Tilting at Windmills

If you celebrate Christmas, a merry Christmas eve to you! If you don’t, happy holidays of whatever form of winter solstice festival you choose to observe! 😉

I’m just about finished testing out spells. I’ve gone through all the different spell schools and cast most of them. In the the process I discovered several bugs and improvements to be made.

For example, I realized it wasn’t clear WHAT monster was taking a turn or at all. If you cast spells that immobilize them or put them to sleep, you had no idea if they were just not moving or what. So I added a “blink” effect on each monster’s action that causes them to flash white, much like the players do. That way you know it’s cycling through monsters and can see if one tried to do something and failed. I considered adding notifications like ‘Bandit is held!” or “Bandit is asleep” as well, but I don’t want to slow down the progression that much. I’d have to wait at least a half-second on each text notification so the player can see them.

So my last couple engine tasks are:

• Test the last few spells (disarming traps and unlocking doors mainly)
• Fix regressions in boss combats
• Reactivate monster special attacks

The numerous fixes I’ve made in other areas may have rectified a lot of the bugs. My next video should be a fight with something big…

After that, I need to start a fresh game from scratch and start playing the game through legitimately, checking that quests, content, and other elements all look good. I only have the first world disk completed, but I want to make sure I personally test all of it before I start involving beta testers.

Also, before I can start getting other people involved in testing, I need to complete the documentation. 🙂 That requires testing and feedback just as much as the game itself!

I’ve been hard at work with the game the last few days… There are many bugs to hunt down and features to test!

Part of the fun of playing the game is the refinements you can add to make gameplay better. For example, I realized that swapping between player statistic screens was a bother, having to go back out to travel mode and press a different key. So I changed it so you can go back and forth between characters while on a stat screen by pushing left and right.

Another change was to have it so you can select a player while using services in town; previously the active character was automatically selected. I decided the whole “active character” thing is best kept in travel mode only.

I’m running close to empty in most of my modules for space; several modules I only have around 100 bytes or so of free space left. This means no major new features can be added, and it makes me nervous about any huge changes that may need to happen.

So on the topic of spells…

One thing I’ve noticed after playing the Ultima series is how under-utilized spell systems tend to be. In Ultima III the most used spell in the game was disarm traps, because it was the only way to safely open chests left by monsters. In Ultima IV many spells weren’t used because you had to mix them before you could cast them, which made improvisation in combat difficult. Ultima V had some fun-looking spells like Flame Wind which NOBODY ever used because by the end game your party was strong enough using magic axes to not need spells.

So when I wrote up my spell list a long time ago, I had a goal. I wanted a spell system that was easy and fun to use, and had spells you would WANT to cast because they were cool or useful. In particular, because it was tactical 2D combat, I had a bunch of spells that altered the terrain by creating walls of fire, barriers, and similar things.

But now that I’m actually PLAYING the game, I’m not using those spells at all. In fact, the list of spells is very long with ones I haven’t touched or needed to. So now I’m asking myself “Is this or that spell really needed?”

I originally had 72 spells in the the game. I realized that most of the spells in the first book were getting ignored because they were just pale copies of more powerful spells. I also changed a damage type in the game which meant I had a serious spell gap where the players would have no means to cause that kind of damage. As for the terrain altering ones, they are consuming a lot of memory to support and create, and passive effects like them are just not as fun as I thought.

So now I’m taking a moment to remove the code for these spells and tighten up the spell list. I now have 60 spells instead, which I think is more manageable for both the player and the designer. That also means I can free up a little space in the combat module as well.