Introduction

Hello to all of you long time fans of EDI, or maybe some of you newcomers. As Raymond may have mentioned previously he has had a new addition to the team and I would like to formally introduce myself. I am [twitter]Brian_Matthys[/twitter] and I will be handling regular journal updates for the foreseeable future.

Experience and Stats

A lot has happened in the time since our last update. First, we are working very hard to release our next major update since Raymond decided to redo a large part of the game. Up until this time we have been lacking 2 major things: Combat and dialogue.

A large part of our effort has been focused on those two things, with Raymond heading up the dialogue and quests, and with me working on combat. We have made great strides in both and we now have a functioning system that creates monsters based on the level of the player and awards exp based on the monster level.

This will require some balancing, but the structure of the system is sound. Of course with this new system, and the addition of the new stats that this system brings, things in the old UI were getting a little bit cluttered. We have decided to move all of Morning's stats to a dedicated Stats Panel and keep only the life and mana in the overall Character Dialog.

Of course with the addition of the Stats Panel, some wild new stats have appeared! We are now tracking Morning's level, her current experience, experience needed for next level, and how many skill points she currently has. There is even a nifty little bar that shows visual progress of how close she is to her next level.



Skills

Along with Morning's level ups, Raymond and I wanted the players to be able to "customize" their play style more than just adding random stats to Morning on each level up. Hence the need for skills. Along with the combat and leveling up, I was working on a screen and the architecture for the skills system. We now have the screen that shows the ranks of the skills along with their names, and when you click each skill another window pops up.

This window explains what each skill does and will have a button to allow the player to allocate points for that specific skill. Right now everything is placeholder(please excuse the lack of a button to allocate points; right now we are doing it just by clicking in that general region, button to come soon). The actual skills are placeholder, as are their descriptions. In the future Raymond and I will have to discuss what we actually want, but now that the system is built this will be fairly easy to change in the future.



Dialogue and Dialogue Editor

Raymond meanwhile has been hard at work on the dialogue for the game, and this required him to make a tool to speed up the process of creating dialogue for the game, especially for the future and quests etc. Enter the Dialogue Editor. He has made it so that we can create nodes and make links between them, simulating a conversation between the player and the NPCs. This will really show it's value later when converting all the old quests from the last version of Revel and especially when designing new quests.

Also Raymond has been sprucing up the way that dialogue and conversation works in general. We now have a dialogue system that is akin to Dragon Age. The NPC says a greeting and then the player is presented with choices to respond with. The dialogue also flows naturally as if it was appearing on the screen by someone typing.

Currently Working On

Right now I am working on making it so that enemies respond to players slashing at them with weapons. So far we have the correct functions for swinging the weapon and the small cooldown that it takes for allowing you to attack again. It also seems that it is properly dealing damage. Now we have to make sure all the values are correct and make it so the enemy dies and then trigger the experience from the system I was talking about earlier.

We are also doing a small refactor on the current way that we handle attacks and where they come from so that we can introduce animations for the attacks. We were thinking of doing something called Limited Animation, where instead of having the character model do a full on animation of swinging the sword/casting a spell etc.. that we would just draw an effect over the enemy to show that he has been attacked and maybe adding damage text.

As for Raymond, he is hard at work on getting locations back into the game and getting them up to par with art standards. He is also working on adding back the old quests that used to be in the game so that this actually feels like a game again.

Promises (Hopefully)

If you made it this far I want to thank you for sticking with us through all of this. We are sorry for the lack of updates, but as some of you long time fans may know, Raymond is more of a man of action and less of words. He prefers to finish his work and then showing it off. But I know ravenous hungry fans can't wait that long between updates, so I am going to make a promise to you guys, that I want to keep these updates regular. Hopefully every week. So until next week, see you later and hopefully you guys enjoy the insight into the development of another EDI game. Have a good weekend.