Hey Exanimates,
We hoped to have a release ready now, and though we are very close, we moved the goal post a little for a couple of reasons. We also had some key team members who had to deal with some personal life stuff, which put our work a bit out of synch. With the new core role and AI functionality in place, our current goal was to use Derrin, the only intelligent NPC currently in the game, as a test case for these new systems. Our previous placeholder role system was really just used a platform for some quite rigid scripting, dialogue and commands, but now there would be multiple dynamic roles over which the character has agency, working closely with core emotional systems and expressing them, as well as driving conscious decisions on how to act despite of them. The new roles also support more complex behaviours and different activities. All this was ready for a more intelligent, communicative and self-sufficient Derrin. However, as we got into designing Derrin's new roles we soon realised that some of these specific roles would be redundant once we introduced the "Knight" NPC, which we plan to do very soon, and more NPCs later on. When considering a larger party things are a bit different, and it's important to note that unlike games where the player just gives orders to companions, most roles are supposed to be common and interchangeable. Potentially any NPC could be a party leader, or the party could be cooperating without an appointed leader, and no players need be involved. Thinking about how this would be set up led us into some new ideas for role features that better and more easily support group activities and interactions. So we had a little course correction, working on these new features and modelling Derrin's roles based on them, so that we can immediately test a more future proof and relevant version of things.
We also just made some big changes to combat AI and related AI features. These greatly improve tactics in group fights and support strategic behaviours. The AI is very dynamic and unpredictable, so it needs lots of testing and tuning which we've been doing to get a good baseline from which to observe feedback from players. It's very cool to see the AI smartly handle multiple opponents and generally being much more situationally aware. We've been making various other improvements as we noticed things during testing and we want to continue doing so once it's in players' hands, as all things AI and making NPCs feel smart and competent is a big focus at this time.
Finally, we've continued to update character assets and how they function, with yet more improvements or complete redesigns of items that didn't match our current quality standards and more brand new items. At this point there's really not much left to do in terms of clothing and armour, so for items we'll be shifting our efforts towards more weapons, more ornate variants of weapons and a complete overhaul of shields, which will become procedurally generated as weapons already are. We have been doing some other cool things with content and the content pipeline, but as they relate to the big upcoming story additions we can't really talk about them to avoid spoilers. We've also added some new elements to most existing late game areas and new ways to interact with the environment to support important and long awaited new features.
Changing how things work and modifying content is difficult because it essentially breaks the game and also the perfectly persistent saves that include everything down the exact position of every object and NPCs remembering every role interaction they've ever had with anyone they've met. This update is by far the most expansive overhaul of engine functionality and key assets, and it should be the last of its kind. We are trying to get everything to a place where we can add new features and content without constantly worrying about breaking many things and having long development down times. When it comes to key features the scope often exceeds even the 1.0 release, but we have to build things for the future if we want to avoid these situations repeating.
Best,
Bare Mettle