Devlog Oct 10 - Improving characters

 Welcome to the first October devlog

A core feature of the RPG genre is that character improve over time. This sprint we've created a system for handling that.

Characters now have experience points (XP) and levels. Once a character have accumulated enough experience, their level increases. This is a common feature in many games, so will probably be familiar to many players.

We have added a box in the character overview displaying the characters level and experience.

In this example, the character is level 1 and has 0 XP. They need 8 XP to advance to level 2.

When a character increases in level, they will gain something. That could either be new or improved abilities, increased stats (health, attack, defense) or passive effects.

This progression will be individual for each character. For example you could have a defensive character who gains more defense and health every level, but an archer would instead more attack or range. We have not yet set up the exact progression for every character, but the system is in place.

When a character levels up, a message will be displayed to show what the character gained.

The exact wording of the message could be changed in the future.

If multiple characters level up at the same time or if the players gains enough XP to level up multiple times, the player can click "Continue" to see all the messages.

Observant readers of the blog may recognise that we're re-using the dialogue system to show these level-up messages. This is intentional: We plan to eventually add a dialogue history so the player can view previous dialogues if they skipped through on accident. That may also be useful here if the player forgets what they gained and wants to re-read the messages.

We have implemented the system in a way that allows us to reward (or punish) the player in different situations as well. Here are some examples of what the system could be used to 

- Completing a quest could give a character a new ability

- Entering a certain map could give stat penalties

- We could have a dialogue where the player gets to choose their reward.

This system is fairly flexible and will hopefully serve us well in the future. And of course, XP, levels and all gains or losses from levels or from other things is added to our save/load system so it should be preserved when saving the game.

Steam page update

We wanted to set up a page on the Steam store for the game, so it would be possible for people to wish-list the game or stay updated in a different way than reading this blog. Reading blogs aren't for everyone, so it would probably be beneficial to set up a Steam page.

Unfortunately I'm struggling a bit with some of the tax paperwork required and their support was unhelpful. I don't want to bore my readers with the details, so for now just know that we'll keep trying to get it set up and hopefully it will be possible to wish-list the game soon.

Thanks for reading!

The next update will be on October 24th, where we will return to the Town area we teased last time. We will write dialogue for all the characters and some of them may have some quests for the characters.

Also, it's possible we'll receive a response from the grant we applied for (mentioned in the update on sept 12). Please cross your fingers for us!