Lair of the Leviathan

[Rand]

[Rand]

[A Chinese opium den]

Looks great, hope theres a way to run or at least speed up how fast you walk in the overworld though.

[Rand]

Looks great, hope theres a way to run or at least speed up how fast you walk in the overworld though.

This isn't the overworld, just the town local map.
The overworld is on a much larger scale.
Kind of like how Ultima through Ultima V did it.

[Acrux]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/?em ... 5398302535

April Updates: Battle Begins!
In this month's news, we're *finally* working on combat. Also, some cool new town interiors.

Greetings, adventurers!

Time from another update from the Lair. After so much work on the editor tools, I'm excited to finally be working on combat itself. For all the exploration, conversation, quest giving and loot, our RPG is, at its heart, a game that will be defined by the battles. So, we need them to be engaging, tactical and most importantly they can't last for 20 minutes each!! ( Looking at you, 1980s epic Knights of Legend! )

With that in mind, I've been striving to make combat feel fast paced, despite it being turn based. Originally the plan was to have combat all be grid-based, but with monsters being of all different sizes, and with maps having obstacles of various shapes and sizes that can get in the way, I wanted a more flexible system. So, movement will still be technically on a grid, but each pathfinding tile size is only 8x8, so it will feel like your heroes can move basically wherever they need to in combat.

Monster turns I want to feel snappy. When monsters are moving, they'll move quickly ( as opposed to the kind of tedious lumbering movement in Baldur's Gate 3 where a mephit would fly across the map slowly and you'd have to watch ) and engage. Monster logic will be snappy, aggressive and hopefully feel challenging. I've assigned 'behaviors' to various monster types, so there will be 'defenders' , 'spellcasters', 'berserkers', and so on. Berserkers just target the closest enemy, skirmishers target those with the lowest HP and so on, healers look for teammates who are in trouble and try to cast healing spells etc.

So far none of this is in the game yet, but I do have basic turns working. Monsters have a list of powers similar to heroes ( Attack/Defend/Do Nothing/Defend ) etc, and we can assign special powers to them like "Dragon Breath" or a banshee's wail. Right now monsters just choose to 'do nothing'. Today in particular I'm working on movement options in combat , which is really tricky because I have to support both keyboard movement ( which will have a movement left bar that goes down the more you move ), or mouse based ( which will show a radius circle that shows you how far you can move. This is all so we can port the game to consoles down the road, which obviously don't use mouse.

I also have damage splats and initiative dice that appear working now, and a little combat log panel on the side so you can see what's going on.

Realistically I think combat will take a few more months to get working in basic capacity ( AOE effects, line of sight ranged attacks, getting free hits on enemies if they disengage) and so on, with improvements to come over the course of the rest of the game's development.

Meanwhile, David has been working with the editor tools to start designing a bunch of town interior buildings. Each day he creates a bunch of props ( from tables and rugs to armour stands and bubbling cauldrons ), and puts them to use in creating these rooms.

Every building with a door in the towns you visit will be enterable, with NPCs to talk to, quests to receive, loot to find. We now have 'thin walls' in game which are a nice contrast to the thick dungeon walls and allow us to have multiple rooms inside town buildings.

NPCs and lights have time of day parameters. Lanterns come on at sundown, a tavern might be empty in the early morning and packed at night, and so on. This also means we can create cool things like a ghostly green light that appears inside the old barn, but only between 1am and 3am.

We've currently got several hundred props in the game already, so the world will feel alive and interesting. David's also working on various tilesets from polished wooden walls to grimy stone dungeon walls.

Pathfinding has also been vastly improved, with heroes and NPCs able to navigate fairly cluttered scenes. This was surprisingly harder than I would have thought to achieve, I have a newfound respect for the old classics like Baldur's Gate 2. Even though your party would get stuck sometimes, it was still pretty impressive. Pathfinding is just a tricky thing that there isn't quite an out of the box solution for the way I'm trying to achieve it. Still, its working pretty well so far now.

Anyway, that's about it from us for this month. Next month we hope to have a pretty exciting announcement for everyone, some news we've been sitting on for a few weeks but will be a bit of a game changer for us.

Let us know of what you think of the game so far. Long road ahead but loving the journey.

Until next time, adventurers!

Cheers, Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios