Frayed Knights - When One Door Closes...
For once, I'm going to try to be... well, less verbose in this week's design diary for Frayed Knights, the comedy-based indie RPG.

The big task this week was to get the dungeon re-entrant, and to get save games and load games working. That's right, we're in alpha, and saves and loads aren't working. I was actually considering leaving them out for the pilot (after all, it's relatively short), but the cry of horror from my alpha testers convinced me of the error of my ways.

I spent a lot of time fixing other bugs, and making sure things like armor penalties on spellcasting actually worked. But the re-entrant dungeon had me stymied for a while. What I didn't realize is that Torque is very good about cleaning up after itself between maps. Really good. So good that it will erase all of your in-game data objects for you unless you come up with a special way to prevent it from being destroyed. Woops! So things like inventory, state flags, loot lists, and the like were being completely erased when you left the dungeon. If you went to the village and then came back, almost everything was restored to its original values - you'd have to start over again.

The cool flip side of this exercise is that its also helping me track everything that needs to be stored in the saved game. I'd tried to keep some of that data separated out in the past, even creating some incomplete data-saving functions for things like the game state flags that track events in the game. So I hadn't been completely neglecting this area.

Unfortunately, just as progress was being made and the problem looked *barely* solvable by Friday (which I've set up as "alpha day" for the testing group), the ol' Day Job came through with a mandate for massive overtime this week... twelve hours a day, Saturday included. It's on a short time-frame, fortunately, but to say it impacted my Frayed Knights development schedule is an understatement.

With luck, I may be able to get Alpha 3 out (for those involved in alpha testing, especially those still waiting to get involved) on Wednesday or Thursday, and then Alpha 4 may go out on Monday or Tuesday of the following week. That will probably be the final alpha.

Due to requirements of the competition I'm participating in, the release date for the Frayed Knights Pilot is still going to be April 1st (if not the day before). It may still be a little "beta" (or a lot "beta"), but that's kind of the point. I have been getting a ton of great feedback from testers so far, and this has really helped me figure out some overall changes that may need to be made to the full release. The engine is getting made more solid every day, so hopefully the April release won't be too horrible.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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