It's been a bit of a crazy month, I got totally distracted, then a week off where I got totally hyper focused (ADHD anyone?) and then two weeks away with work where I got next to nothing done. Here's another month's update on the journey that is Tales of Yore. If you have't already then:

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Sometimes focus is hard. I find quite often that disappearing away for a week on a different project or mini-idea helps me enjoy the main game development more. This is of course a double edged sword, sometimes these little side projects get way of hand and it's hard to resist when people are giving you great feedback. So it was with Go Dungeon Go

The multiplayer dungeon race game went down really well with testers and even got streamed on Twitch a couple of times. So much was the draw that I had spend another week on polishing and having fun with the players. It's even got its own domain name now. I'm definitely going to find time to get back to it but this month it zapped up a week of my Tales work time.

A Wee-Cough

Sometimes focus is easy. Especially when you take a week off your day job just to work on your personal project. That's right I did it, I experienced what full time dev must be like - I'd love to say it was terrible and I'm glad its not mine 100% of the time, but I'd be lying - it was FULLY AWESOME! I want it so bad now. 

The great thing was I got so much done in a week, here goes...

Money Talks

I'd started to get a bit worried that I was going to end up paying for the game to be run, rather than the players paying a small amount to keep it alive. At the same time I didn't (and don't) want to impose a payment on everyone. I like that everyone can play if they want. I asked the community and they pushed me towards adding more and improving cosmetics.

So now there are cosmetics for people and houses! Theres also more free cosmetics for subscribers along with purchasable cosmetics, so far so good. People like being able to support the game one time with a small payment and of course they actually get an immediate reward. It's a fun thing to add and I can see myself adding more and more over time.

Jobs for the Boys

First thing added in the week off was one from the list thats been there for months, Jobs! The idea here is that players want to have something constructive to do even when they're waiting for me to catch up on content. Many of the towns now have jobs boards which have randomised tasks generated so thats theres always something to do:

A took a bit of weird approach in that jobs don't get gold for completing tasks, you get job tokens. Tokens like we used to get from those terrible amusements at the sea side. You can even convert your tokens in to prizes (some of which are actually worth having!). Another oddity is that I've made them time based. What I didn't want to happen was players to take a job, throw it away and take another until they got the job they wanted. Sort of against the fun don't you think? Instead, when you take a task you have a fixed time to complete it, however you can't give it up, you have to either complete it or wait 15 minutes til its timed out.

Short James Gold

After the jobs went so well in the first day, next up was another task that had been there for while - Treasure Maps. Again this is an idea that fill time with generated tasks while there isn't brand new content to play. Treasure maps can be bought from various towns, you'll need a spade and a sextant to track the treasure down.

Creating random treasure maps was quite good fun and quite a challenge. The location of the buried treasure has to be somewhere close enough to be not boring but far enough away that it's an actual task. It has to be a location you can actually get to. Once the location is defined then the player has to find the general area using the sextant. Then once they get closer the player gets to hunt down the explicit location using the map as a guide - a few steps north, some paces west etc. Eventually with the spade you can start digging and with luck find the treasure!

Ride um Cowboy

Finally in the week off I managed to squeeze in the start of a much bigger feature. Mounts and Pets! I got ride around the world on my little horse and started working through all the complexities. How do you summon a pet? How do you send it home? How do you order it around? Can it come inside houses and dungeons? Oh the joy of development!

It's not done yet, especially working out how combat works or what the levelling of a pet looks like, but its already totally fun - charging around on my battle boar, or with my little dog trailing behind me! I've got to work out renaming and managing pets but I guess maybe a few weeks of evenings away.

And then...

Then reality kicked in. I ended up needing to fly from the UK (where I live) to Texas for 2 weeks on contract for the day job. With everything going so well it was a pretty painful dragging myself away but I guess this is the lot of spare time developer. I love my job but I'd really rather be building my game! :)

Anyway, enough for now, let me know in the comments if you want to know more anything about anything here or for that matter any other topic you think would be interesting.