It's almost Christmas, the second one that Tales of Yore has experienced and development continues at a much better pace. I had a bit of a break due to day job commitments but this last few weeks I've been back in the saddle working away. Here's whats been happening. If you haven't already:

Play Tales of Yore

(and support if you want)

He's a Legend!

Tales is a game of collecting things, lots of things, it's aimed at pleasing the completionists out there. We have epic items that cost a lot of gold and rare items that require luck and killing a lot of bosses. However, for the hardcore completionists that have arrived in the game this wasn't enough! Enter legendary items!

Above you can see some rare items, and the associated legendaries - including the infamous carrot fish (so named after some special members of the community). I did learn something while adding these items though, you can go too far making things hard to get. The original ask for legendary items were things that were "really hard to get" or "a proper challenge" - so I added them, you had a 1/1000 chance of finding one, at a certain hour of the game day and only if you'd already found a certain number other items. 

Net result = no one found any legendaries. 

So as fun as the idea of making it "really hard" is, if no one ever actually finds a legendary then is there any point them being in game? Subsequently I've made them considerably easier, if still a significant challenge. 

It's all about the stores

The game has never been about making money, but I do dream of a day that I could do Tales as my day job instead of getting distracted by having to pay my way in the world. Initially I was asked to create a Patreon to support the game, which has it perks. Of course because you could get the perks on Patreon, people wanted to pre-pay - so we have Paypal support, then people wanted them on Steam - so that went in. 

And since you can buy the support packs on Steam, people wanted them on mobile. So this month I finally got round to adding in-app purchase (IAP) support for Android and iOS - allowing purchase of the above packs and the cosmetics that are released monthly. I figure two more possible ways to support the game can't be bad.

I did find out something really interesting though. For those who don't know Apple require developers to pay a yearly subscription to the developer part of the App Store to distribute content through it (along with taking a cut of any purchase). They say this is to support the infrastructure and the review process that keeps the quality of apps on the store high. To get my new IAP published I had to release a new version and have it reviewed, which is quite often a daunting process.

Well I made a mistake, I pushed a version that still had the game set up to contact my local dev server, so the game wouldn't ever start outside of my home network. Apple however approved my new app version and all the in-app purchase items and released it into the public. Good review process that!

Say what now?

Translation has become a 'thing'. I'm quite surprised how well this has worked out to be honest. Tales now supports 10 languages, all done with automated translation APIs (Google or DeepL depending on the language)

What's really surprising to me is how well this has been received. Automatic translations get a bad rap, understandably, but the appreciation for even trying to support the game in other languages has been extremely vocal. Yes theres been a bit of pushing on certain bits of translation but all in all a very positive outcome. 

As always in Tales everything is automated as much as I can make it, so adding a new language costs me about $20 and can be implemented in about 20 minutes. I'm not sure which language to go for next but at least its now very very easy.

Taking an Ad out

This is a first for me - using advertising. I've never felt like I wanted to go this route before but since I've come back to game development after 10 years and found quite how swamped the world is with games now, I've had to accept that adverts have their place. In my case I've tried Twitter and Reddit for advertising. 

Observations so far:

1. Yes, advertising works, it certainly draws people in and the game is showing that it does get people hooked
2. Reddit Advertising - cheaper cost per click but less likely to find people who will stick around.
3. Twitter Advertising - more expensive cost per click, but targeting seems better

Bags and Bags

Here's a great example of something thats huge but tiny - Bags! Players have had infinite inventory since the inception of the game, this is great, no one has to throw stuff away simply because they don't have room. This is also bad for organisation, you can end up with pages and pages of junk that you can't (as a completionist) bring yourself to destroy. This month I implemented bags.

The bag implementation is really simple, each item can simply have a parent. The inventory is still one massive list but the UI displays bags for anything with a parent. It turns out theres a fair bit to think about with bags in banks, bags in trade, bags in the challenge dungeon and a slew of other use cases. However, for the massive difference its made, for a smallish amount of work, I wish I'd done this ages ago!

Northlands

The Northlands update continues onwards, I mostly in mapping phase at the moment. What I have started doing is trying to document and formalise my process of mapping a bit so I can use it consistently as the game continues. Right now it seems to follow roughly this process:

1. Zoning - creating zones for the shape of the land mass or dungeon/cavern that I'm creating
2. Base Layer - add floor/reflective for each zone so they all tie up into the right shape
3. Topology - add edging and cliffs to give the map vertical characteristics, this is also where I seem to do the transitioning of tiles.
4. Detailing - add plants, flowers, pools, decals and the like to break up the topology
5. Features / Buildings - add the settlements and relics into the world to give me something to wrap NPCs and quests around

After the mapping comes the NPCs, monsters, quests, items etc - but the big time consuming work is done by then.

Keeping it Short

Finally this month I've decided to give creating a video log of my work a go. I'm calling them "Dev Mini Clips" and I'm trying to do roughly one a day. They're generally a little over a minute long and show what I'm working on that day. I'm trying to see them as a bit of mini-scrum when I don't have a team other than the good folks who bother to respond in comments (thank you!)

You can check out the mini clips over on  the Coke and Code You Tube channel, of here's the latest one embedded for viewing ease!

Thanks for reading, if theres anything you want to know more about or I haven't mentioned please let me know in the comments.

And thats a wrap... (that was a Christmas pun, apologies)