Oh February, you're such a short month - so much to do and so little time. This month in the Tales of Yore office has been mostly focused on a single feature but I managed to squeeze in a few other bits of pieces. For whatever reason you're here, welcome - do drop a comment if you want to know anything. For now...

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Pets and Mounts

Pets and Mounts, Mounts and Pets, thats all I've thought about this month. This was meant to be a feature that I optimistically added to the week off my day job I took last month. It has, however, taken a really long time - like weeks of work - to polish off all the corner cases, make it something interesting and fun. 

Pets

The first step was to make it possible to summon animals. Easy enough, you just create a new actor in the world, make it a player and give it a brain to follow the player around. All seems fines - but wait, now everything that can happen to a player can happen to pet! Neat, but also ugh, have to test every scenario. 

• Can pets go inside dungeons? 
• Can they go inside houses? 
• What if I use an ability or cast a spell on my pet?

And then I realised, your pet doesn't want to just follow round after you. If I'm a powerful mage, I probably want to send my battle snail into the fight to draw the enemies while I cast fireballs into the fray. Right, need the ability to tell my pet to go places.

Wait though, do I want my pet always running off into battle and getting itself killed? Nope. Right, so I need to be able to set a pet disposition.

Ok, I've got control over my pet, but does my pet evolve? Does it get experience? Can it obtain levels. Sure why not.... some days later....

Right! Pets are working now, let's put them in game. What I hadn't expected - how attached players became to their pets immediately. When the first player got his pet cat killed in a battle the "Noooooooooooooo!" told me everything I needed to know. We need to protect these pets. 

Right, now you can summon and stable your pets at will. When you log out your pets need to be safe. 

Suffice it say, pets were not an easy add. And then...

Mounts

Pets were just the beginning. Mounts added yet more complexity. You can now summon a pet, mount it and ride around. Awesome. However, you now have a pet summoned but its part of you (because you're riding it). The pet is both summoned and not. It's both in the world and not. Urrrrgh!

I had cloned mounts, lost mounts, mounts that disappeared when you entered a house, mounts that wouldn't follow you off screen, mounts that dismounted automatically. What a wonderful gift that kept giving.

And then... 

• What about if you cast a spell (or use an ability or item) on yourself while you're mounted? 
• Does that work with mounts - should it? 

For what it's worth, it all seems to have settled down now and both pet and mounts are in common use (especially by treasure hunters who like being able to travel quickly). 

I'll add be adding a bunch more pets and mounts shortly, lets hope they don't break the world on the way!

Visible Weapons

Up to this point I'd avoided showing the weapons that a player was holding. Primarily this was because it meant adding a lot more art as I went along. A secondary concern was making them look good enough in all scenarios. However, like many things in Tales, players told me that seeing weapons would be cool. There are now "standard" visible weapons for items likes generic swords, axes, bows etc. There are also "special" visible weapons which look awesome!

Animated Cosmetics

Once I'd put in visible weapons I went to my friendly neighbourhood artist and asked for some new cosmetic weapons and items to try out in the cosmetics store. As a side note the cosmetic store has worked out pretty well, people seem willing to buy a few cosmetics to support the game rather than paying monthly or anything like that. Suits me fine! 

The artist's first question "can they be animated?". My reaction "no, but by the time you're done they can be". Enter animated cosmetics, you can now wear a hat with a glowing light or hold banner waving in the ever present wind. They've come out so nicely that I wish I'd done it ages ago. Watching player's customise their look is an absolute joy!

Refactoring and Bug Fixes Galore

One of things I don't often feel like I have time to do is "refactor". For anyone who doesn't know this is a term that means taking the base functions (factors) of something and (re)arranging them. Or in other words, refactoring is a process of taking the code, making it nicer to work with or reorganising it with the end goal being no changes to the user at all. Doesn't sound productive but its really good for the soul (and for the future supportability of the code). 

Another piece of maintenance I spent a fair bit of time on this month was bug fixing. There have been a stack of bugs around for a while and I think after this session I'm back to "Zero Bugs Found"! By which of course I mean there are bound to be other bugs in the code but theres nothing I know about to fix.

Boss Kill Jobs

The final late add was to the town jobs boards. These have proved to be super popular especially given some of the prizes you can get with job tokens look very cool. However up to this point I haven't added killing bosses as a job, it felt like a painful thing to ask a player to do for simply more job tokens. Turns out not - players immediately wanted bosses to be on the jobs board, so there it is. Worth remembering (talks to self) 'don't assume you know what they think'

A pretty quiet month by Tales standards but progress continues, really trying to get back to the content update but thats a subject for next time. If you have questions or comments please add them below. As always, thanks for reading!