Welcome back to another edition of the Castlemancy Devlog!

Let's get out the gate with a fairly important note: This update is fairly small, at least compared to the previous updates to the project. This last week and into the next is the end of the quarter, which means I've been focusing on homework and now finals, and as such I've had to give much less attention to Castlemancy until this last push is over. In the meantime, there have been some minor changes that I wanted to highlight:

Fixes:

All three noteworthy fixes were UI related. The first was soomething I noticed where UI buttons failed to play a sound, even though they should have been hooked into a clip. I retargetted all buttons to a single audioSource, so now they play every time as was the original intention. The next fix solved an issue in which items could be grabbed out of a shop and dropped on the ground. This allowed a player to get those items without using the steal skill or paying for them. This has been changed so that while an item can be pulled out and dropped, it just gets added back into its original slot until its purchased or stolen. The last one was a minor change to chests and overworld items, now shift-clicking will add a gold pile directly to the Party's gold total just as normal clicking does. Previously it would add the gold pile as an inventory item to the active character.

The minor changes:

I've added some new sword, axe, and spellbook sprites. These are made the same way as the other recent new sprites, by taking a 3d model I made in blender, and then rendering it into an appropriate sized sprite. I like this method because it looks reasonably nice, and evokes the same methods that classic games used when rendering power was much more limited than it is today. In addition I've added the gold sound effect when picking up items, to give a little more feedback that something has changed when interacting with the game, and I've tried an experiment with item sprites on item infoBoxes. The sprites are not sized for the info boxes correctly, so some weirdly sit on top of text or go out of the box's bounds, but for now its just an idea I wanted to play around with. They may not remain in the future. The last serious change was motivated from a comment, and I've moved the camera one unit back from center on the player. This has changed the perspective slightly, and I think it looks much better as a result. Here for example is a portcullis comparison of the old camera position on the left, and the new one on the right:

I feel like this makes the game world feel less claustrophobic.

Now that Castlemancy has crossed the three month mark, I'm happy to say that the project is fast approaching the end of the first major phase of development. Until now almost everything I've worked on has been a new system or game feature, things such as movement, inventories, dialogue, quests, spells, shops, maps, how the game actually plays. Now most of what I want as far as a game system has been implemented, in at least a mostly finished state. Of course there are a few future features planned, in particular overworld NPC's and followers, but they are now few and in principle easy to implement. Now most of the game play requires two things: Polish, and Content. Soon, I'll be shifting focus onto the latter, as the game only consists of a handful of test monsters, 5 fairly basic single level tileMaps, and maybe a tenth the total items the game needs by the time it's finished. To that end I thought I may lay out an outline for what I have planned for the future:

-At minimum five  of each item type for equipment, so that each weapon and armor has a good spread for improvement

-At least 2 spells for each spell school for each spell level, at present there is only 2 for each at the base level

-At least 6 other are types, with corresponding doors/chests/textures and likely a 'town' in each. The dungeon of Castlemancy takes place within a single mad wizards tower, but the big bad is a crazy undead sorcerer and as such there will be both indoor and outdoor locations, all crammed together by some non-Euclidean means. There will be at least: A gemstone/Crystal Cavern region, filled with large crystal structure in the place of manmade features, a magical alchemy lab/library, probably filled with animated books, an outdoor snow capped mountain area, and one or two other ideas that I'm not married to.  So far I've been working on the ice wall/ snow are idea in the background, since I want to implement a nice snow fall particle effect. 

-About twice as many unique monsters as are implemented now. I'm planning to re-use the ones I have as larger, tougher, and probably re-colored versions so that I can stretch out a single monster's usefulness as an enemy type, but even then we're still missing a few I want. A dungeon crawler by its nature must have dungeons to crawl in, but empty dungeons containing only a few monsters and sparse loot a proper dungeon crawler does not make. Moreover, the other half of any phrase involving dungeons necessarily requires dragons, and at present Castlemancy has none. They will be making an appearance in the near future. The remaining monsters will similarly draw from the semi-horror theme the game currently has, though perhaps no more undead as there is already four separate kinds. 

In concept Castlemancy is meant to have a creepy/foreboding atmosphere, something that may have scared me as a child. As such, new monsters will be drawn from similarly off-putting and unsettling ideas as the Oblex monster is drawn from, though probably no more slime-like monsters either. I haven't decided. In any case, more monsters will be coming, and hopefully I will show them off soon.

That's all for now, thank you for reading! If you like what I'm doing, please leave a like and a comment, and consider donating to the project to help make this game a reality. The newest version has just been uploaded to it's page, so go download it and give it a try, and tell me what you think! Bye for now

-Foxx