Earning Rewards

This post isn't terribly porn related.  As an apology, here's a link to Project Nemesis, which is a fantastic, FREE, webcomic with plenty of porn.  Comic reaches greatness around about the fifth or sixth one, so give it a chance if the first few don't excite.

Much like everyone else, I've been playing Diablo 3 this week.  Not as much as I'd like, but that's how it goes sometimes.  And much like everyone else, there's a lot I don't like.  (There's a lot I like too, don't fret!).  I want to focus on one tiny aspect today: the Identify scroll.  There isn't one.  Normal magic items are automatically identified, and higher level ones are identified by simply right-clicking on them.  To me, this is unrewarding.  It's fast, but there's no thrill to obtaining magic items.

Now, contrast this to Torchlight.  In Torchlight, there are identify scrolls (just like in Diablo 2).  You have to carry a stack of them around, and if you want to identify a magic item you have to find & click on your scrolls, then find & click on the item.  But you can also learn the Identify spell, at which point the process boils down to right-clicking on the item.  In case you missed it, it's the exact same mechanic I just described with Diablo 3.  But in Torchlight it feels like a reward, while in Diablo 3, it feels tedious.

So why is that?

I'm going to hypothesize that it's because in one game I had to put up with crap for a bit, and then I 'earned', the right to bypass this system.  Do you remember how awesome it was when you rescued Deckard in Diablo 2?  It wasn't terribly hard, nor did it take terribly long, but man, it felt great once ya finally had him unlocked.  Felt like ya actually accomplished something.

Now, what if the game had instead started with Deckard already standing in town casting free 'identify all' spells?  I'm going to bet folks would bitch about what a pain in the ass it was to walk back to town to identify, instead of rejoicing in how much nicer it got once Dekcard handled all the busywork.

So, tying this back to my game, remember in the last post how I was saying I wanted players to have to earn the separate classes?  The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that's the right choice.  That said, next release I'll open up the classes for fun & for testing, cuz I think it needs to be checked.  And hey, it's been like 6+ months since my last release, figure I better throw a few nice bones out there.  hahaah.

Til Next Time
DirtyC101

May Update

Next Release: Summer-ish

I've already bemoaned plenty of times how I never seem to have time to work on the game.  I've also been having a lot of trouble waking up on time lately.  So as an attempt to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, I've changed my morning routine.  Now the first thing I do every morning is work on the game for 30 minutes.  It's something fun enough to get me out of bed, so I don't hit the snooze button for an hour.  Of course, by the time I wake up enough to think straight and get Adobe booted, it seems like my half hour is over.  But I've been doing this for a few weeks now, and I'm making (slow) progress.  All the double team animations are complete, and some of the later ones are pretty cool.  I'm going to hold off on the spoilers for now, but I think you're going to really like them.  =D

So with the double team animations complete, I'm trying to wrap up the last of Act 2.  There's still a bit to go.  The two boss fights are the biggest holdouts, but at the moment I'm working on... I'm not sure what you call it.  Detail?  Polish?  I'm working on an optional sex scene that triggers in one of the backgrounds.  So drawing the backgrounds, making the items, and then animating this particular event.  (Given this is a sex game, I reckon that's more like a mandatory scene.  hahaha).  Anyway, had a bit of a setback this week, as once the original items were drawn I realized I didn't like them & went in a different direction.  Still, progress is progressing.

And the last thing I want to touch on today is a question from a few posts back:

"As a final note, when the next version comes out, could you make it so that completing whatever content is there counts as 'completing' the game in terms of unlocking character/class combinations? I'm just itching for my boxing bunny~<3"

Now, this is something I had completely forgotten about.  Well, forgotten is the wrong word, I knew I wanted to implement this once the game was done.  But the idea of having it tested before the final release had never occurred to me.  And it really needs to be tested too, as I'm positive there's going to be some combination of race / class that gets stuck.  Maybe the bunnykin warrior isn't actually strong enough to open the necessary door, or the human wizard isn't smart enough to find the necessary magic MacGuffin.  So opening this up for testing is a great idea.  What I don't like is there's no way to put that cat back in the bag, so to speak.  I can turn it off again of course, but once you've played with it, I think having to unlock it again would come across as tedious, not fun.

I could set it up as an obvious code just for testing (something like "ThisCodeDoesn'tWorkLater").  Or I could release some full releases where the unusual combos were the only options available (IE:  In this month's release, you can only play as wizards).  But I'm not really digging either of those options.  So I'm seriously considering just making them all unlocked from the top.  I rather liked having them only available as unlockable rewards for beating the game though, so I'm a bit torn here.  I'll have to think about it some more.  It just so happens that I want to re-do the character select screen anyway, as it doesn't have a color selector built into it, so I'm going to be retouching this anyway.  Now might be a good time to turn it all on & be done with it.

Til next time
DirtyC101