Frayed Knights - Artificial Stupidity
More tales from the development of Frayed Knights, the humorous indie RPG!

After a nasty little delay due to circumstances beyond my control, we delivered Alpha 3 of the pilot this week. And all was well. Unless you ask the Frayed Knights testing crew. THEY can give you an earful of what's not-so-well.

D'oh.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes
Since it's still an alpha and not quit beta (2 weeks?), I'm still adding a few new features. Well, "new" meaning, "was kinda there but not fully functional." This week's additions included some more "dungeon dressing" - in this case, some storyline elements that point towards the larger plot of the full game. Some tiny hints as to what is really going on.

Also, I made encounters more flexible, so they can more easily include mixed groups of creatures. This was already being used in a special case - the battle against the "boss," the "Evil High Priest" (EHP) Kraltic Barg. Now there's a mixture of spell-casting priests in addition to the more warrior-based monks inhabiting the temple. This was accomplished by the tried-and-true advanced technique of swapping their colors around - or, actually, their textures. See, they are wearing BLUE and YELLOW robes! How very different, huh?

And then there's having the enemies actually cast spells, which they are doing now. They are a bit too random with their spellcasting right now (as they are with their attacks), but every enemy who has spells now has a selection of spells they will draw upon in combat. Yeah - that's artificial intelligence! Or, rather, artificial stupidity.

Speaking of randomness, another report from the testers is that the game is too easy one session, too hard the next. In other words, randomness is playing too large of a role. To combat that, I'm going to put a curve in on the damage and healing done so that they will trend more to the average.

And then there are the bug-fixes. Hoo, boy. The bugs. Some are small - like the enemy health bars overlapping the information window in the picture displayed here. Some are quite a bit larger - like the game crashing on saves, and some elements not resetting properly. I'm knocking them out as quickly as I can, but the testing crew is doing their job admirably. They've also offered a lot of great suggestions which I am trying to implement where I can. But time is running out.

One thing I'd like to add this weekend is to implement wands. I'd like to give Chloe a wand of fireballs with only a couple of shots left - but good for inflicting incendiary pain on a group. Something that's bugged me for a while (and one thing a tester pointed out) is that she's got a reputation for blowing things up, but the spells at her level are too nicely balanced to let her do that. So having an almost-used-up wand of fireballs with just a little usage left will do a nice job of explaining some of that, AND give the player a nice "panic button" type weapon to deal with larger groups of enemies in the temple.

Content Updates
On the content front, Kevin has put together a new and improved dungeon that appears to run a bit faster. Digging into the details of how Torque renders interiors, he discovered that many of his assumptions concerning visibility and optimization, based upon how Quake-style engines handle these things, were entirely incorrect. Since those were my assumptions too, this was kind of depressing. But unless I feel like re-writing that part of the engine, we're stuck with these limitations.

James has been working on the icons for the trap / lock interface, new skins for NPCs found in the tavern in Ardin, and sound effects. These have made a phenomenal difference in the game already.

Mike has a new version of the Frayed Knights main theme done. His other projects are also demanding much of his time, but he's managed to devote some effort into it so we have some great custom music instead of just licensed stuff.

What's Ahead
There are a couple more changes I want to experiment with for the pilot before I go beta with it, but for the most part, as of right now I'm looking at bug-fixes (they'll never end!) and work on the full version. The testers are asking for an example of leveling up a character, so I'm going to try to sneak in the opportunity to take Benjamin "up to" the same level as the rest of the Frayed Knights. There's not THAT much to it, so it should be easy. Right? Right?

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(Vaguely) related silliness:
* Frayed Knights Release Update
* Frayed Knights: Beating Up Is Hard To Do
* Frayed Knights: Poor Spelling
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Labels: Frayed Knights

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