Roadmap changes

Since the last dev log a few things have changed in my roadmap. And those are actually the major changes since the last update.

No Boss
Actually I wanted to use the Darefishes as boss the play has to fight against. But that turned out as pretty complicated and very time consuming. I also started loosing motivation and I often lost the focus. So I watched way to much YouTube videos instead of working on the game. 

Because that possible puts the whole jam in danger I decided to kick the boss. 

Improved Weapon System
The players weapon and the enemies now have a level. The player can only hurt an enemy if the weapon level is above the enemies level.  During the story the weapon will increase in the level so that more and more enemies become killable. 

Another thing I've implemented was that the weapon now has ammo. So that the player needs to reload. Never did that before but it was more easy than expected (actually it wasn't even on my roadmap. It was kind of nice-to-have).

SaveGame-System
That whole system also wasn't part of my roadmap. I thought about it but had the feeling that it would be really complex to implement. I actually thought about showing a timer and declare it as a "speed run game" (which of course was just an excuse for skipping this task). After I skipped the boss I thought: "maybe I get the time in the end to try and implement it". So I continued with creating more quests. May you guess it: testing new quests takes a lot of time - because I always have to create the whole game from start. And then one start to think: what will waste more time: implementing a not estimatable feature or playing the game again and again from start. 

I decided to go for the SaveGame-System. And guess what: I did in ONE DAY! Not even one day. Because I also was working at that day for my job. So I only had the hours before, during lunch and after end of work. I think I've spend about 6hours and it was straight forward. 

Fortunately it wasn't the first time I've implemented a save game system and thanks to some udemy courses I have a really good way how to do it. You may ask yourself now why I struggled so much with starting it. Well - it is one thing persisting your own components. But another if you have to save the state of StateMachines. Fortunately I switched from Bolt to NodeCanvas. The main difference is that in Bolt it is harder to tell which states are currently running while in NodeCanvas there "usually" is always just one or none. I remember that I wanted to go for Bolt with a similar approach like for NodeCanvas and it wasn't possible. But in the end it is of course also possible with Bolt. But afair in Both cases I'd to update my StateMachines a little so that they're savable. 

Other Changes
I've implemented a second enemy (Chop Chop) which was really easy because I could reuse the spider for it. The main difference is the model and some settings. The Chop Chop also made some bugs in the AI visible so that I was able to fix them. 

Besides that I also updated the QuestSystem. Enemies now are able to drop quest-items with a given drop rate. 

Well thats it for now :-)

Have a nice day