Mixed news and features

I’ve got several things to say about TRS on very different topics, here they are in one single blog post.
 
First, I’m a bit ill, hopefully nothing too serious, but it might keep me from spending too much time on computers, as it affects my eyes. I’ve found some time to hack at TRS despite that anyway.
 
Next, I’ve created some tools to help me design UIs faster. I’ve been avoiding this for long, as I’m still worried by the state of Guichan: project isn’t actively maintained anymore, it’s still lacking important widgets I’ll have to design myself, etc… But, trying to integrate another UI kit in replacement got me banging my head against the keyboard, so, Guichan it will be for some time to come.
 
The first piece of new UI using these tools is a new global interface, which will vastly improve user experience by exposing features in a user-friendly way (mouse activated as opposed to finding keyboard shortcuts in a Readme file). The current widget set forces me to change the ‘speed up’ feature to become a ‘toggle’ instead of a ‘push’ mode. That bothers me a little, but not too much, let me know what you think.
 
Lastly, I’d like some feedback on a kind of dilemma I’m stuck in. I want to add loot to the game. And I see one interesting way of doing it, but it would steer the gameplay toward a much more active kind, and that wouldn’t be easily reversed afterwards.
My idea is to remove the monsters’ automatic respawn, so the player can collect loot as a separate phase from combat. If I went that way, I’d also add ‘attacks of opportunity’ to monsters. Then the player would have to manually manage a lot of things to make the adventurers act.
Another possibility is to put a much longer respawn than currently, or maybe tying it to the quest completion. That would also change the pace of the game a lot.

So, please, be my guest, comment or mail me!

New monster upgrade system

There is some major stuff coming for the future releases. Here is one part.

First thing coming, as it has generated too much negative feedback, I’m currently reworking the monster/spawn point upgrade system. It will be simpler to figure out, and with a new GUI, which will make things better looking as well. So there will still be the spawn point level but the monster itself will only have ‘minor’ upgrades instead of a complex computation for levels. Here’s an explanation of the new system.

Let’s consider a spawn point level 1, with a stock monster. Say it starts at 100 ‘points’ (to avoid thinking in terms of health, attack, etc…).

You can upgrade the monster 3 times. Each time will get you a 25 points boost, so that 125, 150 and 175. Now if you want to get it higher, you have to upgrade the spawn point to level 2.
When you upgrade the spawn point, the monster gets to level 2 stock, or 200 points. Then you can purchase upgrades to get it to 225, 250 and 275, etc…

I think it makes sense quickly, I just have to figure out the upgrade costs so it’s fair. I think the monster upgrades will be quite cheap and not very effective, so maybe 20 points or even 15 instead of 25, whereas the spawn point upgrade will cost you a lot, but will be dramatic in terms of monster improvement.

The new UI will hopefully make it very easy to understand.

Build 018 – Sprite patch

Here is a very quick post to provide a small patch for Builds 018 & 019.

http://tinyrpgsim.free.fr/pub/TinyRPGSim%20-%20Build%20018%20Sprite%20patch.zip

This fixes the new Adventurer sprite’s sword, which was transparent due to a conversion mistake.

To apply this patch, unzip it and put the two image files in the data/sprites/ folder.

Sorry for the inconvenience!