Maps!

Welcome to the southern realm of the Kingdom of Shelah as depicted by Karl Dupere-Richer, who reworked many of the backgrounds for this game and illustrated this map of the playable overworld area.

Karl also took the difficult step of translating this map into pixels to be used for the in-game map as well.

As for me, I’ve been working on getting this map up and running in the game so that you can actually use it, which is now possible and looks much better than how it used to:

Hint Guides and Walkthroughs

In the past I had been asked to put together a walkthrough for Betrayed Alliance, which I had done a long time ago. But with this update I wanted to take an extra step and not only redo the walkthrough (as a number of things had changed), but also put together a hint guide for those who didn’t necessarily want the answer, but welcomed an additional nudge in the right direction.

So I put together this document which took quite a lot more time than I had imagined! It includes pictures for easier navigation, guided hints, and then straight-up answers. With the pictures (and a decent amount of white space) it ended up being about 40 pages long with 6,600 words. Not a bad little document! And am I very glad it is “done,” although I haven’t proofed it yet.

Odds and Ends

While the playtesting build for Book 1 has been out in the wild, I haven’t gotten a lot of unsolicited feedback, so I will need to be a bit more direct and actually ask people to help personally (crazy thought I know!). The good thing about that is that I’ve been doing small updates in the shadows anyway. A couple of updates are the battle system artwork, UI, and coding, and the Rotating Tower scene needing a visual update:

I needed to make the player character taller to start as the proportions always felt “off” to me. Because of this I also needed to redraw the other character’s battle sprites (minus the troll here!)

I had thought about using the same battle system artwork and animation I had used for Book 2, but I think this will end up working better for the type of battle system in Book 1 where the mechanics are not the same as they are in Book 2.

I also did some work on the Rotating Tower, mostly ornamental work to the borders, but also some color changes that I think make the mood fit a bit better:

So that’s about it for the what’s been going on lately. There’s a whole lot of boring small fixes and bugs that I had to fix, but they’re not so interesting to show all the time.

Working on the game has been a slow process, especially with the ongoing ordeal that has taken my time away since January, having to do with a flooding basement. But we are now finally nearing the end of that as I’ve gotten the floors recarpeted, walls are almost finished repainting, and it won’t be long before we can move the furniture and regain a bit of breathing space in our cramped home. But I won’t complain too much; things could be much worse than that! I still have some time to work on Betrayed Alliance and that gives me a bit of respite!