Some more key features have been establish! Every week we get closer and closer to a very basic demo for us to test on. And this devlog will talk about one of the biggest features that had its baseline system developed.

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Throughout the game, you will be working with a Master. They will teach you new spells and skills, along with giving you some small quests to further your skills. We have implemented the base code for these masters.

As all of you are probably aware, the UI is no where near complete. Like we've said in the past, we build a terrible UI as we program the entirety of the backbone to make sure it works as needed. Right now this menu works perfectly. You can't access the menu if you're the wrong class, which means you'll need to go to your personal class master. Once you open the menu, it'll populate all of your spells and skills, that you can learn over the course of the game. The spells that aren't disabled in the picture (the level 1 spells) will be learnable, whereas the disabled spells (level 2-5) won't be learnable until you hit that level. Pretty basic RPG elements.

In the future, some spells and skills will be locked behind side quests, where you will need to complete that quest before you can learn the spell/skill. Not all spells and skills will require a quest, but a good bit of them.

The spells and skills will also not be this close in level. There will be gaps in level between when you can learn a new spell or skill.

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Chests now function MUCH better. Before, loot would almost always fill the chest, guaranteeing that you would get a good bit of crafting items, consumables, and equipment. This would make it to where players were stacked way too easily. We obviously don't want it to be impossible to get loot, but if you're getting 3 weapons, 2 accessories, 2 armor, and 10 potions per chest, you would be making out like a bandit before being even half way through the level. We significantly broke it down

We broke loot up into 3 tiers, and 9 rarities. The tiers aren't anything besides how common the loot is, with rarity being the actual rarity of the the loot you got. Craftables/mob drops are tier 1, consumables are tier 2, and gear is tier 3.

This lets us limit how much gear and consumables you can get, along with how rare those items are. We don't want to make common swords uncommon just to balance the game, as those swords should still be common. Same can be said with every other tier. However, we can't leave them all on the same level if they're common, as then good loot occurs way too often. The tiers help us guide how easy it is to find loot and how much you will receive through the game with each chest. Gear and consumables aren't too rare, so you won't struggle with finding it.

There was also an issue where you would more than likely get the same exact item in most chests, due to it being first in the data table array. We made it to now randomize the array every time, so it'll never be in the same order twice.

Below is an image of the original chest loot (it's not the exact same, as it would give a random number of items)

And below no is an example of the chest loot now

There's a massive change in how the loot populates and how much more balances it is.

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We added a spell into the game! Only after 10 dev logs, we are now adding another major feature into the game. Slowly we will be adding more spells, but for now we have a pretty basic spell to show off.

This is the light spell. It creates light. It'll be a spell that wizards can get early on to help with dark environments.

While this code may seem a little insignificant, it's actually a huge step forward. Before this post, we were hard programming each spell slot to do a premade spell that wasn't changeable. We spent a good bit of time figuring out how to make this work for any spell in the game, as each spell has its own toggles, and uses. The light spell will function severely differently than a buff spell, or an attack spell. Now we can program each spell how it needs and still make it a universal code. This is easy to port to the skills as well, as it's essentially just a duplication of some of the existing code.

Here in the next couple posts, we will be able to demonstrate a few spells and skills for you all.

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The entire spell and skill system has been refined and overhauled. It works just about perfect in every way, and we'll debug it as we continue to play test the game.

The menus have been getting refined as we start to move towards dedicating our tome to asset creation. With a lot of the major systems are getting to a state for a mass demo release, we're getting the menus refined for a demo to be sent out so we can focus on finishing the models and animations for the game.

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We've finished the code for the character creation menu and began work on the character save selection menu.

Currently both menus are being overhauled to fit our UI design standards, but they both serve their function in allowing players to have multiple character save slots. The multiple save slot system is still in the works, but is near completion. We'll make a post for when it's completed and in the game.