I’m halfway through October, which means I should be halfway done with building levels. The city and hive prefab sets need a lot more attention, and the forest isn’t completely done yet, either. I can probably get those into a state I’m happy with by the end of this week, which will leave the last week of this month for level-related tasks like figuring out which bosses and minibosses will appear in each level, specifying which enemies may appear where, and so on.

I’m not yet sure when and where narrative NPC design will fall. It’s not going to be a huge part of the game, but I want the opportunity for narrative NPCs to appear at the start, middle, and end of every level, in order to provide some context and lore. These characters may also provide feedback and insight into ongoing legacy events, which would mean this feature could be closely tied to the legacy system, which I’ll be tackling in December. That might end up being the most appropriate place for it.

I introduced the Wayfarer from the Win the Game series as a playable character late last week, which couldn’t be further from level design work, but it was something that had been a goal of mine for a while, and its absence was starting to become worrisome. I’d imagine the next few months will probably be full of these sorts of random “get it done before it’s too late” sort of tasks, for better or for worse. The updates from Tuesday’s dev stream to the cost of healing at inns and loot drops from stone chests are good examples of these sorts of things, too. They don’t fit cleanly into the “levels-items-legacy” path I’ve laid out for the last three months of 2016, but they’re important, and the sooner I get a first implementation done, the longer I’ll have to test and tune them.