Development Update: July 22nd, 2024

Development Update

I’ve updated Carnation’s buy/sell stuff and am going to be working on getting the UI up to spec. I have also optimized some stuff in the C++ code so you can now directly load assets into C++ objects, which is another step on the road to fully moddable UI elements. Will that ever happen? Maybe! I really do want to encourage mod development but it’s a ton of extra work to do. Still, this will if nothing else slightly reduce loading times.

Oh and I have been considering changing the Harpy Tower Defense minigame in chapter 2 to Harpy Autochess. The purpose of the minigame is to both give the player something fun and cool to do besides beating the shit out of monsters (though that is fun), and to give you a better impression of the fact that the harpies actually do have an army.

One of the problems omnipresent in games is that the scope of things isn’t always clear, due to technical limitations. It’d be a lot of fun to put in 6000 harpy NPCs in a huge military camp but I think the call of “not doing that” is much stronger. Instead, you put in as many characters as you need in order to save on resources. So the player is always of the impression that the harpy army is 20 people over 3 game screens. It isn’t! There are thousands of them! Hence why TD/Autochess exists.

I’ll make a patron poll once Carnation is prototyped and ask the great mass of the patrons what they think. I’m sure everyone will be measured and reasonable.

What Could Have Been