Hi all! Last week, I told you how I started to work on 'The Big Book About Crafting', and how it required a number of internal changes for how crafting worked. Last week, I continued with the graphical part of it. That is, you can now actually see the book in your inventory, and read it. This is how that looks:
It took quite a few hours to get all ingredients and the result on the right position, and I'm not sure if I'm happy with it yet, but it's something at least.
Another thing I worked on is a request from two of my friends, who tested the game some time ago. According to them, making roads was way too expensive; roads are something which encourage creativity (players can build the roads wherever they want, and thus can create main roads, town squares, roads to other cities, etc.) and exploration (new players will follow them to see where they lead), and thus should be easy to contruct. However, in Olvand v9.3, you could only build them with light softstone, which (1) often takes a few minutes to find and (2) is too large to be transported in large amounts - only 6 pieces fit in a bag.
I fixed the first problem already in the current version by also allowing dark softstone to pave roads (roads look grey anyway), and in this version I'm loosening up things even further: with one piece of softstone, you can now pave 3 squares of road instead of 1. That required some changes to the building mechanic, and some new visual feedback to the user as well:
For both the book and roads, I've got the main functionality working as I write this, but there still are some corner cases I should handle. For example, the ingredients in the book have no tooltips yet (so you can see how they look, but not what they're called), and for the road it's still possible to build 2 squares of road, then cancel, and get your full piece of softstone back ;).
If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].
