What's the haps this week?

Progress has been pretty steady despite the close proximity of Christmas! Holiday events and gift prep has occupied some time, but I've made steady progress on Scrabdackle nonetheless. Got some updates below, and some gifs!

Scrying - A Wizard's Guide To Lore

The lore system - now called scrying - has progressed much further than last week's devlog! Previously, we had the book functionality completed and needed to tackle art, UI, and the spell implementation itself. I'd say we've jumped from 1/3 done to 2/3s done overall! Here's what's new.

Pictured: Taking the Scry spell from 'rough visual mockup' to 'in-game implementation'.

Scrying - the "lore spell"

First, the Scry spell is nearly completely implemented, sans some minor polish and a few fringe validation cases to cover. It's considered a "special" type ability, meaning that you can have it equipped at the same time as an attack spell, and is currently bound to right-click. If you can see a creature or object that has an associated lore entry, you can Scry on it to learn more about it! The wizard will then automatically jot it down in their notebook.

The Scry spell doesn't drain your magic meter, but does still require some thought! You need to keep the spell focused on them for its full duration - meaning if they jump out of the way, or you take a hit, or you lose sight of them around a corner, or if you switch to casting attack spells, the spell breaks and you'll have to start over. No big deal for gathering lore on a fountain or a sleeping boss, right? But it might be trickier to gather lore for enemies roaming the world, who don't particularly care about staying still!

The work involved here was actually a lot broader and more complex than simply implementing the Lore spell itself (which only took an evening or two). The player character's existing abilities were all built to trigger their behaviour once, upon being activated, whereas Scry (and future abilities) will also have ongoing effects the longer you keep the spell activated. The player code hasn't been touched in a long time, so I needed to cut out some early rough code and replace it with a system that's cleaner and can scale up as we add abilities.

This took a fair amount of work, but it's now set up so that building a new spell or ability will be really simple in the future - I just specify what effects happen when the spell activates, what effects happen each frame while the spell is active, and what happens when the spell keybind is released (or if the spell ends prematurely for any other reason). Meaning: It's really simple for me to do crazier stuff, like a flamethrower spell that slowly but steadily consumes magic, or a spell that magically picks up a glob of water from a source and can be flung in a direction that you drag and release to. Very glad to have that out of the way!

Art progress for the wizard's notebook

Notebook? Grimoire? "Lore book"? Journal? I'm still not sure how we're going to diagetically represent this, but I'm leaning towards a "beginner wizard's first notebook" type of flavour. This will mostly influence the non-lore stuff - the cover, table of contents, foreward, etc - but there'll be a few things included that will be relevant to the teachings of the wizard academy, so I want to lock this in pretty soon.

The initial implementation of "the book" was purely functionality-driven - take a master spreadsheet of lore, convert it into a dictionary in Godot without appropriate page breaks and entry grouping, then build a system that could load that data into page layouts and show it on screen. The next work from here involves taking those floating blocks of page content and making them appear to be 'within' a book.

Pictured: Evolution of the book's visual UI menu design. Still more polish and revising to do!

I've been drawing up a background of what an 'open book' would look like, and trying to get it at just the right angle so that the pages still look a little naturally curved without the perfectly-grid-bound content look out of place. It's coming along! This definitely feels more 'real' to flip through in-game.

The hardest part is still yet to come, though - making pages appear to flip. This is easy if I do it the somewhat 'cheaty' way, where the animations of page-flipping don't actually use the visual contents of the pages being flipped. I'd really, really like to handle it properly with shaders, though. It feels like a bit of a waste to go to all this effort of having clean, realistic page design for the menu and then to use a stock 'flip a page' animation with generic scribbles. Due to the effort involved in a shader, I'll probably try the easy implementation just to see how it looks. If it surprises me and actually looks good, great! If it doesn't - well, I can use the animation frames in the shader anyways.

Any other work? Last call for lore stuff!

The only remaining pieces past what I've talked about here is actually writing more entries, and then attaching them to objects and characters in-game. Most of the regular entries are done, but I'd like to take a little more time to figure out what the foreward and inside cover stuff will look like. I also have a small idea for a small collectible subsystem that I'm not sure if I'm going to scope in or not, yet. More later, maybe.

Oh, and we've got some cute little book UI for the menu sidebar now as well. Still need an animation for the UI icon 'turning into' the full-size menu, when you open it.

Press, publicity, and production priorities

Demo update release changes

I'm making a few calls on what order things are going to be released. The big one is that I'm pushing almost all Ducklands-related new content to the update after this next one. I did this for tighter prioritzation around the game's 'publishing' needs, as I'll get into.

The Scrabdackle demo is itself going to become a full-size game, and absolutely needs more content - just a little more variety in enemies, space to explore, etc will totally round out the demo-sized experience. However, the immediate goal of the demo is serving the Kickstarter campaign, targeted for around March. This means the demo has to be as systems-complete and polished as possible for not only the Kickstarter itself, but for roughly a month prior.

I'd like to contact as many streamers and content creators as possible, with this systems-ready demo available to them early enough that they can create videos in advance of the campaign launching. That means that I need all remaining systems, UI, visuals, and general experience polish done in the next two months. Unfortunately, Ducklands content is content - not systems - and I can't realistically prioritize it over making the game as Kickstarter-ready as possible. (I don't even have, y'know, proper support for multiple resolutions yet!) I'll still try and get Ducklands stuff in before the campaign launches, but only after a streaming-streamlined version is out.

To that end, the 06 update is not going to be all that spicy or exciting if you've played the last update, and I probably won't try and promote it as a 'big' release. It'll have critical components to flesh out the existing experience - honestly, I'm really excited about having a way to share more information about the world - but collection of secrets, enemy challenges, rooms, etc will be unchanged.

The public roadmap is, as always, up-to-date reflecting these changes.

The Scrabdackle press kit!

Lastly, I made a press kit! Not so much exciting - but it did take a lot of time. This doc is public-access, and holds a variety of copy (text/writing) that can be used by anyone making a video or writing an article to talk about the game, as well as a variety of assets that support the same ends.

It wasn't much fun to work on, but I'm still quite proud of how it turned out! We got gifs-aplenty in there :)

...and that's it! (for now)

I'm hoping to be quite busy and productive on the game over the holidays, since, y'know, not exactly going to spend time with the family this year, which should mean I get through a ton of remaining tasks fairly quickly. I'll keep updating live progress on the Discord server as always, and hopefully you'll take a look if you haven't yet and find yourself with a little extra time to kill! I've also started to dabble in doing devstreams, where we've done some music, some coding, some spell design, and some art on stream so far. Happy holidays, whatever you're celebrating (maybe just surviving 2020) and see you next year!

Discord link in the image! Have a click, we'd love to have you :)