Here’s what I’ve been up to this week:
- Building a better Mastery UI: the one that lets you spend your points on level up. This has taken most of my time!
- Polishing up Books as a consumable item.
- Building the Cartography and Advanced Delving masteries.
- Rebuilt starting class loadouts.
- Worked on the camera some more 🙁
- Started on a simple layout for overland encounters.
- Bugs bugs bugs
The starting majors (Fightermans, Rangermans, and Wizardmans) are arrangements of 5 mastery points, along with some simple starting gear. A player can also start without picking a major, you get 5 points to spend as you please to build whatever flavor of hero you like. You’re not pinned down to anything, you can put points all over the place!
Not all masteries can be completed right away. Most of them allow you to put in one point at 1st level, another at 3rd, and the final at 5th. For the first few levels at least, you’ll have to weave between masteries, but that will create a more well rounded character.
UI work isn’t my forte, and I’ve had trouble pinning down a contractor to help out with the interface. No excuses though: here’s a look at the Mastery UI in it’s current state. The little sword bounces– I’m very proud of that bounce. Less proud of the gradient for the Master’s Programs label. That’s gotta go.
I’ve been putting in some long hours over the last week, I’m really driven to hit my upcoming personal milestone. I can’t wait to share the results!
Nice work so far! I’ve been following your updates fairly regularly – very interesting insights into the design processes for this genre of games. Looking forward to seeing the release version. 🙂
Thank you John! It’s been a treat to be able to try new ideas. Not everything is going to work perfectly, but I’m OK with that as long as I can force myself to keep up with feedback and adjust where necessary. It won’t be too long before players can get their hands on the game. I’m excited to see where I’ve hit and where I’ve missed.
As you unlock other classes/skills will you have more places in which to spend points? Or will thing that could benefit Necromansy already fall under Wizardmans masteries?
As you unlock new classes, they’ll appear in the left hand column. Necromansy is its own set of powers, but they mesh quite well with Wizardmans masteries and it would be find to take them both. Or, you could pick up a few bow powers, put one point in Applied Wizardry to get a mana pool, then pick up Necromansy powers to create meat shields while firing arrows from afar.