Maegwyn

Friday, January 21, 2011

The Traveler Returns

The Traveler returns to Soluna City with new weapons (art & animation by Minar, specials designed by blues and coded by Vivi) - something in his shop for NSC, Star Captains, and Nova Gems.  If you are a Star Captain you may choose to go on an exclusive quest!  This quest will be available when The Traveler comes to town so if you upgrade to Star Captain in the interim, you will be able to access this quest when he comes back.

There is a new bossfight - Vivi designed and coded the AI.  I think it's genius!  Korin suggested a detail in this enemy's defeat animation that puts a pretty awesome finishing touch on this gem.  

The reward is sweeet - another work of brilliance brought to you by Minar-blues-Vivi!

I hope you like the quest - Korin is starting his grand plan of getting help more with quest building. He started by giving me a tutorial, using an existing quest as a sort of template (so you will recognize a lot of elements) and I used that to set up what I guess you'd call the 'bones' of the quest.  Things like how it decides which enemies you will fight, and when - choosing from a variety of things you might find if you don't find the thing you were looking for - basically how the quest is set up.  Then he took that and added it to The Traveler's menu choices - so that you can actually, y'know... access it...

I actually used real paper, colored pencils, and scissors to set one thing up.  Then I took photos of it and showed it to Korin so he could see exactly what I meant.  But it would be a spoiler if I were to explain exactly what. You'll just have to play the quest to find out... It was really fun to write and set up and I even got to do some coding without making too many mistakes!  I learned a lot from the little things.  

Korin also chose from your suggestions and we've given the first Verified Mecha its proper chassis and weapons names.  Thank you to everyone who participated - I don't have the list of names of everyone whose suggestion was chosen but I know astro999 came up with the part of the chassis name that shows which level it is. Congratulations and thank you!

And I know I had a lot more to say but I should probably take a break at some point here.  So thanks for playing, and have a great weekend! (I'll probably see you on the forums.)