Frayed Knights - GUI Kablooey
The indie RPG of comedy and fantasy, Frayed Knights, continues development - here's the story!

GUI Re-Glued
A major overhaul of the UI is in progress. The former UI was something only its programmer could love. The new UI isn't done yet, but it looks at least ten times better. Here's a spell being cast in combat. The character portraits haven't been re-done yet, and the buttons on the scroll are just stand-ins for now.

I can't tell you how many iterations we went on the interface. We came up with ideas, metaphors, slick systems, and then discarded them. Besides the obvious cosmetic differences, the button panel and entire combat interface has been massively overhauled. The new system doesn't rely on nearly as many pop-up windows or as many mouse-clicks, which is a Really Big Deal. Really. Even as a programmer who has the UI sense of a medieval torturer could tell it was Bad Design, but I wasn't sure how to fix it.

What we've got now is a cool little pendant-looking thing that now acts as the button panel. It operates in two modes - combat and non-combat (yeah, I know, "Gee, whiz!"). The sections highlight when the mouse passes over them in a really slick low-tech awesomeness, and the icons on the right-hand side change in combat mode. I'm kinda proud of it because it is very non-Torque feeling.

Earlier, whenever you attacked or cast a spell, you then had a pop-up to determine what your target was. This, on the whole, sucked. Especially since you usually keep whittling away at the same enemy until he drops. Now an enemy target is always selected by default in combat, which you can change with the pendant. In the case of spells targeting friendlies, a default friendly target appears in the spell menu, which you can change.

While the switch-over isn't complete yet, it has already made things run much nicer. Not to mention look a ton more polished. The character displays are also in the process of being overhauled, but I'm not done with that yet. It should look a little bit like the mock-up James did down below (though I have since switched some of the icons around in the non-combat pendant). And I still have to finish up the combat interface. It's still not quite to the full level of functionality of the older version - I think I'm about two hours of development away from that.

One Week Until Alpha
SHEESH! We're gonna be handling the first wave of alpha testing uh... like... next week. In only days. I'm scared. Hold me.

We just got a rough draft of the "Frayed Knights Theme" music this week from Mike "I Am Ominous" Nielsen, which will be iterated on over the weekend. The rest of the pilot chapter will use stock music, and I expect to have plenty of stock music in the full release.

There are a couple of secondary systems that just aren't there yet. And may not be by the beginning of alpha. Like... uh... saving and loading the game. D'oh. Yeah, it's a suck. But right now we're surrounded by odds & ends that we're trying to get fixed up and cleaned up before real testing starts and we get 5,000 bug reports about the same dang broken features. Each.

As I've mentioned before, we're staggering alpha into groups. So even if you are in alpha, you may not be brought on until the end of alpha. Or the middle. This helps keep people from getting burned out on the first version and never playing the later ones.

The game really is a game now - albeit one that has a very rough ending and some severe balance problems. I haven't had time to give it a full play-through in a couple of weeks - I guess that'll be fun for me during the alpha, too. Maybe next week that's the format the update will take... my playthrough. Complete with bugs.

During alpha we're going to be frantically improving and fixing things, changing the Frayed Knights website a lot, putting together a questionnaire / survey for players, and so forth. I expect the game will change a LOT between each iteration (which should be weekly).

Don't forget to sign up for the alpha if you are interested. You'll get to play before everyone else - albeit a possibly buggy, broken version!

Looking Forward
The beginning of alpha is a huge deal. The release of the pilot chapter in less than six weeks is an even bigger one. Our focus is almost exclusive on this release - but we're starting to look ahead to the rest of the game.

In a way, the full release will be "Frayed Knights 2," but we're not thinking of it that way. I'm pretty much gonna keep right on rolling in April, May, and beyond. I've already invested some time and money into what's coming next, and we've discussed ideas as a team to cement the rest of the game. The story is set, the upcoming quests have at least a general outline, and we've even begun putting together assets. I PRAY that they'll be faster /easier to put together than the Temple of Pokmor Xang, as there won't be so much necessary on the coding / engine / system side to do.

While the pilot chapter is largely self-contained, there are going to be some hints here and there as to the larger mystery and storyline going on. Although one of my fears is that the players will figure out the whole story, the upcoming plot twist, and everything else right off the bat in just the pilot episode. Then I guess I would have telegraphed things too well.

Naturally, some of what we have planned will be changed. Your feedback is going to be key. It's hard to imagine, but I expect in four months I'll be looking back on this time and chuckling at how naive I was, and how much easier things were. But I really look forward to hearing what you have to say about the pilot!


(Vaguely) related drivel:
* Frayed Knights: Pilot Prep
* Frayed Knights: Prologue and High Concept
* Cartographic Incompetence and Dirk's Interview

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Labels: Frayed Knights, Roleplaying Games

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