(These are some of the A* spells you get in Final Fantasy. OR am I calling on a demon to possess you? HMMM.)
We are about ready to submit to the Windows store, but we ran into a little gotcha and so we’re going to submit after Christmas. What happened was that we failed certification – not a big deal, it was mostly over UTF-8 encoding issues. I thought they would look over it, but not really. Then when I fixed that and when I resubmitted, they wouldn’t look at it until Christmas anyways. But we achieved our goal! Hooray. I also set up knightoftime.com as a branding thing while we wait for the game to come up.
You’re probably wondering what’s next. I’ve talked at length about the release cycle, and I do have a release plan for the next month. Here’s what we will be adding in the next month. This plan is not final and might change at any time. Things with * are more quality of life changes for the developer.
- Tests*
- NPC Name Display
- Balancing and fixes
- Conversation system
- Elemental Affinities
- Alert for level ups
- Advanced Debug*
- Better looking cards
Today, I’ve started working on Tests and Branch switching. Tests is simply write tests against the code. It’s…going to be a lot of trouble, and I might have to wait to do this after I make some major infrastructure changes. The problem was that in the haste of getting this product out the door, I did not design the infrastructure of the engine very well, and as a result, it is difficult to test without mocking up a whole visual infrastructure.
So it might just be that new functionality need tests, but existing functionality won’t until the infrastructure changes.
NPC name display will display the NPC’s name in a system wide manner.
Balancing and fixing may not be there depending on what comes out of test plans.
Conversation system will allow you to question an NPC using a system similar to FF2.
Cards have certain elemental affinities meaning that using a Dark power card on an enemy with a light affinity, would do more damage.
Right now the game doesn’t tell you if you levelled up. I totally missed that one.
Advanced debug would basically give game developers (ie me) an easier way to test the game. Right now there’s a debug room but that won’t work as well once the game gets longer.
And better looking cards replace the crappy cards we have now with something a bit easier! Hooray!
One thing that might happen is that some of february’s items might end up being worked on January.