Today marks the first real update on Castlemancy, and there's a lot that's been fixed and added as the project slowly grinds towards a functioning game.

Most of the bugfixes were a few minor (if hilarious) math errors. For example, the math for changing an items price is fairly simple, and essentially takes an item value and doubles it less a small amount according to the skill level:

ItemValue * (2f - (0.1f *Merchant)))

Clearly, this function should return a value at most twice an items base value (and in principle can even reduce a cost below actual value). The first version however had a (+) instead of a (-) which meant that as a characters Merchant skill increased, so did how much the character would spend on anything they bought. This has been fortunately fixed, and led to a hunt for any other math errors hiding in the code.  Similar errors such as failing to check if a character can afford an item, and whether a timer is approriately reset have thus far been resolved.

Now for major changes and added features:

Firstly both the Stealing and Perception skills have become useful. In the case of stealing, attempts can be made to rob a shop of its items, with an increasing chance based on skill level. Failure causes the party to be banned from the shop until the shop resets (another new feature on TileMaps). In future it should also be possible to steal items from enemies and roaming NPCs, though game space to do this hasn't been created yet. For perception, secret doors and traps have a new mesh sitting on the object with a material that remains transparent as long as a character in the party doesn't have a perception level high enough. As so easy and basic.

Several other additions include enough spells to round out the spell schools, though not all currently function as intended, and adding the primary class feature to the Chaplain class. An auto notes feature is also newly added, though it doesn't have much more than a UI and a few notes for testing. The major additions in this update is Alchemy and Turn-based Combat.

Alchemy works as it probably should: a new window is used to combine an ingredient and a glass bottle into a potion, and subsequent potions are mixed by combining simpler potions together. At present it works by mixing colors to get new colored potions, which have their own unique effects, though I don't think I much like how this works. Future updates may change this into something more unique, but for now the system works, and works well enough to leave it for now. 

Turn-based Combat

Turn-based combat was an initial concept for the game, and after a full rewrite on the previous turn-based movement, a full toggleable turn-based mode is up and running. It works by hooking into the recovery time each action adds to a character/enemy, and then on each turn the recovery timer is reduced by one tick. Thus if an attack normally adds a recovery time of say 60 ticks, 60 turns will pass before the character can act again. Of course if nobody can act the turn controller just passes turns (and thereby reducing ticks) until something can act. The system toggles at any time, thus if things in real time get too hairy one key press lets the game pause for breather. Currently there's a bug or two still floating around (some characters can attack well more than once in a row) but otherwise everything is in place. 

That's all for now.