Devlog april 24th - Returning to the town

  Welcome to the second devlog of April!

We continued with writing a new set of dialogue for returning to the town after saving the farm owner's son. All of these dialogues will be with characters we have met before.

Here's a list of the changes to the town since the player was there the first time.

- The legion is no longer marching down the central road, allowing the player to access the right side of town.
- The farm owner has two new dialogues. The first is a dialogue where he gives you a reward for saving his son. The second is a short, repeatable dialogue.
- The farm owner's son has returned to the town and has a short, repeatable dialogue.
- The two tax officers each have a new dialogue. Both are short and repeatable.
- The merchant Nef and her Ox Agnes each have a few lines of dialogue. They have moved across the road and have set up shop on the right side.
- Interacting with the mage tower can trigger two different dialogues (one if you have Septimus in your party and a different one if you do not). Both are short and repeatable.

Putting pictures of all the new dialogues in this blogpost would be too much, since we have already seen all the characters before. So we'll just give you a single picture of a new dialogue: This is the farm owner's son, reunited with his father.

When the player interacts with a character, something should always happen, even if they have already seen all the dialogue of that character. That's why we like giving all characters these short, repeatable dialogues. We don't want a long repeatable dialogue, because then the player would potentially have to click through a long dialogue they have already seen.

Cutscene tweaking

While working on the dialogues for when the player returns to the town, we became aware of a small problem. It was possible for the player to return to town without having seen Septimus' cutscene (we talked about this cutscene the last two updates). Or they could return after having seen it, depending on what order the player decides to visit the areas in.

It was also possible for the player to leave the town without speaking to Septimus at all.

This was a problem for the narrative. We want the player to give the rune to septimus to study in the first town visit, and then we want the cutscene to explain what happens to Septimus and the Rune. Then, once the player returns to the town the second time, the mage tower can be empty. The player will understand why, because we saw Septimus leave in the cutscene. If the player hasn't seen the cutscene yet, it will be confusing.

To fix this, we did two things:

First, we prevent the player from leaving town the first time until they speak with Septimus.

If the player tries to leave without speaking to Septimus, instead of the normal leaving dialogue, we display this dialogue. Things like this will hopefully help players who are stuck to figure out what to do.

Second, we swapped the Decimus cutscene and the Septimus Cutscene. So now the Septimus cutscene happens earlier and is guaranteed to happen before we return to the town. This should be better for overall consistency for the reasons above and it's probably also better narratively: The Septimus scene becomes relevant soon, and the Decimus scene isn't relevant until a bit later in the game. So it probably makes sense to have the Septimus scene sooner rather than later.

Variables

While working on the above cutscenes, we also changed a few things behind the scenes. We used to have a number of booleans (true/false flags) to keep track of the player's progress in the farm owner's quest. So for example we had a HasAcceptedQuest flag that could be true or false. A second flag for HasSavedSon, and finally a HasReceivedReward.

This was a little cumbersome. For example if you interact with the farm owner, we can check if you have saved the son (HasSavedSon = true) but not yet received the reward (HasReceivedReward = false) Then we display the reward dialogue, give the player the reward and set the HasReceivedReward flag to true.

Now, we have replaced these booleans with a single variable for the progress on this quest. That way we no longer have to check multiple variables.

We did something similar with variables keeping track of which interactions the player has had with Septimus.

We also improved the way variables like this are displayed, to make it easier to work with.  

Apologies for the poor quality, this tends to happen when I screenshot small details from the unity editor

Doing this didn't take too much time and it can make a quite big difference if we have to work more with these kinds of variables in the future.

New area

Finally, the section we have all been waiting for: We start working on the new area, called the Northern Hills. Like we teased last time, it's a big area with several new characters and several fights, so will probably take multiple updates to get done. We will therefore share a bit more about the process.

When making a new area, the first thing we do is write down a list of features the area should contain. For the Northern Hills, our list looks like this:

- (Required) Kara introduction
- (Required) Alexia and Septimus introduction (fight)
- Sheep farm + two new characters
- At least 2 fights with the full party
    - Berry picker quest fight
    - Fight outside the farm
- Exit to the final boss section

Some of these are marked as required. That's because these encounters will add characters to the party, and we want the full party to be available for the rest of the area. So we want the player to experience these encounters early in the area.
That means we have to design the area in a way where the entrance is mostly linear. If the player can only go one way, we know they will encounter the required characters first. Once they have gotten the party members, we can design the rest of the area to be more open with multiple directions. 

With that in mind, we proceed to the next step: Making a sketch of the area.

This is what the sketch of the Northern Hills looks like in the drawing program we use. We like to draw it in a bright colour that is unlikely to appear in the final piece. That way the sketch is easy to see even once we start drawing on top of it. In this case we chose purple colour. 

The entrance to the area is on the bottom edge, marked with an arrow. The only way the player can go is north, where they will meet Kara. From there, we can move them in a cutscene to the east, where there's a larger area. They will see Alexia and Septimus fight here. After this, they have experienced both required encounters and can now move freely.

There's a few more considerations here. Any place where a fight takes place, we need a some room to place enemies. That way, the player will recognise that they're approaching a fight and can prepare. 

The sketch is just a rough draft and it's likely that things will change along the way. But it can be helpful to have some idea of the whole area before we go ahead and draw the details.

Which is what we will be focused on for the next devlog. Drawing all the little details and all the thoughts that go into that. The next update is on May 8th. Talk to you then!