Had my regularly scheduled fortnightly evening with Simon, my friend and official BotLG playtester, explorer and rubber duck. Like me, Simon is a professional web developer and video game enthusiast, so it’s always good to get his opinion and have a second set of eyes look things over.
As usual, he left me with a pile of bugs to fix and visuals to tweak, which will keep me busy tomorrow. We also discussed combat balance, item design and the way the game is steadily becoming less idle and more roguelike over time, and that perhaps it’s time to just finally embrace that. I’m going to set the global action duration really small (perhaps 2 seconds) and see how that feels.
After a couple of hours dissecting the game, we ordered Chinese and watched a could of episodes of Inside No. 9, then agreed to meet up again next week, ahead of it usual every-other-week schedule. By then, I’ll be just about to head into my last week of development before returning to the world of full-time employment, so hopefully everything will be finished (mechanics-wise) and I’ll be focusing on adding content.
Simon has really been invaluable to this project; he’s played every major iteration, has found javascript bugs, recommended changes and pointed out issues and exploits; so I’m super-happy to have him listed on the colophon/credits page. Cheers, dude!
In other news, I felt like I wasn’t making too much progress this afternoon, so around 4pm I closed PHPStorm and booted up Monster Hunter World: Iceborne. Look, it counts as research, right? Since starting on the Iceborne campaign I’ve switched from my usual longsword and started to use the hunting horn; I’m now up to a hunt for Glavenus, and I feel like it’s starting to click. Obviously it’s great in groups when I can doot away playing songs and providing buffs as I hit the monster about the head, but it’s also really fun solo. I had thought it might be a bit lacking solo, to make up for it’s obvious group benefits, but it turns out the hunting horn is just all-around great.
I’ve got to add to musical instruments to BotLG. Murder-bard should definitely be an option…