, "The terrain is impassable" means end of map, whereas "The terrain is high and impassable mountains that way" means otherwise. Is there a way to make the edge of the map more clear, so that the player doesn't need to use up turns?

I ended up failing a quest because I needed to deliver a letter to another city. I didn't know where the city was, so I ended up randomly searching and arriving late. It would have been a nice touch if I received the direction of the city (e.g. East) while listening to rumours in the city.

Also, is it possible to highlight the last message in the text? When doing the tutorial, I found myself skimming backwards through the lines of text to find the start of the message.

A couple of typos in the text:
- In the factions section: They have 1 cities.
- In the tutorial: Now, move away from the city anduse the X key...

Thanks, that's all really useful!

The blue messages aren't super important, and they have an area/time effect so actually last for 2-3 moves rather than being locked to a specific tile - it's basically a search success chance boost. You can get interesting searches regardless (especially if playing as scholars), you just get a much increased chance to do so when the blue message shows. Given that, I can't mark them on the map and I don't want to interrupt for them (I think there'd be too many interruptions). Maybe I could highlight the search button whilst the search boost lasts?

I've been wondering whether to properly mark map edges. I'll have a go at implementing something for that - possibly some differently coloured mountain/sea tiles that are impassable.

City directions are a good point, will look into that.

Highlighting last message sounds difficult but I'll see if there's anything I can do.

Typos I'll get on and have a look at pretty soon! :)

very fun so far^^
the battles go very quick, which i like, and the old timey designs feel very consistent

random things i noticed:
- when you try and move on a tile with a city's army on it, it gives you the "impossible high terrain" message from mountains

- when the travelling armourer offers you stuff, they always say "an" (see pic)

- when you start a new game you can spawn on a mountain

- i noticed i just ignored the rumors and city searches after a while and focused on the quests for one city,
so far i don't see much progress in our relationship, i did around 10 quests for them, and the leader still nods curtly, but maybe that's just him,

- possibly a spoiler, depending on how randomised this stuff is:

Spoiler

the murderers on the run were quite dissapointing bosses until zhia the hawk killed my chickens, which was very exciting! however, zhia seems to be a shapechanger, judging by the second encounter after he ran from the first (also see pic)... or he took his armour off

-yes, marking the map borders in some way sounds like a good idea

- semi-related: is there a way to get more chickens (faction related units) other than random overworld encounters?

oops here are the other pics

- when you try and move on a tile with a city's army on it, it gives you the "impossible high terrain" message from mountains
Noted, will look into that.

- when the travelling armourer offers you stuff, they always say "an" (see pic)
Ooh, noted, will look into that.

- when you start a new game you can spawn on a mountain
Yeah, that's a thing. I decided it didn't seem like it was worth changing?

- i noticed i just ignored the rumors and city searches after a while and focused on the quests for one city,
so far i don't see much progress in our relationship, i did around 10 quests for them, and the leader still nods curtly, but maybe that's just him,
Yeah, the leader's attitude to you is always static and based on their personality - your relationship is built up with the city as a whole, not with any one leader. This is currently even true for leaders who are your faction - I may add more depth to this at some point, but it'd be a relatively large task I think.

I think city searches should get more valuable when I add more options/possibilities - or do you think something else is needed there?

- possibly a spoiler, depending on how randomised this stuff is:
The idea is that sometimes you catch them unawares for an easy fight. Should I make that more explicit?

-yes, marking the map borders in some way sounds like a good idea
Noted!

- semi-related: is there a way to get more chickens (faction related units) other than random overworld encounters?
Not currently - Scholars and Phoenixes get their faction units by random encounters, Generals and Dragons get theirs via special adventure point upgrade events. Do you think there need to be more ways?

Yeah, the leader's attitude to you is always static and based on their personality - your relationship is built up with the city as a whole, not with any one leader. This is currently even true for leaders who are your faction - I may add more depth to this at some point, but it'd be a relatively large task I think.
fair, i'm not sure it's necessary. they started doing elections now, and leader/rival personalities might actually distract from the whole city running simulation thing...

think city searches should get more valuable when I add more options/possibilities - or do you think something else is needed there?
i like having options in the city, but at the moment, there doesn't seem to be much incentive for searching, maybe if some quests required you to search or use hints from the rumors

The idea is that sometimes you catch them unawares for an easy fight. Should I make that more explicit?
i don't think you need to. it does explain what's going on, and i like ambushing the murderers, because searching and then fighting very weak enemies feels like a change of pace from normal encounters. there is also always the possibility they'll be serious and tough.
my point was just meant to be that zhia's sprite change felt a bit jarring.

Not currently - Scholars and Phoenixes get their faction units by random encounters, Generals and Dragons get theirs via special adventure point upgrade events. Do you think there need to be more ways?
i guess if the phoenixes are meant to be more like elite units, it's fine not to have too many,
maybe make sure players always have access to some low rank chickens to replace the dead ones or would that be too much of an avantage for the phoenix house. also depends on how common the random encounter is.

> Leader/rival traits are already factored into elections: most leaders have some sort of viewpoint on society and how it should be run, and that's factored into election results (for example, a wealthy aristocratic ruler will likely do better in a wealthy city).

> Having some quests with city search incentives is definitely a good idea - I made the fugitive quest to do that for the main map searches a bit.

> Yeah, the sprites are a bit random - but since I'm not drawing any of them off my own bat really it makes it hard to get perfect ones.

> The random encounter for chickens is a moderately common search result any time you're in open/plains terrain (pangolins for the scholars are less common and in forest terrain, but pangolins are straight-out decent melee units whereas chickens need training).

I have now got a version of map edge marking working, though I'm not sure it looks right/it may be too obtrusive - I'll try and get screenshots sometime in the next 2-3 days.

Quite a lot of updates and changes!

A big change to the way the game handles companion characters (that is, named characters who aren't the hero, enemies, or quest NPCs): they now can get wounded much like the hero, and can also gain stat upgrades over time. Also, hero upgrades will now get more expensive in adventuring points if your stats get above a certain level.

Plus - bugfixes, one new city quest, one new companion character type (the sergeant). Plenty more to do, but the 005 update will definitely have some decent additional content in it :)

Sounds great you'll have to give me the updated version at some point.

Updated to show 005 as latest version.

New feature today - the map now has named regions which cover 1-3 screens. I'm not sure how useful this is but thought it might be kinda cool. There are also now deep forest screens which never spawn cities.

Hey Jubal, thanks for letting me in on the closed beta test! I just playtested version 006 and collected some problems to report:

1. Things got very weird after my hero went down to 1 hp, after I got the message that I'll die in 10 days if I don't get help. First I was unable to move, then when I press ESC (which triggers the exit message), the screen goes to a seemingly random area on the map without me and my troops in it. If I press N to stay in game, I still can't move.

2. The tutorial doesn't seem to work. I just get this:
(https://i.imgur.com/OvnAi4j.png)

Loving the concept of this game. Reminds me of something like Wasteland where you never know what you'd end up in every step. The discovery is quite addictive.

Oh dear :/ I've had bugs like that before but I'd thought I fixed them - it's caused by a bug in some major map-level calculation, so the game got stuck doing something in the seemingly random area, and then couldn't move your troops around because it was still looking at the area it'd had a hang-up in. The diplomacy and city warfare scripts are pretty common culprits there. You didn't happen to get a screenshot of the random area by any chance?

The tutorial thing was me being an idiot - I'd made some changes to how cities are stored, and not updated the load file for the tutorial to match. That'll be fixed in the next patch :)

Quote from: Jubal on March 09, 2019, 04:20:03 PM
Oh dear :/ I've had bugs like that before but I'd thought I fixed them - it's caused by a bug in some major map-level calculation, so the game got stuck doing something in the seemingly random area, and then couldn't move your troops around because it was still looking at the area it'd had a hang-up in. The diplomacy and city warfare scripts are pretty common culprits there. You didn't happen to get a screenshot of the random area by any chance?

The tutorial thing was me being an idiot - I'd made some changes to how cities are stored, and not updated the load file for the tutorial to match. That'll be fixed in the next patch :)

I'll do another playthrough and try to reproduce it (gave up that bugged playthrough because I was dying anyway lul). If it helps, it was a 5x5 map, and had several inter-city wars happening that I wasn't involved with.

Yeah, probably triggered by some niche problem with an army placing script. I'll have another look at it, though replicating bugs on that thing is horrible.

I'm glad you're enjoying the discovery aspect, it's something I definitely want to double down on in future improvements - let me know if you think there are particular areas that could do with more depth too, I have improvement idea lists on most bits of the game but help prioritising is very valuable!

Finally got a rather pathetic but nonetheless functional amount of work done - adding hotkeys to the city menu and battle screens, and Help (by pressing H) to say what the hotkeys are. I'm not sure if either screen needs a more developed help section than the hotkey overview, advice appreciated.

Further things today:

> There's now a minimum number of cities equal to the map size - so a 2x2 map has min 2 cities, a 3x3 has min 3, and so on.
> I've started working on character permanence - basically a log of where characters go when they're not "active" (in a party or ruling a city), so you can get the same character back for a different quest later etc. So far this has only been implemented with nobles who you escort between cities - you can now find the same nobles again for escort missions later in the game - but this system will be expanded to various other parts of the game over time.

The game now limits the number of scholar escort missions you can have at any one time, because it was getting super lucrative to just load up and have about twenty of them following you and run between cities.

I've got two and two half major planned pathways and I don't know what to focus more on:

> Path 1 is character development: making it more possible for characters to switch between roles so you can build up rivalries and watch other characters rise and fall in their fortunes, adding more life and sidequests to companions, etc.
> Path 2 is quest development: adding more and more varied quests as you go through the game, making your storylines more interesting. This would also go with adding more search results and enemy types.
> Path Kinda-3 (because it's a much smaller area) is trade, and getting trading working properly as a bit of a minigame for the player so if you're smart you can make money shuttling stuff around.
> Path Kinda-4 is going back to the manuscripts more and redoubling my efforts to milk stuff out of those, mostly adding extra enemy types, more graphical variation, etc.

I'm not sure which the game is lacking more - feedback very appreciated on which you guys think would be more important!

New encounter added - finding a ruined cart in grasslands. There are various possibilities if you search the wreckage. One of these is a new quest, where you find a mysterious parchment and have to go and find someone to decipher it, which may in turn lead to other opportunities...

Today's been all about morale - more possibilities to both lose and gain it. You can now get caught in storms which damage morale, and unit wipeouts in battle give specific further morale hits. On the other hand tavern stays can boost morale and can also produce a new "buy the men a drink?" events which can further improve morale. There's now a cap on the morale stat, and if you hit it then all your troops can get an XP bonus or may vote to give you some extra money. :)

So, big overhaul this weekend: I implemented most of the character permanence stuff. This doesn't make a huuuuge initial visible difference to the game, but does have several important results:

• City leaders can now lead their armies to battle (and won't be at home to give you quests if they do so).
• You can promote companion characters to lead their home city in some cases. All characters now have a home city, usually the one where you found them.
• You will sometimes see characters in different capacities: ex-city leaders can turn up as escort quests, and characters you met for escort quests can get elected/appointed as city leaders

I'm a bit worried this has been a lot of work for minimal gain, but I'm hoping this will also give me a better basis for any other added complexity in character interactions that I want to give.

I request a copy of this bad boi PLZ sir!

Don't have much free time, but when I'll do, I'll make sure to put your project through its paces ;)

Great - I should fiiiinally be getting a new version out shortly :)

Today I managed the first decent block of work the game has had in a while, mostly on graphics (ironically for a game with so little graphical content) the three different types of companion NPC and two main escort mission units (scholar and noble) now all have a small variety of visual options to make things look a little less samey.

Also, scholars now have character permanence like nobles, the mysterious parchment quest now has an ending, and I've started on putting in some dialogue and things triggered by characters' opinions and traits.  :)

I really like all of these ideas, especially allowing NPCs to change role. I feel that's going to give a good sense of the world developing, and having its own internal logic.

The cart-and-mysterious-parchnent quest sounds really interesting, and trading could be fun too, especially if there's an element of risk, ie to loose more than you make.
There could even be trading based quests, eg to travel to get rare commodities, with the possibility to make city rulers into enemies by getting resources they want (or into allies by trading on their behalf).

Today's been a fairly solid day of work on this - lots of small things added/fixed, especially adding more practical effects that result from companion traits. Eventually there will probably be tons of these, but having a few as a start is good. Also a whole new quest has been added, an assassination mission that only gets given to you by city leaders with ruthless, iron fisted, or conniving character traits. :)

Another solid day of work and 007 is compiled and ready!

There's now some alternative battle background graphics for different terrains, character traits affect elections, more flavour text added, more character-related boosts, etc.

007 has mostly been a very character heavy update: 008 will either focus on quests primarily, or on adding new unit types, abilities and search results. Not sure which the game needs more. I'm sort of interested in adding a trade sub-game as mentioned above, and in adding a load more options for holding court (allowing you to e.g. invest money in a city), but I'm not sure if the latter would be interesting enough that I should prioritise it. Expect more terrain related effects/tweaks, and a change to the siege system so the game requires you to wait a certain number of weeks before attacking a city, as a way to slow the lategame and force the player to not take on tons more troops than they can manage and just blitz the map before desertions set in.

Hey! Could I get a James Bond version too? I have little bits of time so can have a poke around for you if poss.

Quote from: Jubal on August 18, 2019, 09:40:29 PM
Not sure which the game needs more. I'm sort of interested in adding a trade sub-game as mentioned above, and in adding a load more options for holding court (allowing you to e.g. invest money in a city), but I'm not sure if the latter would be interesting enough that I should prioritise it.

My 2 cents are that something like quests will give people something to keep them busy - which is better for people that are starting with the game or more of an idle player.
The holding court mechanic/s sounds like it will add loads of depth but perhaps once the player has played for a little bit and is invested in various things... But trading will definitely be a fun addition, and you can probably tie in the odd quest with it?

Quote from: Tusky on August 22, 2019, 01:46:07 AM
Hey! Could I get a James Bond version too? I have little bits of time so can have a poke around for you if poss.

Quote from: Jubal on August 18, 2019, 09:40:29 PM
Not sure which the game needs more. I'm sort of interested in adding a trade sub-game as mentioned above, and in adding a load more options for holding court (allowing you to e.g. invest money in a city), but I'm not sure if the latter would be interesting enough that I should prioritise it.

My 2 cents are that something like quests will give people something to keep them busy - which is better for people that are starting with the game or more of an idle player.
The holding court mechanic/s sounds like it will add loads of depth but perhaps once the player has played for a little bit and is invested in various things... But trading will definitely be a fun addition, and you can probably tie in the odd quest with it?

Yep - holding court is already in, it's just there's a very small range of possible opportunities from it so it's currently fairly boring, and it's something you're sort of required to do as the lord of a city so just having to go back every few weeks to listen to people telling you that taxes are too high or too low is probably not much fun. Currently it's less of an issue because the late game is usually quite quick, once you're set up to capture cities you can blitz the map pretty fast. However, I'm planning to slow the late-game down a lot, so I think I'm going to need more holding court stuff to balance that out. Of course, maybe some of the holding court petitions could lead to more advanced quests...

Thanks! Things so far...

Coule of Q's

• I went rummaging around in some tunnels and so on, and my hero got rather battered and was on -4 hp out of 14. Is the only way to regain health to stay at the tavern over and over again gaining a single hp from time to time? I noticed there was also a search event that you could heal on - but didn't feel that thay would be a wise thing to try with a very injured hero
• No idea how to start engaging in city politics - is it just a time based things like with unit upgrade offers?

Bugs / issues I encountered

During tutorial I ran a search on every tile going from the city to the bandit (output below). I got this error during the tutorial, and then saw it again during the normal game

You find only a single gold coin, discarded by some previous traveller. You find nothing here. Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 1773, in handlershipX File "mainfile.py", line 6710, in mineparse File "mainfile.py", line 12242, in searcharea IndexError: list index out of range

-------------------------------
After doing a search in a forest I encountered a new hero and was asked if I wanted them to join. There was an error, although the only thing in the output was the word "error". I already had a cleric hero in the party, and the new hero did not join

Nislien Wheyler joins your party.
Error!
-------------------------------
I accepted an escort mission to take a noble from to a city that was at war with the other, but cannot complete it. This is the only thing in the output:

You are brought before the city's leader, Anna Charvalise.
"Welcome, Clive", says Anna Charvalise. "May your battles be fair and your conduct noble in them."
You set out to complete this new quest.
Error!
You head out of town.

-------------------------------

Wanted to attack a mustering of lanfynches

UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 2158, in handleryes File "mainfile.py", line 10465, in binchoice File "mainfile.py", line 13125, in fightsetup TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

This also happened when I was searching some tunnels in a city

You find old coins in the chest! You gain 80 silver aspers' worth of treasure. You explore the third level of the vast network of tunnels - and come to a cavern full of enemies! UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR Exception in Tkinter callback Traceback (most recent call last): File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__ File "mainfile.py", line 2158, in handleryes File "mainfile.py", line 10899, in binchoice File "mainfile.py", line 13125, in fightsetup TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

Oh no, that's a lot of bugs :( And ones I never encountered myself, too... I'll start looking into them soon.

City politics events will start getting offered to you when you reach 50 relation points with a city.

Healing can be done by the Caradilis event in forests, by staying at taverns, naturally over time, or via a random upgrade event where you spend 25 adventuring points. Cara and the advp event give you an automatic heal to full health, the others are gradual. Taverns are likely your best best for healing in an emergency as they're reasonably reliable, albeit not the fastest.

---

Important question: how many of the above bugs did you encounter during the tutorial, and how many after starting a standard new game?

Quote from: Jubal on August 23, 2019, 10:46:19 PM
Important question: how many of the above bugs did you encounter during the tutorial, and how many after starting a standard new game?

Oops - sorry I did not notice this question!

I encountered all of them during a standard new game, I just noticed the search one at first in the tutorial, but it reocurred during normal play (a few times actually)

Next question: did you play the new game immediately after the tutorial without closing the game down first? And do you get the bugs if you start a completely new game now without playing the tutorial first?

I think I might have worked out the problem...

At first I went straight from the tutorial, yeah.

I've tried to recreate the search bug from a fresh game and can't seem to

Right, got it :)

The tutorial loaded an old (and incomplete) version of the unit bank, which wasn't being refreshed properly when you hit the "new game" button. I think that's what's triggering all your issues.

Small tweak today - lots of new names and city name elements added, which should make that a bit more diverse :)

OK, finally got some time to do a bit of work.

Changelog for today:
> New quest! Trophy hunting - this will be available only at slightly higher levels, and faces you off against one unusual and powered up variant on a normal map monster. This is currently either a red-skinned quarquare or a huge albino kinklade. When you attack parties of that monster in the relevant region, you may find the more powerful variant, and when you kill it you have to take the trophy back to the ruler of the quest-giving city.
> Gameplay tweak: you now have to click the "go to castle" button to finish as well as start city quests. This may seem a pain but a) means more audiences with city rulers which is important for getting the feel of what they're like, b) stops you getting so much load of text immediately every time you enter a city, and c) will be helpful when I add quests where the ending directly sparks another quest.
> Gameplay/rules tweak: map stamina is no longer a standardly upgradeable stat, and resilience is now properly a separate stat to defence which can be upgraded in its own right.
> The quest log systems now change their text for some quests once you've completed a major element (e.g. the find person quest is different once you've found the person).
> Kinkladelets now have a different visual to kinklades
> Letter delivery quests now have more word variation.
> The message when you already have an ongoing quest now depends on the ruler's personality.

Finally got to look at this again :)

> Fixed a bug that meant you could sometimes randomly take units into companion-only areas
> You now have to wait a certain number of weeks before assaulting a city - this makes a "blitz across the map" strategy harder, as you need to pay your army for longer and enemy factions have more chance to capture your cities back whilst you're at it, especially if you didn't garrison them well. Currently it's set to a flat 3 weeks, which I think will be the baseline - having siege expert units (not yet implemented) in the player army will allow them to reduce it by a week or two, but also towns with more fortifications or a defence-specialist ruler will have increased time (I'm thinking +1 week for a defence specialist, and +1 week per fortification bonus item in the city).
> Port cities can no longer get cavalry-only armies. This just felt weird to me when it happened so I decided it shouldn't do any more.
> Minor spelling and grammar fixes on some messages that had typos in.

Today's work:

• Now siege time is increased by a city having more defences or a ruler with the "defender" trait.
• New quest available from lords with either the "honourable" or "callow" traits - they may demand you defend their position in a dispute at swordpoint, in a duel with another ruler's champion.
• Fixed a bug where the +2hp upgrade only gave you +1

EDIT: And I'm calling that as 008. Hopefully time for more updates will occur in the coming days.

Today's updates include some fun and quite noticeable changes:

> Quest threading! Some lords' quests, when you end them, now immediately trigger a new quest offer. Letters in particular are made less boring by this - they can turn out to be warning of a murderer or bandits in the area.
> Unit upgrades. The barracks or blacksmith can give a non-beast unit a +1 attack bonus, the blacksmith or tanneries can give +1 defence, and the tanneries can give +1 resilience. Each unit can get each upgrade type only once. Companions can be offered the upgrades too.
> Some opportunities now have semi-randomised variable costs, including weapon upgrades and bandit hunting, which may now be more or less profitable

Smol improvement for today: I added a feature to add/strip modifications to the strings used to store map tiles. This makes life quite a lot easier when it comes to e.g. storing hidden items on the map, because I can now tell the computer those are different without having to duplicate the underlying art asset, so that's an improvement and might make future quests and more hidden locations easier to sort out.

Productive day on this today I think!

The major advancement is that as well as characters getting their own throwaway vignette lines, they now have a range of possible scripted interactions with other characters, which can both show off their personality traits and those of others. They can also contribute to characters becoming friends or enemies. If two of your companions are enemies, their arguments may drag down morale: conversely, friendly characters can boost it. Particular combinations of traits in different characters can make friendships more likely (and more lasting). There may well be other effects of friendship/enmity too, but those aren't implemented yet.

Game start has now been tweaked too: you get a readout which tells you more explicitly a mini-backstory for you and makes your overall aim clear, and on your first move of the game you get offered a starting quest, which will tell you the location of a city to head towards. This should make the game start easier for new players.

More diversity of starting quests added: still only two options, but you now get either a letter delivery or a scholar escort, randomised.

Wondering if there's a way to make these more engaging, but not sure atm. I feel like I have tons of ideas at the moment for this but they're often poorly connected and I'm struggling to implement them well.

OK, crossing the sea has changed! Now instead of searching for a ship, you just try walking onto the water and it asks you if you want to search for a ship and tells you roughly how long it will take to look for one. I don't like the feel of this as much (I quite like the feeling of having impassable areas on the map that the map actually tells you that you can't cross, it makes the map feel more physical to me), but I do have to admit that it's overall a better system as you no longer have to do a billion searches when stuck on a small island before finding a ship.

I've now got the first rudimentary version of a new quest running. This is the potion making quest, which sets you three randomly selected flowers and asks you to go and get them. Once you have all of them, you make the potion and can choose whether to use it as instructed or not.

There's a lot still to do on it, both adding additional complications for finding the flowers and adding a lot more outcomes at the end of the quest (currently there's only one potion type and it always makes sense to drink it, but I'm thinking some may have more mixed effects and some of the complication moments might allow you to get some hints about what those might be).

Today's work has been fleshing out the companion ability roster. Tomorrow's will likely be the same.

New skills implemented are:

• Combat stances. An attack and defence skill that allows someone to shift between their standard attack, a mode with +1 attack -1 defence, and a -1 attack +1 defence mode. Given the game's system where you basically have one "defender" and one "attacker" in play at any given time, this is pretty powerful as it means you can shift the unit to specialise in whichever of those 2 roles it's needed in. I might cut this in two and make the "shift to attack stance and back" and "shift to defence stance and back" skills separate, but I quite like how they work together. Currently these stance switches don't cost any resilience points and the skill is available for the minstrel, sergeant, and squire, though I might change that?
• Trample. This is a squire only skill that gives a damage bonus based on the number of enemies. Good for stomping big blocks of lower grade enemies.
• Engineer. Your siege times are reduced by a week (min of 1) for each siege engineer you have. Sergeant skill, will also be available for scholar companions if I get round to implementing those.
• Calm beasts. A defence skill that only works on attacking beasts, for the minstrel and ranger. Reduces your resilience by 1 and the enemy unit's resilience by 2.

I'm struggling with three aspects of implementation for this stuff.

Aspect 1 is simply making up the skills in ways that aren't just "sacrifice a resilience point for a better attack/defence round" - it's easy for me to create skills that are technically different but which the player will just realise are the same trade-off: delivering an automatic critical hit and getting an attack score bonus, for example, technically do have different effects but as far as the player is concerned both just equate to "they hit harder". So I'm going to be experimenting with other things the player can sacrifice to get those sorts of bonuses - their level of control over their troops, and other stats than resilience, for example.

Aspect 2 is the skill lists - do I make them overlap more to make them broader? Overlapping lists mean more possibilities for each individual character, but also make each class of character less unique and make it more likely that there will be redundancy and overlap in some skills. Currently I'm treading a bit of a via media with this, but we'll see where I end up.

Finally, testing, especially in how the AI tries to use a lot of these skills - it's going to be very rare that AI units have these skills so maybe it's not a problem, but the AI process that decides when to trigger skills feels a bit random to me at the moment and I don't have a way of just booting up arbitrary longer battles that would allow better tests. I can generally test that something doesn't crash the game, but whether it works right is harder to say. Testing is easier for the player of course as I then get to trigger the skills myself as needed.

Also every skill makes the code a touch more unwieldy - I'm trying to make them concise, but because each skill has its own separate effects on the combat calculation, they pretty much all need some tweaks made to the "fight a combat round" function, plus the trigger code, etc.

More skills!

• Critical Strike if the opponent has higher defence than the attack unit's attack, the defence is treated as being basically the same as the attack unit's attack value. No help against low level troops but extremely useful against monsters and other high defence enemies.
• Counterattack works similarly to the pikemen's schiltron skill in that it deals damage to the enemy attack unit when they attack, though unlike schiltron the damage is based on standard attack and defence (while schiltron "reflects" a percent of damage done back at the enemy).
• Stand Alone is an interesting one - the unit gains a +2 defence bonus, which also affects its defence minimum, so no matter how tired it gets, it won't got below def 3. However, there's a catch: once activated, the unit won't move out of position, so you're stuck with it being your defence unit until you win or it dies/flees.
• Camp espionage is a nice simple bard skill that just gives you a run-down of the enemy force's composition, useful in bigger late game battles when you want to plan how to use up your valuable skills.
• Entertainer is a noncombat skill that allows a minstrel to occasionally give a +5 morale boost to your forces.
• Panegyrist is a noncombat skill, also for minstrels, that gives them a percentage chance of giving you an extra +5 relations with a city upon quest completion as they sing a song or give an oration or whatever about your deeds.

I think that's rounded out the minstrel and squire's skill lists quite nicely. I need to add one or two more ways to actually find those character types, I think, and then I've got one more quest to write and then that's my release line :)

Right, a start made on the "landmark" quest, which will be a very varied one as it basically comprises of "spawn a mysterious landmark, something will happen when you get there".

I've done some of the more complicated first half today which is spawning landmarks, though currently I have a system that will break badly if the game generates ten thousand or more of them - but I think that's pretty unlikely, I'd expect that to take about 5000 hours of playing time on a single world, in a game that is usually winnable in under five hours of playthrough time on a given run.

Version 009 is out! Let me know if you'd like a copy :)

Sure! I'll take it out for a spin

In your PMs now :)

Hey, I played the game now and made a short video with my first impressions. It's unlisted on YouTube, but I sent you a link in e-mail.

The main takeaways:

• I feel like amount of money you have should be visible at all time (in top-left corner or whatever). This would also alert me when I need to stop moving around and explore
• Is it possible for the map to scroll while you move? I often try to go outside of the map and hit a mountain
• Allow access to information/quests while in a city
• Consider changing the game to automatically "explore" every time you enter a new tile and pop up some "event" message, which would also include deltas (changes) in coins you have and troop morale. This would give more weight to moving around and make it easier to track the two most important things (money and morale).

Also, I have no idea how to progress east beyond the mountains, but I probably missed something.

Very nice concept, I can see this turning into a very good game.

I'd love to try this out if you still need more testers!

SLiV: Thanks! Have PMed you a link :)

bigosaur: Thanks, just watched through your video, that was extremely helpful and I really appreciate the feedback!

The big thing you didn't get from not doing the tutorial, I think, was the keyboard hotkeys which are really important to how I envisaged the game being played. E.g. rather than going into the menus you can just hit "Q" for a quests log or "Z" for skills and money or "R" for a quick units log. I think what I need to do there is have the game remind you at game start that you can press "H" for the hotkeys list at any time. Readouts for money etc: I'll have a think about fitting those into the UI and how do-able it is, I do see the point that it'd be useful.

It's actually really important that search area isn't an automatic thing: my idea is that it should be done either a) occasionally when the game prompts you to or you feel like it, or b) if you have something to actively search for. But some things you can find by searching in some quests are quite dangerous to the player, so you need to have the option not to search so you don't run into those things when you're wounded and need to get to a city fast. I'm thinking maybe I should highlight "search area" when there are the "now is a good time to search" events.

I see the point about making the map scroll, I'm not sure I can face rewriting that much of the code to allow that to happen, but I agree it'd be nicer and I wish I'd designed the engine to do that. Maybe someday when I'm feeling brave and want to wrestle with code a lot :)

Regarding the things you were stuck with: the east border is actually a border to the map, the dark mountains/darker sea are always the map edge tiles. I need to make that clearer when you walk into them, I guess. That's also linked to the map size decision you make at game start: a 2x2 map means 2 screens by 2 screens for 4 map areas, the size you had (and has a minimum of 2 cities in it: 3x3 has min 3 cities, 4x4 min 4 cities, etc). I need to do more work to make the 5x5 maps work, they're too big at the moment.

The things I think you needed to do next mainly were to progress with quests. I guess I should tell you what to do and then ask how that should be better flagged up (spoilered in case anyone doesn't want to know how to complete those):

Spoiler

• You had one fugitive hunt quest. The game tells you he's "hiding in nearby farmland" or similar - that required you to go and search a few times around the farms near the relevant city (Xhanihalla I think). It sometimes takes you going around several of them and searching each tile a couple of times, but eventually you will find the fugitive and get to fight them.
• Your other quest was to find a person for the ruler of Caradinge. You had a readout saying they were at the tavern in silver district. What I guess wasn't clear is that the game wanted you to go stay at that tavern to find the relevant person (it randomises which district's tavern you end up at with that button so again it's not necessarily instant).

I guess maybe I just need to state some of these things more explicitly as instructions for the player: I'm thinking actually that I should maybe implement a rudimentary achievements system and tie that to it, so each standard quest type gives you an achievement on completion, and you get some extra advice/details on how to do that quest until you've completed it at least once?

Anyway, thanks again, that was really really useful :)

Quote from: Jubal on October 19, 2020, 11:38:39 PM
bigosaur: keyboard hotkeys which are really important to how I envisaged the game being played. E.g. rather than going into the menus you can just hit "Q" for a quests log

Maybe underlining the Q letter in the Quests icon, etc. would be enough to figure it out for most players. Although, if the game can be played with mouse exclusively, I like to lay back and lift my left hand off the keyboard.  :)

I understand that search could be used for important stuff, so maybe give just a regular search popup on every step and keep the Search option as the deliberate one when you want to risk a more dangerous enemy or find something hidden there. As for highlighting, Civilization games have done it right IMHO. When you learn (hear a rumor, etc.) that there's something interesting on a map tile, it adds an icon to it (it's a small hut in Civ IIRC), so you know you can get there. Maybe a simple question mark symbol would be enough.

As for map scrolling, there's an alternative solution, make the map transition when the player enters any tile adjacent to the border tile. That way the player would never walk on border tiles and would always be able to see at least the adjacent ones.

As for 2x2, etc. map selection, maybe a better naming would be to use the actual number of tiles tiles, so 2x2 map would be 10x8 (or whatever it actually is, I'm on a different computer now, so I cannot launch the game to count), 3x3 would be 15x12, etc. This would make it clear that it's the world size.

Now that I realize how small the map is, I would actually give more attention to each particular tile. I was under impression that there was a whole huge world to discover, so I didn't give much weight to any single tile investigation.

Thanks for the tips.

Hm, I think search could then get annoying in the later game/when you want to be trying to do a lot of escort missions and have to sift through a load of random stuff. Plus the way search works which I guess I should also clarify is that the game doesn't pre-load the results of searches, and you can search a tile a bunch of times through the game (though you can't do it multiple times in a row) - searching is more "roll the dice on the random generator for this terrain type" rather than "discover this thing I've generated here as part of the map" if that makes sense? I'll have a think anyways.

There actually are some equivalents to the Civ series hut for some quests where the game spawns a special location for you to look for :)

Quote from: Jubal on October 20, 2020, 02:26:30 PM
Hm, I think search could then get annoying in the later game/when you want to be trying to do a lot of escort missions and have to sift through a load of random stuff. Plus the way search works which I guess I should also clarify is that the game doesn't pre-load the results of searches, and you can search a tile a bunch of times through the game (though you can't do it multiple times in a row) - searching is more "roll the dice on the random generator for this terrain type" rather than "discover this thing I've generated here as part of the map" if that makes sense? I'll have a think anyways.

Maybe I need to play the game more to get a feel of what would be the best way to do it.

Anyway, my comments were all based on initial impressions, and I wanted to get those out before I learn more about the game. Once you understand how the game works, it's impossible to look at it from new player's perspective.

If I knew those 4 screens where the entire world, I would definitely play the game differently. So, maybe it would be enough to communicate that in more clear way?

Yeah, I think more notes on the map size screen or more clarity would definitely help there. I'll do some work on that for the next release.

Just played through the tutorial. One thing that confused me a little: the text log refers to silver aspers as a currency, but the in-game events had prices in gold: Harionasis has "Hire 5 citizens (50 gold)", and I encountered a farm that offered food for gold. Is that a naming issue or is there an exchange rate? At least I was able to pay for them, it seemed.

Also I found a bug, I think: I had saved in the tutorial, and when I tried to load it, it asked for the hero's name, listing " Othko". I first tried "Othko", assuming that the space was part of the UI, but it said it couldn't find a hero with that name, so then I tried " Othko" and I saw a Python error in the command line that it wouldn't find a file.

Spoiler

Type START for a new game, or OPTIONS for the full options list.
OTHKO
Type the name of your character, as shown on the list, in the text box and hit enter. Type BACK and hit enter to get back to the MAIN MENU.
>>> OTHKO
Name not found!
OTHKO
Type the name of your character, as shown on the list. Type BACK to get back to the MAIN MENU.
>>>  OTHKO
Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__
  File "mainfile.py", line 2385, in handlermain
  File "mainfile.py", line 3205, in loadgame
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: './saves/ OTHKO.txt'

Didn't really matter of course because the tutorial isn't that long, but thought I'd mention it.

I agree that transitioning when moving to the edge would be nice. For example now you can bump into mountains or gryphons that you can't see because they're just across the fold, so to speak. At least it's good that you can usually back away without penalty.

Found another bug:

Spoiler

The centaurs babble meaninglessly, giving no clear guide to the future at all.
You reach The Revetmirk Weald.
You are ambushed by a troop of yammering vorthals!
UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR
UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR
UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR
Exception in Tkinter callback
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "tkinter\__init__.py", line 1549, in __call__
  File "mainfile.py", line 1810, in handlershipl
  File "mainfile.py", line 7569, in mineparse
  File "mainfile.py", line 8230, in mineparse2
  File "mainfile.py", line 15466, in fightsetup
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not subscriptable

Resilience is an interesting mechanic! Also are there ways to influence which creatures spawn? Maybe it was because I was playing on a small map, but I started with a quest to slay Qualquales which I have only found one of yet, while the map was being overrun with Wiblenibs. I'll be sure to give this another spin later.

Big and hopefully useful update today: by popular demand, the map now pans along with the player :) Needs more testing but seems to work so far, it feels a bit jumpier as the game is loading a lot more images each move, but it's very subtly so, so hopefully it's worthwhile.

Re SLiV's points:

• The ref to gold is a throwback to older versions, I'll work on fixing that.
• I'm not sure I've ever tried saving the tutorial, I'll look into that one.
• The UNIT NOT FOUND ERROR with the vorthals is very odd indeed. It may be because of an issue with the units file, which I suspect doesn't get reloaded if you do the tutorial then start a new game. I'll check that.
• You can't really affect spawns: on the smallest map size this sometimes mean some quests take a while to complete (small maps tend to make spawn quests harder and deliveries easier, big maps the reverse).

Thank you!

fyi I did play the last version for a while. Not anywhere near completion - mind. I still need to accomplish that!

Anyway I didn't find any obvious issues with that but happy to give the newer version a try if you would like

Yes, will happily send you another version sometime soon :) Spritelady and I did a discord hangout where I watched her play and took notes for a bit today, that was really useful so if you or anyone would be up for doing that sometime, it seems to be one of the most efficient ways for getting feedback for me.

This weekend I started on companion quests! They're still quite rudimentary but it's good to have gotten started:

• Ranger characters will sometimes ask to go on a hunt for a particular rare creature - they have the same option set as for the trophy hunt quest, so you're either hunting a red quarquare or an albino kinklade.
• Captain characters may seek out a member of their old unit. Currently this just gives a brief vignette of a reconciliation for old mistakes on the battlefield, but there will be other options too.

Once you complete a character's quest, they gain the loyal flag. This means that they will never desert no matter how low morale gets, and tend to always have a high opinion of the player.

I'm not sure whether, if the quest is multi-stage, the player should get the loyalty flag for stage one or for the quest-ending stage only.

Sorry didn't reply to this! I wouldn't mind, but I am busy with a top secret kickstarter project, and moving house. That's up till the 18th of Dec, then I'm meeting no more than 2 other households for a top secret religious festival until the new year.

Happy to do something on a weekend in January though?

Yeah, that sounds good, I should have another version by then :)

So today's addition is another new hero/companion type - the scholar! You've been able to escort them on missions for a while, but now they can be part of your party and may offer their services at the end of an escort quest. Scholars have the worst statline by far (literally straight 1s) of the heroes, but they have a maximum of four abilities and start with two (rather than max 3 start 1 with the other hero types), and will offer a range of party management and information bonuses via their skills.

I think I've also fixed the bug where squires could get combat stances despite already having an attack or defence skill in place.

I've had some feedback that in trophy hunting it's annoying if you can't find quarquares especially. I've added some code to give them a spawn bonus if you've got a trophy hunt targeting them active - I don't know if that'll work or if I should actually force-spawn a bunch, but we'll see how it goes in testing.

Added the bare bones of a loyalty quest for clerics - they have to go and find and retrieve a relic from a spawned special location. Currently they just find it and that ends the quest, but that certainly won't be the only outcome!

Finally broke through mental deadlock and did a couple of things.

• You now have a higher chance of healing at taverns, and can heal multiple hit points at a time.
• The Hire Troops button no longer says "for X gold", and is no longer automatically 5 - it takes you to "you find X citizens, for Y gold" as a separate decision.
• You now sometimes get decisions as to which route to go down when going to a tavern, so you get a pick of two taverns to choose from. This should make it easier to a) find good taverns when you want to heal, and b) find specific taverns when they need to for a quest.
• The descriptions of places in the tavern routes give you more info about those districts, which should hopefully make it easier to learn about the different parts of a given city.

Got a tiny bit done this evening - almost all bugfixes and minor improvements based on feedback from testing to try and make information more easily available and allow hotkeys to be used in more places (so for example hitting z for stats now still works on decision screens so you can check how wealthy you are while deciding whether to buy things).

Today I did a bunch of work redesigning the taxes/spending systems. The new system is more complex and more "real" in that the AI actually has a budget number somewhere and generates taxes etc much the same way a player city does.

Ultimately this will allow me to add some more complex/interesting spending options which will be available to both the AIs and the player. Currently it still needs some balancing though I think, I'm getting too many AI players deciding to keep everything in balance by slashing taxes back to the minimum and keeping very few troops.

OK, both the AI and player can now build buildings :) And when you own a city you can still get quests to go and defeat nearby bandit parties as local merchants petition you to get rid of them - this is really useful for improving your relations with your own city if they've taken a hit from you being away too much.

I think the next step is probably going back to the companion quests - there's definitely more late-game stuff to add, but the addition of building projects definitely makes the city management feel a bit more fleshed out and dynamic.

Today I've finished adding an extra stage to the menu system: faction confirmation. You get a little loadout screen giving an overview of your faction's quirks before choosing what to select.

I think I'm also going to replace, eventually, the map screen with a number of options, whereby clicking the banner will cycle through the options (so e.g. map size, player gender, possibly allowing the player to change death mode for a bigger challenge). Not got the relevant stuff implemented for that yet though.

I've been working a lot on improving the player's access to information: readouts now give you additional info (in particular which region you're in), city leaders provide hints for some quests if you go back to them before the quest has finished, city rumour mills often give information in more condensed ways. These changes should at least in theory improve ease for new players by exposing much more effectively what the player.

I'm thinking of further adding to this by making the hotkeys section also contain a hint which will be tailored to where the player is through the game and what quests they have active. Might that be a good plan?

Additionally I've been working on the city event model, which now does some minor things in cities as proof of concept. In particular, ruthless and ironfisted rulers will often put the heads of fugitives you bring in on pikes, which can cause rumour dialogues or be seen when you enter a city, and new building construction will also be a rumour talking point for a while after it happens. I need to add events for changes of ruler and AI elections as well ideally.

I have now finished recording the initial set of tavern songs! There are eleven in the game now - four (Saint Oraphas Was A Wood Sprite, Oh Forest Tree, Princes of Exile, and I Courted A Maid) can be found anywhere, one (Balderdash the Blemmye Pirate) can be found only in taverns in port districts of cities, and the remaining six each fit to a house and only appear in that house's cities: The Howling Lay for the House of the Wolf, The Making of A Princely Man for the House of Princes, The Song of Scribes for the House of Scholars, The Old Comrade for the House of Generals, The Dragon's Mead for the House of the Dragon, and The Phoenix Knight for the House of the Phoenix. :)

Next thing I need to get back to is the companion quests, I think, and maybe also improving companion generation: I want the way you meet companions to give more hints about their personality.

Companion quest work continues: tonight I finished a new enemy, the spectre, which tests the unit's spirit and can ignore attacks from insufficiently spirited enemy units. These will appear in one of the cleric companion quest options - clerics are indeed especially useful for taking them on due to their own high starting spirit score (though they may need some improved attack skills before taking on the spectres, which aren't super tough but can fight for a long time so the ideal is to have a high spirit, high damage companion to take them down quick).

One thing that goes with this is that the "bravery" (for units) and "leadership" (player only) stats are now the same and are called "spirit". This stat is now visible in battles, and determines how likely the unit is to break from combat among other things: also, as a mental trait, unlike most combat stats it doesn't drop as the unit gets fatigued.

Finished the other branch of the priest's relic finding quest, where rather than the test of spirit it's a test of speed and agility as the hero's party must scramble through a ruin to reach either a small gryphon or a rostrulet's nest. These are both new enemies: the "Tower Gryphon" is weaker than its usual counterpart, more a mid-game opponent, and the Rostrulets are smaller bipedal winged creatures who attack as a group and have two dangerous special abilities, passing attack which lets them sometimes attack your attack unit rather than your defence unit, and feint which can waste your attacks.

I've also changed the recruitment for priests, so there's now a little vignette that tells you something about the personality of the companion you're recruiting.

It's been a busy week or so! Version ten is now out to testers and I've been getting a lot of great feedback and not as many bugs as I'd feared which is nice.

Also, I've been starting to act on that a bit and also add some of the smaller features that will be in version 11:

• City leaders can go out with their campaign armies now, and city armies with a leader in will offer you letter delivery and escort missions as long as you're neutral/approving of them.
• Some quality of life fixes: there's a bit of code that blocks you getting too many of the same quest in a row from cities, and you're more likely to find taverns you need for particular quests.
• The game's wall background gets a red tint when you're in bleeding out mode, to give a much clearer visual indicator that you're in danger. Considering also doing a music cue?
• A few minor things - retreating is now easier, the army menu hascost information, the mute button is mentioned properly in the hotkeys list.

Well, I've started messing with some code to add sexualities and thus the possibility of romance as a part of the game. I'm currently just working with it as a flavour thing for the NPCs: I guess player romances are likely but will be added a bit later.

Congratulations should especially go to testing character Penso Trave, who rolled the (actually really quite improbable) set up of being a nonbinary pansexual priestess, for being the first character to have an NPC relationship and then promptly starting the first and possibly only polycule to exist in this game (I could actually code for poly characters at some point in theory but it could get SUPER complex. Even sexualities involve eight different possible flag types.) This was useful as it turned out multiple places my code was broken, since I'd intended not to allow multiple relationships per character and one of Penso's partners, Vianca, shouldn't even have been interested in them according to my notes... much testing still to be done.

I also have quite a lot of notes still on balance and quality of life stuff, but also that's just not as much fun and I'm having a stressful enough time that adding silly extra features is more important right now!

Yay for algorithmically generated DRAMA!

I wish I could find the papers published in the early 2000s which listed all the weird and wonderful relationships on Roman funerary inscriptions. 

I am now tempted to immortalise Penso as e.g. a popular figure of ribald stories told in taverns in the world of The Exile Princes.

Algorithmic drama continues!

The main new additions are work on the UI for choosing game options: the player can now select their character's gender and the game difficulty. There are three gender options (M/F/Nb as for NPCs), and five difficulty settings, named for medieval fictional exiles and wanderers: John Mandeville (Sandbox mode), Vis (Easy mode), Moriaen (Normal mode), Flea on a Drum (Roguelike Mode), and Silence (Ironman mode). I'm not working out how to implement the difficulty levels in a reasonably simple but effective way.

I'm currently focusing on the hard end. Roguelike mode will be easy - it'll be very similar to the normal game, but with slightly higher player injury chance, and most importantly no saving other than a running autosave/save on exit, with some code to delete the save if the character dies, so you get the true "one shot" feel of a roguelike.

Silence, the ironman mode, is harder to work out: the main thing here is that death will be instant, no injuries. But I'm worried that this ends up training the player to just save constantly. So I'm wondering about restricting saving in some way: I could keep the roguelike settings, but I'd like to make ironman a bit different and more about game challenge. A current musing is to actually make saves come at a cost in some way - if there's a small xp cost to saving then it stops the player just spamming it? And it's meant to be a stupidly hard mode (I think the biggest issue will be "how do I make this hard without encouraging it to be extremely boring or train massive risk aversion").

Quote from: Jubal on June 23, 2021, 11:21:27 PMVis (Easy mode)

Yeeey!  ;D

Coming close to having the new version done. Some concerns I still have: The difficulty settings still don't feel right. Silence, the hardest mode, is tricksy and a bit brutal, but I just ran a three city game with it and got through without problems playing slightly conservatively. I'm not sure about the "autosaves off, XP cost to save" mechanic, and it's hard to ramp up numerical/mechanical difficulty beyond a point or so without making the game nearly impossible to complete. I could increase difficulty by slowing/reducing progress and reward mechanics, but that just feels frustrating.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if the easy settings are different enough to the standard Moriaen mode either.

All that said - generally the basics of the difficulty settings seem to be working, and I'm now bugfixing other additions I've made.

OK, version 11 is now finally ready for testing :) Main thing in this is the romance mode and difficulty settings. Not sure what the big pushes will be for the next version.

Possibilities include:

• Some "endgame crisis" events which would add challenge to the late game. Still not sure about this idea.
• Some more mid to high level regular quests, which would be a bit more scripted/go into more lore and probably mimic some epic/Arthuriana tales.
• More companion quests: there's still one tied per class which makes them a bit predictable.
• More interesting and varied dungeon environments and end bosses
• Events in cities such as feasts and festivals which might give special quests or interactions and make the game world feel a bit more alive
• Nameable pets
• More building interactions in cities
• More character traits: two I think would be fun would be a social trait for someone who's a bit more in the middle and doesn't like the characters with more extreme views, and a "weirdo" core trait for a character with a bit of an odd-gothic vibe (the "yay, spiders" type).
• Other miscellaneous content: new enemies, new sidequests, a travelling fair

But I'm not yet sure what to focus most on/what's most needed. Looking forward to seeing feedback - shout as ever if you want a copy of the new version :)

So, knocked one thing off on the list by adding a subsystem that allows you to name your pets :) There's only one pet in the game so far, the tame Kinklade, but I guess this will make it easier to add others. Possibly a lanfych minnow -> tame lanfych could happen? Or something regular like a dog? Small pets don't work as well because it feels weird to have them in combat.

Another feature done - there's a new interaction in court that lets you judge court cases, with twenty different predefined cases. Your companions and the populace may all be watching and have opinions on your choices!

Been slowly working up feasts - today I've added the code for the player to host their own feasts, and NPC lords also do so. There aren't many things to be gained yet, I'm thinking there may be quests that involve attending feasts to keep up appearances?

Hoping to get back on working on this over this weekend, if other things don't yet again get in the way.

I don't think I really updated here with the addition of tourneys, which are now fully working (though I'd like to add some more side-events: the main events are companion melees, because given the combat system a 1v1 joust is actually pretty dull).

So, I'm now working on some bonuses and disadvantages to do with the various alignment stats, finally getting back to this after a long while.

So far, I have the possibility to get free mid-tier units (instead of paying their hiring fee) for high authority score, and merchants giving you donations at feasts for high pro-wealth score.

The other two high scores I think will have associated bonus units: gatherers, a mid-tier but non-upgradable foraging unit (somewhat better than the grape-hogs), and groquete bravos, a very flexible but impetuous combat unit for high liberty players.

I'm also thinking of having some bonuses for keeping midway? But I'm not sure what.

Some progress! The groquetes are now in, as are the gatherers though those need more testing. Today though I mainly worked on the "midway" bonus, which is a special set of four additional court cases only available if you're mid-range on liberty/authority or rich/poor scores: you can get a reputation as even-handed which means you might get paid to help arbitrate certain cases in your court.

More testing of all this needed as I get back into this, but plenty more to do in general after that...

Started today on a new block of 3-4 additional companion quests, which should bring the game to the point where many companions have a couple of options and it's not just "oh this is a companion of X type so I'm definitely getting Y quest".

The first of these is pretty simple, it's a trading quest available to characters with the liberal or socialite traits where they want to start a new luxury goods trade and you need to search around for buyers and provide them with starting funds, with a unique resulting trait for them which should help you recoup the loss and more besides over time.

Over the weekend I did a screeching turn away from the companion quest work and instead started on a new lategame feature: emergent threats. There will probably only be one of these in the imagined 1.0, which will never trigger on a first playthrough but then will turn up on 30-50% of subsequent runs.

The one I'm adding will be an "enemy king" event, essentially, when you've captured 50% of the cities, an enemy noble will rally the remaining settlements to themselves as king, to provide you with a new higher level endgame challenge. The king will have some bonus features, most obviously some much tougher honour guard units and a system whereby if they lose their city but their emergent faction still has at least one city, they just get to go there and replace the new ruler. They might also have elections against them switched off and their faction or city might get protection against renown based loss (where the player can flip a city through sheer renown)? This feels mean to players who really want to complete the game in a less conquesty way though. Possibly you can only flip/election the king's city once their faction is down to a single city? That might make sense.

Anyway hopefully this will make for a more interesting endgame on some runs. I don't want to spend too much time on late-game content because I don't think many people will ever see it, which is why I'm not adding other options. Other endgame threat plans on the list include an emergent wibulnib threat where the game spams them at you in actually dangerous scale hordes, something where you either face or spearhead some kind of wrath of the forests/fairy revival as the Duke in Green chooses a champion, a dragon threat where a dragon moves around causing major destruction to cities, and an external invasion where a new faction comes in with a whole new and more powerful military unit roster. I think those are all quite low down the list though, and along with the late-game story quests they might end up getting bundled into some kind of expansion plan if the game ever has a player count to merit it.

For now, the king threat has been implemented in its basics, though the king's bonus units aren't in yet and nor is the rule for their moving out of a captured city to a new capital. So those are my next steps - then I'll try to get back to the companion quests, and then after that probably achievements and early-game quest tweaks are next on the list.

Okay! As of this weekend the king feature is much more functional:

• Flips & election triggers can only happen to a royal capital if it's the royal ruler's last city
• Capturing a royal capital if the royal faction has a remaining city will lead to the ruler picking a new capital and becoming ruler there
• Royals spawn two Royal Knight units in battles with the player, these are slightly beefier than Armoured Riders and have the Charge2 rule meaning that unlike most cavalry they can charge even in siege contexts.

I still need to do a few things to mostly-complete this feature:

• It should only trigger on about 50% of runs.
• Rulers should also get a chunky bonus on autoresolving battles for their royal knights - don't want it to be the case that the best way to beat them is just letting an AI ally do it.
• Need to test & check that if they do get beaten by an AI ally, the capital switch mechanic works.

I'd also like to add some extra bonus units that reflect the ruler's personality, and in my original conception I wanted the royal rulers to have some additional ways to challenge the player like sending duel knights or assassins, but those (especially the latter) may have to be nice-to-haves given the number of other features I'm keen to add and the fact that this is all late-game content that I wouldn't expect many players to see.

Some new additions lately! I'm adding companion interactions for the city events, so there's now a chance companions will give you a comment while you're at feasts, and I'm going to add soon some little bonus mini-events for the different companion classes for tourneys - ranger, sergeant, minstrel and squire all feel quite doable, not sure what clerics and scholars will do at the tourneys yet. Thoughts welcome!

Also, had Spritelady's other half run a test, which was interesting. He stuck close to a core gameplay loop of lord quests, with little city searching, and so didn't pick up any companions etc, I wonder if I need to push the searching and exploration more at people?

I recently had some testing done by a Ukrainian friend here in Vienna which was useful.

Also, a lot of work has been going into getting this towards Steam recently! The store page is prepped and I'll be announcing that properly in a day or so from now.

Alongside that, a long-awaited addition of achievements is the next thing on the list. I've got one working and, thanks to some help from psyanojim, piped up to Steam, so that's neat. Lots to do there though - I'm aiming for about thirty achievements in the initial release.

As of the weekend I'm up to 16 achievements, so that's good progress :) Making the pictures and thinking up good names is honestly often the thing that takes time.

I am also thinking about rebalancing the faction bonuses a bit, in particular to try and give the Scholars and perhaps the generals some bigger mid-late game thing - Phoenixes get, well, Phoenixes, dragons get Dragon summoning, and the Generals' arequebusiers are powerful. The Scholars' pangolins are a very good unit too especially due to their training ability (which makes no sense but it's staying in now) - but the Scholars don't necessarily have anything flashy for the later game.

32 achievements now ingame! So that's progress. Here are some more of the latest ones:

(https://i.imgur.com/mTdBHRr.png)

I've also started work on the much needed dungeon crawl overhaul: I've been putting in "service" sections for piping more information around the various functions so far, but I've now got to a point where:

• Completing a dungeon turns it into a ruin instead (which could then be redeveloped, so it lets you "clear" the area in your own cities if you'd rather have another amenity).
• Ruins have a chance to turn into dungeon entrances (which is currently set way too high for testing purposes, this will be a very rare event).
• Dungeons have a type, which will set the final enemy, and which I'm also planning to use to flavour some of the miscellaneous events on lower levels.

The next and probably bigger section of the overhaul is to add three new enemies on top of the one already used. I want these to be some of the more interesting/unusual boss fight style encounters in the game, there to stretch its better players, so they're going to involve some difficult/unusual mechanics.

Today's dev work: adding one of the tougher possible optional boss fights. The game includes mini dungeon crawls where you can only take your hero and companions (without your "regular" warband units). These are entirely optional and provide some extra challenge, and I'm working my way through adding three new unusual end fights for them which are designed to test players with well prepared parties.

Today I've been doing the mechanics for the Whisperer of Lies, which can turn one of your units around to attack you. If you need to face one, it's good to hire some weaker "fodder" companions to help (at some risk to their lives) because if the Whisperer grabs one of your most powerful heroes or player character you might find yourself hacking your way through your own party!

The Whisperer will have a couple more tricks up its sleeve too, but I'm not revealing those yet. I've already completed another of the three bosses, leaving one to go. Which I think will be an easier ride: the Whisperer has been relatively complex to code...

Having a big round of testing so I'm making a lot of smaller improvements at the moment, here's a few of the recent changes:

• Tweaks to the sound player, nothing very major but should hopefully have reduced "double start" issues on tracks, and ensured that files are periodically closed which may help players with older systems or linux systems with low file limits.
• Started work on ascertaining what can & can't run the game in general - Windows 7 and lower seem to be out because Python itself isn't back-compatible that far (which surprised me as a discovery). Not sure about Windows 8, 10 and 11 will both be absolutely fine. I'm not sure if I could make a Win7 version by running the code through an older version of Python 3, but this is unlikely to be worth the bother I suspect. On the plus side, it looks like the whole thing should actually run OK on Linux systems with WINE.
• Fixed a silly saves bug which I caused just by not preparing the save storage file properly.
• You can now press Esc to leave the information or army menus and return to the map (or to the city if you're looking at a garrison).
• Added a new interaction for characters who've completed the Grand Merchant quest, where they'll basically occasionally give you chunks of free money when visiting areas of cities with alleys or markets.
• Tweaked a couple of dialogue lines for Ruthless characters so if you're in late-game and they're fully on-side they'll act more trusting towards the player character.
• Various minor text fixes.

Big run of progress this weekend on the social networks side of the game, which is especially represented at feasts (though I will add some more possibilities elsewhere if I get time).

Perhaps the biggest game mechanic change is that for "city champion" victories where cities switch to your side, two additional things are now taken into account: how much the city's leader likes you, and whether the city's leader is friends with members of your faction. These factors will have a significant impact on how much relationship you need to build up to flip the city. The relevant elements will be things that feasts offer you chances to manipulate, letting you flip people into your faction and helping broker their relationships with the city's leaders.

Bits of this I've now implemented:

• There's a stored network of who knows who, which is updated at feasts.
• Feasts the player doesn't go to will create some semi-random relationship changes anyway.
• The algorithm for the city victory now takes into account lord relationship and friendly nobles.
• There are feast opportunities to observe pairs of nobles talking to help determine their relationship.
• The player now gets occasional opportunities to make or break friendships at feasts by spending adventuring points, in exchange for relations with the city (essentially taking part in someone else's schemes).

To do:

• The make/break friendships thing might be more interesting if it occasionally failed or had a negative outcome?
• Still need to add the player's ability to boost relationships and faction-flip NPCs at feasts.
• Feasts the player doesn't go to should let faction switches occasionally happen.
• Should have a couple more readout options for the "do you want to make/break this friendship" text.
• Companions should be able to dig the player out of some social holes at feasts.
• Companions should have reactions to making and breaking friendships at feasts.
• Need to add an "attend a feast" quest.
• Need a new streamlined function for changing city lord relations with the player, and need to deploy that in several places: a "damped" version for low level quests (only goes up to "approved"), and then a version getting to full approval for feasts etc. Maybe also need more ways to get disapproval.
• Need to make approval/disapproval affect a couple more things. Maybe escort quests get different text for disapproval, and assassinations shouldn't be ordered on someone's friends.

Further bugfixes also continue:

• Fixed a tutorial bug where the "give directions to another city" rumour caused a game crash because it didn't have another city to find.
• Caps lock doesn't break all the hotkeys any more.

Another big weekend of work.

Big stuff:

• Players can now flip guests to their faction at feasts.
• Lord relations are changeable via quests and feasts.
• Lords will react differently to guests depending on whether they like them, and won't order assassinations on their personal friends.
• Lords react when you make peace or war depending on their personal viewpoints.
• The House of the Dragon has now officially been renamed the House of the Wyrm, because I don't fancy being sued by HBO.
• Summoned dragons now have dialogue lines and there are a couple more petting your pet interactions.

Lots of bugfixes, including:

• An annoying bug where you sometimes ended up trapped in a city after winning an election there which should now be fixed.
• At least one cause of late-game combat bugs should also hopefully be gone.
• Going into your army menu after viewing a city army no longer gives any wrong button labels.
• Misc typo fixes.

Biggest news of today is that I've opted The Exile Princes in for Steam Next Fest in October

Also I've been doing a big UI overhaul. I had quite a lot of feedback that people wanted a bit more info on the main screen, so actions/week and money total are now visible. Also the side menus now have more buttons, giving more information options, perhaps most notably including a full read-out of units' special abilities and what they actually all do.

I think the next step may be implementing Demo Mode, and then I've got a bunch more bugfixing and checking and then maaaaybe I can actually put a bit more content in, I feel like I've been spending quite a while doing all the bits of this that I don't enjoy so maybe it's time for me to let myself add some nice stuff :)

I think the UI overhaul is mostly done: I'm now working on stuff pointing in the direction of Steam Next Fest, which the Exile Princes will be present at in October! I've worked on making sure a presskit and developer page are available on Steam and I've been "locking down" parts of the game to create the demo mode for players to have a go at.

Hey! Thank you very much for allowing me to partake in the beta testing, it was a lot of fun! I definitely haven't gotten this back by August 15th lol but final thoughts:

I've never played a text-based RPG so this was VERY much a learning curve. I restarted a few times and definitely quit without saving a lot :D

- Bugs: two instances, but I think the same thing: ambushed by forest bandits and the fight turn button stopped working after a while. Copied the (hopefully) relevant part from the console and will link the files.
- Close to playable, definitely! I wouldn't be questioning my life choices if I stumbled into this on the internet randomly and downloaded it for free haha
- Priorities for late dev work: I would LOVE a choice of avatar and more PC customization (like classes?) omg!!!!
- How long: medium map size, easy/Vis difficulty, inexperienced in this genre gamer, few false starts. Reaching 50 relations for the first time took about 2-3 hours and the whole game took between 5 to 10.

- YES please to the money/health/morale readout on the UI.
- On that note, is there a companion approval/relationship mechanic, and if yes can we have that shown? (Not on the UI lol)
- I vote "yes" to the main quest appearing in the quest log personally
- Achievements: I'll link the file

- Other bits:
1) I adore your music but I had trouble concentrating sometimes on the game with the parts with singing (like the beginning/creation, and I had to pause the game when I was listening to minstrels) - but honestly, maybe this is just me
2) I would really appreciate having more save slots! But maybe I'm just a weakling :D
3) Are pernament stores in the plans? Especially weapons (but companion armor upgrades would be nice too)
4) Parts I struggled with are morale and how to raise it, and companion injuries and when do they actually heal, can I do anything for them, ???. Again this might be obvious to someone experienced with the text-based genre, just thought I'd let you know! (And I did play the tutorial, so if those are in there disregard what I said, I'm some twenty-six goldfishes in a trenchcoat.)
5) Are there any plans for a few pernament companions? The randomized trait thing is actually fun and unique, but I avoided a guy my whole playthrough just because he was pro-nobility the first time I met him! And I really don't know how much other people will replay this (personally I could do it a few more times definitely), but maybe it would be someone to get attached to :D

Link to bug and achievement file (https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1umYppG_CsuYl6JwRfiyNsPMIGB79Hr_r?usp=sharing)

Again, thank you very much, I hope my thoughts aren't completely disjointed and useless! It was a blast and I'm really looking forward to the full release <3

Quote from: thewildflowersong on September 03, 2024, 08:11:52 PM- Bugs: two instances, but I think the same thing: ambushed by forest bandits and the fight turn button stopped working after a while. Copied the (hopefully) relevant part from the console and will link the files.
- Close to playable, definitely! I wouldn't be questioning my life choices if I stumbled into this on the internet randomly and downloaded it for free haha
- Priorities for late dev work: I would LOVE a choice of avatar and more PC customization (like classes?) omg!!!!
- How long: medium map size, easy/Vis difficulty, inexperienced in this genre gamer, few false starts. Reaching 50 relations for the first time took about 2-3 hours and the whole game took between 5 to 10.

Choice of avatar I think is fairly doable and relatively high on my list, I'm not sure how wide the choice will be but I had an idea of making achievements unlock some extra avatars maybe :)

Player customisation I think would be a case of adding one or two "skill/bonus" picks in the game, maybe one early-game and one when you get your first city or something? I'm thinking things like "+3 attack if you're using a ranged weapon" or "hiring ships is half the price" so significant bonuses but not quite a full character class range of possibility. I'm not sure if that's going to get done before November though.

Quote from: thewildflowersong on September 03, 2024, 08:11:52 PM- YES please to the money/health/morale readout on the UI.
- On that note, is there a companion approval/relationship mechanic, and if yes can we have that shown? (Not on the UI lol)
- I vote "yes" to the main quest appearing in the quest log personally
- Achievements: I'll link the file

Yes, companions (and every NPC) have a 5pt scale - greatly disapprove, disapprove, neutral, approve, greatly approve. It's intentional that there isn't a simple readout of it, but companions will act differently towards you depending on their opinion and e.g. companion quests only trigger at high approval! In general it's pretty easy to get high companion approval unless you keep refusing all their little interactions (getting a drink with them, gambling with them, etc).

Money and actions left in the week will be on the main UI in future versions, I've done that :)

Quote from: thewildflowersong on September 03, 2024, 08:11:52 PM- Other bits:
1) I adore your music but I had trouble concentrating sometimes on the game with the parts with singing (like the beginning/creation, and I had to pause the game when I was listening to minstrels) - but honestly, maybe this is just me
2) I would really appreciate having more save slots! But maybe I'm just a weakling :D
3) Are pernament stores in the plans? Especially weapons (but companion armor upgrades would be nice too)
4) Parts I struggled with are morale and how to raise it, and companion injuries and when do they actually heal, can I do anything for them, ???. Again this might be obvious to someone experienced with the text-based genre, just thought I'd let you know! (And I did play the tutorial, so if those are in there disregard what I said, I'm some twenty-six goldfishes in a trenchcoat.)
5) Are there any plans for a few pernament companions? The randomized trait thing is actually fun and unique, but I avoided a guy my whole playthrough just because he was pro-nobility the first time I met him! And I really don't know how much other people will replay this (personally I could do it a few more times definitely), but maybe it would be someone to get attached to

• You can use the M key to toggle volume. There's no sound other than the music so you can just hit M once to turn it off.
• Yeah, I've had other feedback on this. I'm not sure if there's a great way to do multiple saves per character, but I'll keep thinking on it.
• There won't be a visible inventory (that's one of my "I'll go mad if I add this" lines). You can change the player weapon, but you can only carry one weapon at a time. You can upgrade companion weapons and armour though, and your own weapon! It's just a one-off +1 bonus that you can get for companions, but it's worth visiting crafters and smiths if there's any in your cities to get it. And player weapons can get up to three tweaks made by smiths in the cities. I've shied away from more high-detail modelling of everyone's equipment because the complexity of the much larger array of camp followers is really the bit that can vary your loadout in this game.
• Companion injuries don't heal like the player's do: they're just a permanent reduction to one of their stats, so they can "heal" and get over it by getting more XP. As for morale, basically don't take lots of losses in battles and keep paying people, and spend more time in the pub. There's also a useful common "search area" result in farmland which lets you pay for nicer food to get a morale boost. The big things that crash morale are not paying troops or taking heavy casualties.
• I think if I do more on companions it will probably be adding more diversity of traits and personality types, rather than adding super scripted individuals. When you say you avoided a guy, do you mean you avoided all characters who had the same introduction interaction, or were you finding the same guy repeatedly somehow? Maybe I should add more variety to the character intro scenes to make it clearer they're not all the same person?

I think my next game might be a more conventional RPG - a small number of fully scripted companions, inventories, a less emergent and more static plot - possibly back in the Kavis setting, so I'm also saving some ideas up for that rather than throwing them into this one :)

I've added a bit re pets this weekend! There are two new pets available, a dog because I figured people would want a dog, and a lanfych, one of the weird two legged fishes that appear next to water bodies and down some dungeon tunnels in the game. You can raise either from a whelp/fry respectively to get a nameable pet now :) Also there are a couple more unique petting-the-fluffy-animal text vignettes, and a whole new set for interactions with pets that, like the lanfych, are a bit more slimy and less fluffly.

I've started work on post Next Fest bugfixing!

Recent changes:

• Fixed a bug in the music engine that meant that if any track was allowed to play fully twice it would crash the music engine. I haven't so much stopped this as added a failsafe that reboots the engine if it happens.
• There were various dialogue trigger flags wrong for nonhumans (pets and dragons) which could lead to party members having political arguments with the dog, a dragon trying to romance the player, etc. These have (sorry, monster-lovers) now been fixed.
• I think I've fixed another of the intermittent battle-crash bugs, which could trigger as a result of the hero collapsing from exhaustion and/or a player unit fleeing, which wasn't properly triggering losing the battle.
• A couple of text bugs (or as they're better known, typos) have been fixed with some of the more complex romance dialogues.

I'm not sure what's next. I had someone asking about the creatures a bit and pointing out that there isn't necessarily a lot to give you a sense of what a kinklade or wibulnib is beyond the artwork, so I'm wondering if some of the more common creature types should have some occasional trigger vignettes where you get a little dialogue or example of what they're doing when you find them? That seems less heavy duty than a bestiary while still helping give a bit more colour.

Worked on the game again today - this time the main thing has been working on the save game feature. You can now have multiple saves for the same character, and there's a system for deleting saves and characters as well in the Load Game section of the menus. So that's something? I think at least one person asked for it in feedback so I hope it's useful.

Today's work:

• Release date announced!
• Some common enemies (kinklades, quarquares, wibulnibs) now have little randomised readouts to describe what they're doing when you find them on the map. These will appear at the start of battles.
• Timed quests (merchant escorts & trade goods) are now variable in time length according to map size. Large maps also now have +2 actions per week, and Mappa Mundi maps have +6. This should make deliveries more viable on larger maps.
• If you have the achievement for winning a game, the game changes its new-games default up to normal difficuty rather than easy.
• The code that stops the music changing if you face weak enemies is now more aggressive (that is, it will stop battle music triggering against slightly tougher enemies than before, broadly you now need to have a start lineup 1.5 times as tough as the enemy rather than twice).
• Tutorial has been tweaked so that the battle infodump is in two segments rather than one, it actually requires you to use the unit switch buttons before letting you start fighting turns.
• Tutorial has some prettier music tracks and the city of Harionasis has a background to its city banner when you enter.