What's new in the development of Fates of Ort this week?
We designed and implemented all of the maps for the fungal biome, the High Kingdom of Hyphae. This is an isolated island, populated by... Well, you'll just have to find out for yourself!
We also designed and implemented the treetop biome. This is a set of structures high above the canopy of the deep forest. This area presented an interesting visual design challenge. We have a parallax layer of leaves, intended to convey a feeling of height. The problem was that we also had pillars that extended down. Where those pillars met the leaves, the effect was jarring and confusing. The solution we landed on was to extend the pillars beyond the edge of the map. This had the bonus impact of amplifying the illusion of height!
We added some key NPCs to the courthouse in the grasslands, including a couple of bickering lawyers and a judge. This is an important area for a main questline.
Finally, we worked on implementing some functions related to management of money in the game. Ort has three types of coins, each corresponding to one of the three Sisters and their respective element (Life, Mind, and Shadow). This means that there are cases where NPCs would like to only accept a specific type of coin, or a mixture of all three. We designed functions to handle all of these scenarios.
That's it for this week! We'd love to hear your feedback on our progress.
Wishlist Fates of Ort on Steam: Store.steampowered.com
Follow development live at: Twitch.tv
This looks like the kind of game I would play during hours in the long summer nights.😍
Only one thing: do you think it could be possible to make the character walk/run faster? Or would it break the gameplay?
Long summer night gaming - that's quite the compliment!
On the walk speed, there are two points:
1) There are items and spells in the game that affect the walk speed. I would expect the player to obtain equipment that speeds up walking, and temporary boosts could be achieved using spellcasting.
2) We are planning to run a closed beta, and probably a publicly available demo. We are looking forward to all kinds of feedback from that process, and this is certainly one of the aspects that could be tweaked in response.
Thanks for your comment!