development thread

[jack1974]

added salvaging to the crafting menu. It's a bit silly to be doing this from scratch after I had it done in Amber but sadly the two framework weren't compatible

[jack1974]

finished the tutorial and also tweaked a bit the words used to determine the items quality. Main reason is actually a bit funny: "Masterwork" was definitely too long to display it on many istances (like in inventory) so I needed to find shorter words!

The last thing left from this screen is the upgrade part, I need to tweak it since values are completely wrong. After that I can finally move on! (I never expected this part to take so long).

[Troyen]

I'm going to nitpick the categories here:

- Quality. While technically fine "these are quality ingredients", it's also the name of the category, and especially in games it's often used as a category label. I'm not sure if this'll cause confusion, or if people will be able to easily rank "Quality" compared to "Fine" or "Rare". I would suggest "Good" but I also don't know how to compare "Good" vs "Fine" ("Good" might be slightly better).
- Excellent. From your picture you seem to rate this between "Quality" and "Rare", when "Excellent" would imply it's at the top end of the scale - perhaps next to "Legendary".

However, the bigger issue is some games use rarity to indicate value (more rare = higher value), some games use quality to indicate value (masterwork, Fine, normal, junk, excellent, etc.), but you're kind of mixing the two. These are orthogonal concepts, it's difficult to think about them on the same scale. When I get an "Rare" item, how do I know it's more valuable than an "Excellent" item? Just because you find a rare pokemon doesn't mean it's going to have good stats.

The only label that's an exception to this is "Legendary" because it can fit with both scales, and players know from other games that Legendaries are usually the best there is.

[jack1974]

OK so let's see: Common, Uncommon, Fine and Legendary are OK
I am not sure which words could use in the middle. Hearthstone for example is not really clear either, you have "Epic" cards and "Legendary". I wouldn't necessarily assume Legendary is better than Epic, if I didn't knew already from the game.
I'd like to keep Rare since I used it already on all my other RPGs (SOTW, Cursed Lands, QoT) so previous players already know that Rare is just before Legendary. Or I could change it into "Epic" keeping same colors.
The main issue then is Quality/Excellent and which words to use instead... I need to check other games and see how they do it!

[Franka]

Maybe there are simply too many tiers?

[jack1974]

Yes I was thinking about that too. Each one gives more point to stats (so that a same level item between Common and Rare has a difference) but maybe I could cut at least one tier, maybe two. Need to do some experiments

[Troyen]

I think "Epic" is more common in video games these days than "Fine". It's the terminology used in everything from RPGs to lootboxes (Overwatch and Heroes have them). I've seen it in God of War and several other non-Blizzard games as well.

But that's in the US market. I don't know if the international market uses other terms. (Well, I know some JRPGs do, but they use their own custom system.)

And within the game you can use visual tricks to indicate something clearly better. To go back to your Hearthstone example, when you get a legendary item the voice announcer goes crazy and screams "LEGENDARY" and there's all kinds of visual explosions and stuff. That's much more dramatic than getting an Epic item. You don't need a voice announcer here, but you could perhaps style the border or something so that the best tiers are more visually appealing and stand out compared to the others. Kind of like how gold cards were all shiny and fancy in PSCD compared to bronze.

[jack1974]

Thanks for the feedback. Yes I could use something to highlight the higher tiers, though not sure about borders since the GUI is already very crowded (as you can see from the screenshots). But when the player gets the item, yes (since Legendary will probably require quests to be obtained).

[jack1974]

I’m almost done (finally! lol) with this screen. I removed one quality tier and also allow each datapad to craft unlimited amounts of that item blueprint (if you have enough resources of course). This way decrypting one gives more reward to the player. I think that even if this could be used to take advantage, since the item's level is determined when you decrypt it, there's also some strategy involved.
If it's a Rare/Epic item you can always upgrade it later, but even in this case requires resources. So in the end it should be more or less balanced
The tiers now are: Common, Uncommon, Quality, Rare, Epic, Legendary. Works much better

[jack1974]

today discovered that adding crafting to a RPG is a major pain in the ass
Jokes apart, I randomly stumbled while testing on an interesting side-effect: if you equip an item to a higher level than the character who is currently equipping it, you effectively make that item unusable!
Epic fail haha. So I disabled that possibility and added also some more tutorial texts.
Lol I wonder if this week I'll finally finish this part, I can't wait to be done with it!