[Dev Log] Tourney: The medieval tournament sim

[dubsartur]

I think I have read a medieval sermon talking about a carefully unnamed deed of arms attended by scandalous women wearing daggers and low-cut dresses.  God sent his rain and brought the proceedings to an end and ruined their finery, or so saith the preacher.  I imagine that the women and their gentlemen friends had a different opinion on whose scaly tail was behind the scenes 

And since some of us are too pure of heart to understand why wearing daggers was an issue:

[Tusky]

I didn't ramp up the dev hours quite as much as I'd have liked in May - but still pleased with the progress. Unfortunately it's mostly been cleaning up UI, menus and bug fixes, so not massively exciting to provide updates about.

End of day

I've implemented the general concept of being able to win or lose the day. So now I have a functional level that can be played from start to finish.

Finances menu

Pretty straightforward, to show you the most profitable outlets, and those that are not making much money. So a player can try and identify issues.



Next

Save And Load. I've already been on this for a couple of weeks, and will probably need a couple of weeks more :/

[Jubal]

I hope the save and load creation is goingwell!

[dubsartur]

Apparently Steve Muhlberger is working on a cheap English translation of Le Tournoi de Chauvency, a poem about a medieval tournament, when it comes out it might be worth flipping through for tropable ideas. https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2020/06/a-surprise-development.html

[Tusky]

Amazing, thanks for the tip!

I will keep my eye on that one

[Tusky]

Favourite Knights

Arriving visitors will now have a favourite knight. They are happy when they win, and sometimes their favourite might change to a different knight if they see them doing well.
Visitors will also have a little fangasm if they spot their favourite knight wandering about. The knights will do a little showboating to them too...



Select House

I've implemented a screen where you can choose a house before starting a game. It's a little simple at the moment, and needs a nice background, but you get the idea. You can see some of the "hilarious" blurb for house Pendragon there...



Save and Load.

This took ages and not much to speak about, but it's done. You can save and load a level (so long as an event is not underway).

Other stuff

I'm attempting to balance the game to be a bit of a challenge. I also did a whole bunch of UI tweaks and bug fixes.

Next:

Actually pretty much everything for the first level / demo is done! This next month will be quite cool:

- Add a few sounds
- More testing, bugfixes and balancing by me
- Then run a test with an actual third party person!

[Tusky]

Update time! Here is a roundup of what's happened over the last few weeks!

Souvenirs

Visitors using a shop type outlet will purchase an adorable little souvenir. Here's a screenshot where most of them have picked up a tiny novelty knight helm at the blacksmith (as voted for by the fine folks on Twitter)



Pretty historically inaccurate, I suppose, but I had to forego those reservations because I think it's good fun

Cost Management

Before I had it so that you had to purchase certain outlets to unlock certain upgrades for your house knights. For example you had to place a blacksmith before you could buy them any armour, or the apothecary before buying potions.
However having tested it found this to not really add much fun and was just obstructive. So I moved all of those things to the knight menu to buy whenever you wish.

In place of that I added a couple of more standard management sim options. Chiefly cost management for outlets. Along with that I felt you'd need a way to observe what effect messing with the prices would have. So added some fun* finance menu graphs, and positive / negative thoughts relating to price from the visitors



Sounds

I added a shiny dynamic sound manager that works nicely. There are rain sounds, ripples of applause and lances snapping. As part of this I also wanted to make a dynamic crowd "babble". At the moment all of the voices are my own which is a little disconcerting when I'm testing, hearing a crowd of people that all sound like me. I'll need to get some other voices before the madness sets in.

Unless it already did? *jibber*

Testing

Was going to do more testing and balancing, maybe with a third party, however I realised that I really need all of the finished things that might affect the difficulty completed. This includes things that affect crowd happiness, crowd movement. Happily the above things pretty much cover that.

Next

- Balancing & at least 1 third party test session
- I'M GOING TO START LEVEL 2! SQUEEEE

* If you do not find financial graphs fun, then please replace this word with "dreary"

[Jubal]

I mean, it's only so inaccurate - hat badges were one of the most standard souvenirs for medieval pilgrims, and we have tons of those from the archaeological record

Also, happy to provide some voice sometime if useful!

[Tusky]

Oh cool! Good to know

I mean when I wrote that I forgot about all of the other inaccuracies, like potions for example.

I am sure I will have a use for an extra voice - thanks for the offer!

[Jubal]

Potions is a really interesting one, like they've become completely standard in modern gaming but also I don't know how much of that is a modern fixation on e.g. "performance enhancers" so we expect those things to come out of bottles? I feel like if one surveyed medieval literature you'd find fewer "drink this potion" cases and a lot more character interaction drivers and low-level spells ("you will be invincible as long as you carry this wren's egg, but take care never to let it break").

[Tusky]

Yeah, it's a good point.

I also really wanted to make an apothecary outlet, and when I first implemented the outlets they each were intended to have a purpose. Now they are just shops though. I've kept the potion mechanic in, since it's one of the various things that can contribute to a joust score.

Potions you can get in this will be draught of the stallion, exilir of arrowstorm, potion of ni, and a tincture of health. The most interesting one is probably the Ni potion which overrides equipment and delivers a colossal amount of damage to each participant. You can use it if you are feeling dishonorable to try and force a knight to surrender in subsequent bouts because they are too injured.

[Jubal]

Yeah - another thought re potions and medieval magic is that the question of what you want magic to do has definitely changed. Medieval stuff very rarely goes for boosts or healing, though I guess that's maybe inevitable outside a game context. But there's tons of divination type stuff, which is interesting. If I ever get to organising this game devs and medievalists workshop one thing I'd love to discuss would be better ways of implementing divinations mechanically in games, they're really tricky to do well but I think an interesting challenge.

[dubsartur]

D&D had a wide variety of potions since at least First Edition, but I have never thought where they came from - possibly more Asterix the Gaul than we want to admit!  They do work well in computer games.

Medieval thinking had things like "I put the seal of Solomon on my shield / a scroll with the name of God around my neck, nobody can harm me" and invoking various saints for protection.  I am trying to think of ways that those could work well in games.  And then and now, people had big ideas about the power of eating right and taking the right medicine.

Edit: medieval thinking also tended to class wonderful healing as a miracle: "I drank an ampule of water from the well outside the Tomb of Saint Margaret and my snake bite healed" or "the really holy bishop touched me and now I can see better."

I think D&D / video game magic is more like magic in wonder stories than the kind of magic people before Madame Blavatskey and Aleister Crowley believed someone they knew could do.  Flying or summoning a tower out of the bare earth was the kind of thing they could believe happened long ago and far away, but they wanted to know who to marry or whether it was safe for their ships to leave port right now. 

Edit: It was not that they did not think it would be cool to be able to fly, it was just harder to believe in like they could believe that their weaving partner had forseen that there would be a shortage of fuel next winter.

[dubsartur]

Ulrich von Zatzikhoven's Lanzelet has things like a beautiful pavilion with singing automata, embroideries, a magic mirror, etc. which can be packed into a single box which a polite lady can carry.

The obvious things have already been incorporated into D&Desque fantasy (because before the 1990s there was just not very much fantastic fiction in print so you had to read the sagas and the Metamorphoses and the Epic of Gilgameš and the Journey to the West, directly or in handy summaries) but I think there are cool ideas in other early myths and romances.

[Jubal]

Yes - one thing on my "to write" pile is a run-down of fun things in the medieval Georgian romances/epics, which aren't hugely well known outside the country.