LoSt this month

“How’s it look to you?” Bill said. He was handling the reins, sitting tall and handsome, nodding at voices when somebody called to him from the street. The word of who it was in the wagon got through town before Charley and Bill made a hundred yards. 

“Like something out of the Bible,” Charley said.

[…]

“What part of the Bible?” Bill said, when they were alone again. 

“Where God got angry,” Charley said.

   —Pete Dexter, Deadwood

Full speed ahead!

Last year saw some sporadic updates under the header of "LoSt this week". They weren't exactly the most ambitious posts on this blog, but still a way to document progress, at least. I figured I'd try a model of more reliable monthly updates this year. We'll see how reliable I manage to keep'em.

Back to the Meat

January saw some slow, steady development. Most notably, perhaps, I've reimplemented wounds in accordance with some old plans. I'm now testing with a flat counter à la hit points, although I call it "grit" rather than hp. The player will probably start with about 9-12 grit (a bit more than your average neighbor, owing to the natural determination and character that sets a wannabe frontier hero apart). Grit is marked out when an actor gets wounded. Currently, there are markers for bruises and grievous wounds. Wounds are semi-permanent, and typically only heal between missions, whilst Bruises regenerate every turn that is passed without taking any action or receiving any damage.

That's the gist of it, but I'm still ironing out the details and making related changes. The idea is to make bruises "inexpensive" (in that there is no food clock), so the player can freely gambit their grit in any local situation – if they feel confident on winning the fight. Wounds, on the other hand, will force the player to touch base every now and then, and some bounties and other story related content will certainly have time limits and thresholds; the world should not stand still if the player spends two weeks at the saloon to recover from a bear attack.

Expanding on the current implementation, I'll test using grit for status ailments and buffs in addition to wounds. For instance, being temporarily blinded or confused might occupy a grit marker. Likewise, positive modifiers from skills/props could tap your grit when active. I think this can work well as "payment" for certain skills, having decided early on that I don't want skills with cooldown periods, as that may encourage techniques like pillar dancing. Instead, each effect should be designed with built-in weaknesses. For example, the "fan gun" skill allows you to cock and fire in one turn, but at the cost of reduced accuracy. Another available effect is sprinting (move at double speed for some turns), and I hadn't been able to come up with a good penalty for that. Now I'm thinking grit may offer a solution. Let's say you accumulate "out of breath" markers the longer you sprint, meaning that you must spend turns to recover, or else come into the next encounter at a disadvantage. That should cap the amount of running around it's feasible to do, without nerfing it too much as a defensive strategy. I don't mind if running away is an effective "panic button" for many situations. Knowing RL players, each and one will die by the dozen, anyway; and it bears mentioning that I'm hoping to add non-lethal combat: in particular the option to surrender – so why not an option to run away? The villain should really just stand back and shout insults then, all the while depleting the player's reputation as a valiant hero.

UI Overhauls

Testing #12: «Wanted» poster in Arken Town
Note random truism in the bandit's generated name :)   

Changing the combat system has many ripples. For one thing, the tactical menu had to be rearranged. Working with visual interface design is something I find at once painful and strangely compelling (a bit like masturbating with a branding iron). There's a lot of relative coordinates to keep track of, especially if you take into account varying resolutions and font sizes, and more often than not I'll stumble over cryptic pieces of algebra in the existing code, that my previous self sucessfully used to put things where they belong on the screen, but which my present self is utterly unable to understand.

The new UI puts some info in a top panel. I've kept the right hand menu for inventory, actions and message log, but I was thinking it might be nice to add a "wide screen" mode as well. You'll notice the new interface has flashy menu buttons. I added these since LoSt now has basic mouse support. Yay. The icons in this screenshot are place holder art, by the way. They are more or less hand made, but some are direct ripoffs of Mayan glyphs that actually mean something completely different. So I may or may not keep the visual style, but I'll want the designs used to be original, in any case.

Fonts: Before…

While I was at it, I did some font work. Earlier versions used (and embedded) a few fonts with restrictive "freeware" licenses. I've been wanting to clean up that whole mess: reduce the amount of embedded fonts and make sure everything is open software. So I went font hunting, and found 1001 Fonts quite usable, especially as the site has the option to filter for only open source fonts. I also used Fontforge for the first time, making a very basic Frankenstein font by merging some glyphs into Linux Biolinum. I pulled the glyphs from various free sources, but was especially thrilled to discover Quivira, a font with pretty good Unicode support. In fact, that's where I got the glyph ♄ for lead, arguably the most important letter in the LoSt alphabet.

Fonts: After!

I also redid the logo, using Gimp to draw the letters with filled rectangles, that I then ran over with a bunch of filters. The new menu font IM Fell was just added for being pretty great and having probably the second most fantastic license I ever read (donated to the Oxford University by its creator upon his death in 1686). It may be too old fashioned for LoSt in the long run, but here and now it's quite functional.

Questin' fer Bounties

Since I need to test out the new wounds system, as well as the basic content for defeating the bandit scourge of Arken Town, I had to zoom back in on tactical aspects of the game, which has been refreshing after mostly doing macro-level world building stuff for the last period. I had completely "turned off" encounters (houses, animals, and even plants), but now switched them back on to get a trajectory back and forth to the bandit to slay him/her and bring back the head to the sheriff in Arken. If I do that (currently not trivial, but there's always the cheat options in the main menu :) it raises a little "karma flag" that I plan to use later, to influence reputation and skill advancement, whenever the player passes time between missions at one of the game world's resting hubs (eg. saloons, oases, hospices, cloisters).

I want you kids to get ahead

The infrastructure for implementing this basic kill/fetch quest, where the parameters are ultimately written in the human readable data files, can be used to track smaller achievements as well. There will probably be other "little karma flags" for conduct like giving to beggars, (not) shooting someone in the back, flaunting your pistol in church, and just generally pleasing/offending members of this or that faction/group in one way or the other. In the long run, I hope that the life time of more accomplished characters will span several years of game time, with slowly developing reputation, skill set, as well as global faction relations and story lines. If the game should come to that point, the "original bounty" I'm working on now will probably just be folded into a repertoire of random situations, that can be repeated, omitted and randomized over many replays.

So I'm walking a bit in the desert, getting killed some on the way, trying to imagine what the game will be like a few iterations down the road…

As always,
Minotauros

Gif of the month looks decent, but there's a lot of
graphical glitches too, as when simultaneously
scrolling the map and fading out dialogue bubbles!