Here's some of my latest tweets from twitter / facebook with a bit more explanation. I added a wandering enchanter today that will sell you temporary buffs. There should be over 20 buffs and it even includes shapechanging buffs. There are actually 22 now. Personally I think the enchanter is kind of cool and different than the rest of the vendors. My todo list for Din's Curse is down to 85 items. :) It would be nice to be back down to 85 items (this was before beta). Just as I thought this is foolish hitting the barrel next to the support beam and gas leak, I swear the entire dungeon collapsed on my head. What happened is that the barrel was full of explosive material and exploded. This made the gas leak explode also and destroyed the support beam. I think all 3 of these caused some cave-ins and those cave-ins started a chain reaction and soon the entire room was completely full of rocks (and I was very dead). Here's how random numbers screw with developers, I needed a town with a dungeon. This has a 50% chance of happening. I had to start 9 times to get one. This seems to happen a lot (of course I know it's just selective memory). I can get out of the game and change the percent to 100%, but that usually takes longer. Famous last words "This is going to be easy", right before the person needing a rescue triggered an ambush and attacked me. Even though I know this is possible, it still surprised me. I thought it was going to be easy because the npc was right next to the gate and all alone. Fixed a weird npc/monster duplication bug today that has been plaguing me for weeks. What was happening is that NPCs were getting added to the spawn system after being used in a quest. When this happened the spawn system thought that monster type was allowed to be added randomly when ever it wanted to. Apparently I like destroying things in games, I just can't help not destroying support beams and setting barrels on fire. What can I say? It's just fun. Fixed a lot of issues today, todo list is down to 19. Some of these are fairly big like a skills pass though. This was a few days before beta I believe. Weird bug of the day, I had to fix fires killing other nearby fires. I didn't notice until I tried to get cold spells to put out the fires. I didn't notice this because each fire would kill each other but the effect would stay around till its normal expire time. This worked fine until my cold spells wouldn't put out the fire because they were already "dead". While playtesting today Delilah set off a fire nova trap nearby while I was next to a bunch of barrels and doors, I had to flee the inferno. Technically the trap only set 1 door and a few barrels on fire, but the fire spread to the rest of the barrels and the door on the other side of me. So I was in a small room blazing with both exits on fire. Saw a zombie pull a level in the game today, triggered a trap door and he fell 2 floors down. :) This was one of the funniest things ever (to me at least). Zombies can pull levers, levers can be linked to traps, and yes there is a trap door type of trap. I added all of these in the game, but it never really occurred to me that this would happen. While testing a brand new character, the first monster I killed was a unique and he dropped a unique item. That's luck for you. This was the test character for the beta build. That's a sign, right? For some reason my todo list has gone from 0 to 87 things today (luckily most of it is very minor). This is right after the start of the beta. Tracking down unreproducible bugs is a huge pain. :( Off hand I forget what I was trying to track down, but this is always annoying. Bug hunting today, some easy to find and fix, some trying to be elusive. Added logging to Din's Curse today so that players can have a record of what happened in their game. This is going to be a really cool feature. It's already being used to tell really cool stories. Let this be a lesson to other game developers. Listen to your fans! Tracked down and fixed a bunch of multiplayer issues today. Multiplayer issues are a pain to track down. From a debugging standpoint you are only seeing half of the picture. To make it even worse you also have to take into account what the network, the OS, and even what other software like firewalls are doing. Doing some tax related stuff today. :( I really dread doing tax/administration type stuff. It's boring and way more complicated than it seems it needs to be. You know how some IRS instructions tells you the average time to finish that form? If I actually took the allotted time, I swear I would spend at least a couple months of the year filling out forms. Comments
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