Morningstar Updates

It has been an extreamly productive week for Kent and I.

So far I have been generating the art assets for the prototype while Kent codes some of the base systems. This is still an experimental early prototype in pre-production and documentation phase.

Right now we are addressing the core tech risk at the heart of Morningstar and the difficult question of AI Pathfinding and task prioritization. That means we need characters who can navigate an environment, and the basic Wants & Needs with their hierarchy of priorities. 

I've also been assembling the visual systems and UI elements that will give the game its unique look and interface with these systems. 

None of this is set in stone yet, it's all up in the air and subject to change, but the assets generated now will both be used in the prototype which will be used when seeking our investment and some may end up in the final build. 

The clothing is both a gameplay element and a lore issue, so I've been putting a lot of time into it, using the visuals to flesh out the factions. Every faction has the same comparable sets of armor with equal values and some bonus/defect depending on the skill of the craftsman and the materials available to them.

This sets up balance concerns. You don't want to take your Worthless Tin Knife against Masterwork Iron Plate Armor, no matter what faction you belong to! 

We've also been looking at the health system, how damage is dealt and healed, and how this is communicated with the player. We have a unique UI that's still pretty rudimentary using some rough art, but it's being implemented. 

Finally I've been working on the World Map and the Local Maps. 

By far, the most complex task I'm tackling is the Local Map. 

The Local Map is where the majority of the game is played. You start here with your character freshly arrived on Morgana Fragment, forage for food, cloth yourself, and meet characters here. It is procedurally generated, so all terrain has to be modular. There are no hand made sets in this game, they're all generated from preset kits that are applied by an algorythm with a gigantic list of lore and logic based rules. 

The cliffs have been my first order of business before I start making trees and rocks and such. The cliffs break up the landscape the most, being impassible and solid until mined, so they are extreamly difficult to make and very important to get right, as they are ubiquitous and essential to gameplay. All other art and code relies on those cliffs, so that's a tech risk that had to be solved early. 

The Local Maps are limited in scale, and don't contain the full game. you may run out of game animals and need to travel off map, or migrate to avoid harsh weather -- or maybe just to explore and trade! 

That's when you go to the World Map, which allows you to see how much food you're carrying, how long it will last, who is with you, and what is nearby. 

This World Map is also procedural, and looks like an old school hand drawn map, with mountains, hills, forests, and rivers on display. You'll be able to get known information about towns and see merchants traveling between locations. You'll also see armies patrolling roads and bandits harassing caravans. 

This is where you get a sense of where you are in this vast open world, and decide where to go next. You can then use any tile you currently occupy to drop into a local map, be it a named location or a random empty tile. There you can hunt, gather, and take off again, or settle down at a camp to set up permanently.

It's going to be a very big game. And I'm hoping we have a good budget to live on. 

We need more patrons on Patreon and more donations via PayPal before March, as that's when we finally pitch to an investor and publisher. Before then I'm just, you know, trying to survive.

I did pick up a job under an NDA writing for a Tycoon game, but it won't cover the bills by any means. 

Still building a house and getting ready to print STAVE cards has been expensive this month, basically taking me to 0$. I've been working on a solution to our player card dilemma and reducing printing the actual cards to a reasonable cost, but selling that game to a publisher would certainly help.

If anyone knows a card game publisher, I'd love to talk to them.

in the meantime, thank you for your support and I'll have another update this next week!