Goals for August.
Let's see, the last two months I've tried & utterly failed to narrow my focus to one or two items. So this month I am going to simply embrace my shiny object proclivities, & work on whatever I feel like on any given day for this month, because I still have too many items that require my attention, that need to be brought up to a certain level before I go back to working on just field maps.
Ergo, I'll just list off all of the things I am trying to improve, & I'll simply measure my progress based on where these areas where at the start of the month, compared to where they are at the months end. & then hopefully be working from a smaller list next month.
1) Complete the mechanical components of my revised character creation suite, & then run it through for bug testing. Right now I am at about 50% complete mechanically speaking, & have placeholder text boxes for the dialogue components. Largely because I can't decide if I want more detached neutral voyeur kind of narrator, think Ron Perlman epilogues in the fallout series; or a more interacted with comedic narrator like what you see in the death scenes of Styx Shards of Darkness.
Because I want my narrator to set up the prologue during the character creation suite, as well as provide commentary on the "bad ends" in place of the usual standard "Game Over" screen then back to title, & articulate the epilogue. However, I am not certain which "tone" I like better for my narrator. As I've been experimenting with both.
So I figure I'll complete all of the mechanical components now, & then set up the different dialogue versions later, as the mechanics will remain the same regardless, & then go with whichever one I like best.
2) Complete all of new variations of my player characters images, so that I fully test my character creation suite, & my appearance mechanics that I've set up. All told I need more than forty for each character.
3) Polish the contents of skill tab. I rebalanced the properties of all of my armors & weapons last month, due to my removing of the class system, & rebalancing the parameter growth curves. As well as making the choices of weapons & armors more impactful.
For example Heavy Armor increases the magic cost rate the most, along with negatively impacting TP regen (Stamina) the most, & provides the lowest increase to magical defenses; but also reduces the possibility of injury debuffs the most, & provides the highest physical defenses. While Light Armor has lower magic cost rate & TP regen (Stamina) penalty, but also a lower reduction in injury debuff probabilities; as well as a more balanced improvement to DEF & MDF than Heavy or Arcane armors, & a boost to Crit Evasion. While Arcane Armor has no TP Regen penalty, actually reduces the Magic cost rate, provides a small increase to magic evasion, & the highest increase to magic defense; but also provides no potential injury negation, & the lowest increases to physical defense.
Simply put, since all my characters can use any armor type, & their parameters evolve based on the armor they use among other things, I needed to make it so that there were readily recognizable benefits for using each armor type.
However, I still need to retune the TP rates for my physical & hybrid skills, to account for the new balance; & while I am at it rename my skills to something "pretty". As right now I simply gave them function based names, derived from what they actually do, rather than anything that tries to sound "cool".
4) Build the enchantment system to add weapon & armor customization mechanics, to increase player control over player "load out". Specifically creating all of the runes & glyphs to be applied to weapons & armors.
5) Once I create the various items for the enchantment system, finish up my random loot generation system, by populating the components that will provide runes & glyphs.
6) Once I create the various items for the enchantment system, finish up my shop inventory system, by setting up the inventory for my enchanters.
7) Finish up my lore "World Map", by assigning terrain features to the remaining territorial regions.
8) Rebalance my various enemies & troops, to account for the rebalancing I've done to my player characters. I had intended to get started on it last month, but I didn't make the changes to any of my enemy types, just cleared out the older versions, & set up new baseline templates. So I want to at least put a decent dent in that task this month.
9) Continue polishing the placeholder graphics. Mostly palette swaps for NPC Character & face assets, to increase the variety of NPCs; as well as palette swaps for battlers to provide greater visual variety for enemies.
10) Set up my party banter system, so that the players "hero" character can "chat" with party members; thereby providing a way for the characters to be fleshed out for the player, when they want to interact with them; without forcing them to listen to the character's every opinion on something when they don't.
Obviously I am not going to get anywhere near getting all of this done. But I do want to put as much of dent as I can in this items, so that I can work on field maps exclusively next month.
