Stay on Target

I'm working up a new gallery, so I thought I would share a couple of the latest screenshots from World of Antra, with another generation of textures after hammering them out on the forge of art.
Torque sure looks nice when you feed better assets into it!

The game systems are all in, off-paper and into reality. In theory, the "game"--whatever that ephemeral chimera is--is all snapped together, with enhancement slotting, charged items, and much more being in place now. That's not a promise it all works smoothly, mind you, but the pieces are all in. I'm aware of a couple of gaping issues, but for unknowns grindy grindy testing will show what works and what doesn't, because now comes the Data Time... all the systems assembled with such loving care (and buckets of skullsweat) have to be filled up with stuff to make them interesting to players.

I've been spending more and more time on quests for about five weeks now, learning to use the game platform to tell stories. I can report I'm up to 52 of them now, although most of them are pretty primitive, with fetch quests and patrol quests predominating.

Writing these first few has allowed me to figure out how to mark the map, apply and remove public quests, and experience the wonder that is trying to communicate an idea through mob dialog given one line of less than 130 characters to do it with.

And setting up the levels with custom glue needed to support each story has taken a bit of time, just to learn how--an apple quest needs apples, so apples need to be added so the player can find them, which means setting up triggers and data entry. It goes faster and faster, though, with a little practice, and each technique can be picked up and used again in the next story.

The problem of how to communicate what the player needs to do as quickly as possible through very limited channels has been a very interesting one to have to face and think about. This is probably where I can improve the most in my development work--putting on clean eyeballs and trying to look at it as though you knew nothing about the game is really really hard to do.

More advanced quests, stringing together primitive types, is where the action will be soon. I will say its more fun than any part of it so far, largely because every quest works out the problem of a different story, and so it's not like having to open up the inventory buffers for debugging again.

The best part? As the game systems are technically complete, testing becomes more like playing. Sure you have to stop and add some more data or give an NPC another dialog response, which makes it far from smooth right now, but it feels almost tangibly real.

I'm still sitting on my Torque shirt in its plastic wrap. Perhaps I'll wear it soon.