It's been a bit over a week, so time for another update on progress.

After the last two subphases going at a fair pace with lots of tasks completed, everything has just screeched to what feels like a halt. Now we're into the gameplay section of Phase 1, and that's where the game needs to start telling a story and building its world.

What that means in practice is trying to get procedural levels working, but that's a tricky subject and although I've got a little progress, it's also raising some issues with the actual gameplay. In my anticipated design, the game was the player fighting and sneaking their way across a landscape  with wolves, competitors and the local wildlife hunting you. Each level would be part of a map of nodes that you can choose to navigate between along different routes. Basically a roguelike map.

In reality, it's starting to sound really boring.

If you have wide open levels to be hunted over, it would be very easy to just beeline for the destination, and given the size, it's likely the wolves would never see you. Increase their senses, and you'll never escape them. Increase the number of wolves and the place is swarming with them. Increase other enemies and the countryside starts feeling really busy.

My current thinking is to maintain a nodemap with several "worlds" that theme the levels in them. Each node can be a pre-built level, a dungeon, a trader, or something else. Each area ends with a boss you can either fight or evade. In normal roguelikes, sometimes you have a wave of enemies following that triggers an event if the line catches the player on the map. In this case, I think the wolves would be independently choosing which nodes to travel, as well as competitors, so you'd be able to see before selecting your next step how many of each are currently in that level. 

So, while I'm working out how to handle the actual gameplay, I'm working on starting the story and Pineridge. Pineridge is where play will start, and hopefully where the player gets to learn how to play before the game kicks off, as well as an opportunity to meet the wolves and select the type of game you want to play. Even that needed some changes to the existing game.

First step was a quest system. I'm calling it "quest" but it's more objectives. So I set up a trigger area in a blueprint to start it off, set up datatables for quests, then when you place it in a level, all you need to do is select which quest it triggers. The blueprint then fires off the onscreen notification and details of the quest and adds it to a current quest log in your inventory.

Next, the dialog system got new functionality added to let a dialog option either trigger a new quest or complete one. I also added a bit of functionality to let dialog update world variables. So, to make that sound a bit less crazy, what that does is:

1. Player enters Pineridge, starting "Welcome to Pineridge", with the objective of "Register for the event"
2. By talking to Chobb (placeholder name), he asks if you are registering or spectating.
3. Working through his dialog, you can get info on the event types before making a choice. You select an event.
4. Welcome to Pineridge quest ends, "Bed and Breakfast" quest starts, gametype updates to the event chosen.
5. Player goes to do Bed and Breakfast quest

For something that looks simple, it's surprisingly tricky. Anyway, that took a day.

Pineridge itself is a big town and the hub of the game, so it needs to be pretty, and be fun to explore. The big part is the problem for now. The starting quests don't need the player to go down to the lower town, so access to that area will be blocked off for the time being so I can concentrate on the mid and upper towns.

Just building Pineridge is a set of challenges.

I'd already built the landscape and blocked out some buildings, but that didn't work for collisions, so the landscape had to be broken into pieces. The worst problem was the river in the bottom of the valley. UE has a water system which automatically deforms landscape, but not if it's modelled externally. So the valley floor ha to go and rebuilt. The river went in easily enough, but the end of the valley was the next problem. The river should be a waterfall off a cliff into the lower valley. You can curve the water, but landscape deformation makes a real mess. It needed 2 rivers, with the second being the waterfall and with deformation turned off. But that left an obvious seam, and it was very easy for the player to fall off the cliff. A town would have some kind of wall to prevent falling, and it needs to look epic and hide the water seam.

This is Sloy dam. I recently went mountainbiking on a loop near it (spur of the moment thing. Had to drop off stuff a bit north, used the opportunity to go and empty waste tanks on my van at a disposal site, and this loop was 2 miles away, so good opportunity!), and the arch design sort of stuck in my head. So the retaining wall isn't a duplicate of it, but it's heavily inspired by it.

After that, the path up to the upper town got rebuilt and properly integrated into the terrain, and I've been working on a terrace area in midtown. All the new stuff has been imported to UE, so I've just got a bit more blocking out to do then start adding details to buildings.

Which leads to the final thing.

Usually I budget 3 weeks per subphase, and this is day 12 now. I've got just over a week to complete phase 1, but that's not going to happen. This first phase has to give some gameplay and replayability. It may not have polish yet, but it needs enough of the core functional and stable. Just those reasons are sufficient to explain a delay at this stage. However, there's a few other things in the way.

First off I've got some paid work with a tight deadline that could take up to a day. Secondly, I've got 2 commission pieces due by the end of the month. Again, up to a day apiece. Third, after searching for work since May, I've got my first interview next week, but I've not touched coding since I left my job, so I need to do some studying to get back up to speed and learn some of the required areas that the previous job thought were pointless so I can at least have a fighting chance at not fucking up the interview. As grateful as I am to Patreon supporters and everyone who purchased the game even at this early stage, it's simply not enough to live on, and my financial situation is at the point where I can avoid panic attacks by never looking at how bad my bank balance is. At the moment, I'm putting in 16 hour days, most days of the week on this game, and as much as I'd love for this to be my job and I have been treating it as such, the reality is that just being alive is really fucking expensive, and I can't maintain this much longer. 

I've been forging forwards to get Phase 1 out there and give people a taste of how the finished game will be to maintain interest, but being brutally honest, this is the point where rushing is probably not the best plan. I need to be methodical and give this game the identity and gameplay it needs rather than rushing in and trying to knock it out in a few weeks, and in this case, there's a lot of other stuff that can't be put off and is going to impact on the timeline. As it is, I've dropped the prologue part of this sprint, even though half the sets are already built, learning how to do cinematics is just a bit too much on top of the rest.

Long story short, progress is happening, but due to life stuff, importance of the current tasks and complexity, it will take longer. I hope it should only add a few more weeks onto it, but I will continue doing devlogs to keep things updated and try to nail down how long it'll take.

Thanks for your patience.