Well its been two years coming, but I've had a bad month on Tales. What with getting distracted by another project, a hectic day job and being pretty ill I've had maybe 4 or 5 days of dev this month. I got a tiny bit done which I'll describe below. If you haven't already:

Play Tales of Yore

(and support on Patreon if you like)

Newbie Feature 1 - Notebook in Game

Tales is seen as a hard game to start. It's quite an unforgiving world in its own way - and to be honest thats ok, it's meant to be a challenge. However the assumptions I had about players being used to taking notes as they go turn out to be largely personal bias. Player's today don't expect to have a notepad and pencil to take notes while playing games. In Tales this is particularly problematic since the game revolves around you completing a series of quests to progress, at times this can become overwhelming! Enter the notebook!

The game already presented a quest log to remind you of the quests you'd undertaken, but now as an extra help the game records the last 50 interactions you've had with NPCs so you can recall the details of what they said. Did you need 5 or 10 eye balls? Did you have to find their uncle Charlie or the auntieLucy? The note book reveals all.

It was reasonably painless to implement and the feedback so far has been positive, though not nearly as positive as the other other newbie feature I added this month.

Newbie Feature 2 - Auto Mapping

One of the major loves and complaints about Yore so far is "its big"! I mean really big. It's already getting people lost and only half of the first of three continents is released. Again, I have assumed players would keep their own hand drawn maps (since thats what I do when I play RPGs) but it turns out not so much. With that in mind I added a third section to the quest log - the auto map!

There's been a map in game for a long time but it's a very high level overview of the world and is used for magical transportation, not really as a way of locating things. The auto map I've just added is the direct opposite - it's works at the zone level. Each zone is shown with the NPCs highlighted. The red arrow indicates the players position and you can drag and move the map around as much as you like. The dotted lines you see above are links from doors in zones to the insides of houses - again which have the NPCs highlighted. 

The aim was to find a balance between giving people enough of a record to not get lost but not giving away the whole game along the way. I think I found a happy medium and players have been extremely positive about it.

New Promotional Art 

This month also saw me spending some time working with a artist to create some new promotional art for the game. I'm in the process of creating compositions at the moment but I've added some examples below to give you a feel.

As you can see they're intentional cartoony and away from the pixel art for the hope of drawing more people into the world of Yore.

The Distraction Project - Unearthed

I also gave myself a week to build a little distraction project this month. Needed a stretch. I've always wanted to try my hand at a 2D Minecraft or Terraria thing so I went ahead and did that. I used the wonderful art from KenneyNL since I didn't see anyone else making a lot of use of it. The result after a week was a multiplayer web based 2D minelike named "Unearthed" 

After a warm reception from the community and Kenney himself, it was suggested to make the game open source. This ended up taking a bunch more time up than I'd expected but it has been a lot of fun along the way. You can play the game at unearthedgame.net and find source over on github.

And thats it this month, sorry its not more, it's been a rough one for me. Hoping July brings better days.