Salutations !

This week, I decided to tackle something I procrastinated for a while : a complete rework of the tutorial. Ever since someone suggested on Discord to show players how to change jobs (which, I agree, isn’t all that intuitive), I thought about how to convey some other information.

Now, after the prologue you’re approached by a Novice adventurer who asks for help. Agreeing starts the tutorial in the form of a quest called “To Earn a Mentor Crown” where I made the choice to hold the player’s hand quite a bit : every menu and mechanic is presented in a semi-RP way, pointed at by cursors and for the most part the player is very restricted in their actions.

This actually presented a few challenges because when I first coded the systems (while learning Ren’Py along the way), most of them were made to be freely interacted with. For example, opening the Teleport menu to travel to a previously unlocked location is one thing, but I had to make sure the player would either be able to teleport to the required location, or make that part of the tutorial loop until they were at the requested location. Now imagine the same thing for combat, gather or craft and it quickly gets complex !

In the end, that was a lot of work but I’m satisfied with how it turns out. Afterwards, I implemented some more of Estinien’s quest and even wrote a new optional quest, called “Dragonfright”, that takes place in Moghome. Now there’s only one remaining quest to write and that’ll be “Gloss ‘n Goblins” in Idyllshire. That’ll probably be for next week !