Hi everyone, here is the news from the front.

Playtests

First of all, thank you for having been a lot to ask to come and to test the game. Thanks to Anthony, Gaëtan, Leo, Gregory and Benjamin for playing almost 2 hours each! I’m sorry to have delayed some tests to a future demo: I already had enough feedback to identify what worked well and what did not work, and it allows me to keep “fresh” testers for the next demo, which a good thing.

I have lots of things to fix for the next demo, particularly in terms of inventory management. Feedbacks were still quite positive, especially on things that interested me, and that’s good.

Dialog Editor

This month, I mainly worked on the design of a new tool: the dialogue editor. The editor is fairly standard, it allows you to write text lines and link them together in the form of a graph to create a conversation. One can add conditions, which allows multiple possible branches (eg if a quest was started or not), and the player can select his answers, giving even more branches.

At first I was a little reluctant to do it, but now I think the tool is really great, so I do not regret the time investment. Indeed, I created a custom graph editor, even with rare features, such as hierarchical dialogues and subdialogues. The writing is super fast, and I played a lot with it to write absurd things you will discover in the next demo. The editor works so well that I think to adapt it to also edit the AI behaviors.

Roadmap

I am still working on the Minion’s demo. I still have to finish the mission system, adapt the maze adventurers to make maintenance tasks interesting, improve the AI ​​to make the infiltration even more interesting, complete a first playable version of (a sub part of) the main story, and correct problems of previous demos. I hope it will be done by the end of August, but maybe I am too optimistic.

See you soon,

Arnaud