Ramping Down

This is the complete set of upgrade items, which apply permanent stat boosts and account for about half of all the items in Gunmetal Arcadia.

Items are done. I wrapped that whole thing up with three hours to spare before December, when I officially can’t do any more work on items at all ever. Or something like that.

It’s unfortunate that so much of November was spent on the functional aspects of item development, because these last two days that I’ve spent making up names, descriptions, and icon art for all the items have been super fun. It’s a cheap way to embed lore that goes way back to one of my earliest posts on this blog, and I’ve enjoyed it despite the looming deadline. I’ve built in a few interesting hooks that I may choose to leverage for the legacy system as well.

There are a few critical tasks related to the legacy system that I’ll be tackling first. Although this system is working correctly in limited fashion, I’ll need a few more bits of framework to support all my goals. On death or at the end of a session, I’ll need a way to analyze various bits of data collected throughout the session and trigger legacy events when the appropriate conditions are met. I’ll also need some persistent serialized data for maintaining legacy rewards beyond the scope of a single session, as in the case of unlockable characters, who must always be available once unlocked. I’m also tentatively planning to assign end bosses based on persistent state changes, but it’s too soon to details exactly how this will work.

As I mentioned in Tuesday’s video, I’m going to start ramping down this blog and the video series pretty much now-ish. I have two months left to finish this game, and between Christmas activities in December, PAX South in January, and anything else that might crop up, I need all the work days I can get.

I’m not going to go completely radio silent; I’ll still post things on Twitter as they come up, and if I have the opportunity to produce any more videos or write any blogs, I’ll take it. But the weekly schedule has become costly to the point of feeling irresponsible to maintain.