So I am continuing with the work on the wizards. Shopping tools are finished and work perfectly so far as can be told until it gets some more rigorous testing. I have started and finished a large portion of the NPC manager but there are some segments I got a bit stuck with. Ultimately it comes down to design. How much is too much, and how easily can I make management of other characters that are followers of your character, but not as fully developed. Some of it deals largely with character advancement, and the tools I need to build for it. As with all things that give me a bit of difficulty in this way I took a step back and decided to work on some of the other wizards I wanted to add the new controls to.
So I started with starting equipment. This was easy to do and came together within a few days. Then I worked on starting skills. This proved much more difficult, but also made the entire wizard much cleaner, clearer, and faster. Furthermore, some other tweaks were able to be added to better handle things like racial abilities and weapons so they behave more like they should and are better represented in the character sheet.
The skill wizard was a beast. It turned out to be more of a complete overhaul than just adding in the new controls. This overhaul was coming however. With some of the testers I was getting questions when using the wizard one would think should never be asked with something as simple as selecting starting skills. Some of it was due to clarity. Having certain bits of information labeled and represented in a way that made sense to me wasn’t good enough. After too many questions you have to take another look at it and wonder if perhaps you aren’t looking at it the right way. Sometimes a developer will put things together only in such a way that they make perfect sense to the development team, but if too many users have questions than they have failed. The trick is, how do I make this work so I can use the data easily, but also represent it to the end user in a way that makes sense to them. So I did that in this build and I think it has addressed every quirk, questions, and concern I have heard so far from players. Furthermore, the data remains as it should so I don’t have to rewrite or work around code that was developed after the initial creation of the wizard.
In short, I retained the engine and parts that keep it running good, made some work better, but gave it a new dash board so people can understand what is going on better.
One of the major improvements is the way racial skills, weapons, and abilities are handled. They are given their own dedicated menu list and the skills showing in that list aren’t in the other lists. Breaking things down to standard skills, knowledge skills (which includes magic skills) and racial skills can more easily help players navigate around to the skills they need to worry about. This also retains the focus and clears up any confusions that came about when racial skills were added to standard and knowledge skill lists. It also improves the skill selection for characters that are more like creatures. So if your character only relies, or primarily relies, on their natural abilities these can be easily enhanced without having to sift through other menus.
Also improved is how the skill points being used is calculated and represented. Now, you have a clearly define list of points for knowledge skills. When these are used up the wizard starts taking points from standard skills. Furthermore, skill points that are remaining and can be used for spells are clearly labeled so you know exactly how many skill points will remain after you purchase your skill.
With this finally in the can I have a choice between finishing the NPC wizard or moving on to Attributes Wizard. The latter needs to be done to improve speed and appearance. Right now, the attributes wizard is the longest to load and has weird appearance glitches like flickering. I have some good plans for this that should make everything look and run smoother and organize the information more clearly. Either way, an end drawers nearer with these two systems out of the way which is pretty exciting. However, both wizards are going to be difficult and time consuming it seems. So, I guess I should just get back into it, either way.
Until next time,
Happy Gaming!
