#milestone 5

[you-keep-those]

♥️ Dear Follower ♥️

Holy shit. I thought I’d hit 300 by now and checked but nope there are actually over 400 of you. Greetings newcomers! I feel like I’m the head of a battalion. The Destiel Army. Yep, I can see it. Thank you and the other 400+ people reading this right now as well. Thanks so many.

⚔️

Yours Truly, Eden

[gam3engine]

Patch 5.6: Hermes

Side Menu Adjustments "Places" has replaced Zones and Locale, and throughout the system, zone has had its icon changed. Map is now the map. Since the view for locale and zone are the same now, it didn't make much sense and I had to put the maps somewhere. :}

Removed the "characters" menu option. As incredible as I think they'll be, they're very far off.

The playtest button has become more like categories, this shouldn't be too confusing and it certainly fits better! We also have a better icon for Data.

Map Creation Possibly one of the most fun features to date, both to make and use: we now have a map creation system! Where you previously had zones and locales available only in a boring vertical list, you now have the ability to place them on a map defined by your measures.

First, start out by going to Places and select New Map. You will see World Map and a list of zones: World Map is a special map that plots zones, and selecting a zone from this list will plot locales. World Map is used for zone-to-zone navigation, and zones are locale-to-locale. Directions are on the page to guide you.

Once you have a new map, you'll be directed to its edit page to view the map and plot locations from a list. Simply drag and drop from that list to the map, whoa! The gridlines will not appear for players. If a locale is locked (by qual) to them, they will not see it. You can set a background image for the map, which is the recommended use for this system. You will need to log in to your FTP and put the map image under img/map_img. You don't have to refresh the page after uploading: when you hit Set, it will pull whatever's in the folder.

There's not much more to it! If an area does not have a map, the travel box will revert to its previous form. There are icons at the top of the layout to use as a navigation, in case the player wants to (in the future) remove the travel box. Other things.

You may notice the system has some rough edges: Moving a location around after a map's been created means it won't get a placeholder number. You have to refresh to get a location back after you delete it. You can lose a location if you shrink the map too much via x/y. (get it back by expanding again) These are not terrible enough for me to address, and they will not be any time soon.

Player Search Soon we'll have player editing, but for now you can finally see a nice view of all players in your game. This is accessible via the search box under the sidebar.

General Better player-side name-changing: rather than a popup, you can now click your name to change it to an input box, which you submit to change.

[gam3engine]

Patch 5.4: Atë

So-named because of my foolishness in imagining that these systems would be simpler than they were: this update took about 30 hours where I expected around 20.

Equippable Items In what was one of the biggest expansions for a single feature to date, I bring you equippable items! Here's how it works.

You will first make slots for your players to hold equipment in. Behind the scenes, these are qualities that you will hand out whenever you choose: I imagine silently at the beginning of the game, but you can also give them for accomplishing deeds or hitting a certain point in the story.

Now that you've made slots, every item will have inputs for stats. You'll see you can give an item a max of 4 slots it belongs to: this is to enable a system where you could have two head pieces on, or two "enchantment slots", or just simply leave it at one slot.

You will see some boxes for input beneath the slot selection. Note these ARE NOT solely number values. We can increase or decrease stats by choosing the qual from the dropdown list and then using positive or negative numbers. We can also put in percentages! You can have an item that scales with the character through their journey.

I'm trying something new here: if you want to prevent the player from equipping anywhere, which I *highly* suggest that you do, then you will open up the config file and set prevent_equip_qual to the qual ID you want. Instructions inside the config file. When moving the player to an equip-friendly area, you can just silently award them this qual.

Finally, please note it is not possible to equip an item to a character in this release. Before milestone 6, I will make a small result for un/equipping an item for a player as well as for treating an item as a buff.

Custom Item/Qual Messages You will notice a new "change" header on items and quals. Click the header and four boxes will appear for you to write in. Instead of the generic "You gained [n] (item)", you can write custom messages for these objects.

This is especially useful for gaining new items and qualities, because you can tell the player how certain objects are supposed to work. Rather than having to give a certain item in a certain event so that you can explain it, you can make its first occurrence have the text of "You've found wood! Use wood to build tools and barricades." For The Bear, I used this to explain that honey is rare and can satisfy "dissatisfaction".

NOTE: You will bring yourself only trouble if you use results with the same objects in them for one event conclusion. ex: Raising a qual +2, saying something in a text result, then lowering that qual -3. I could support this, but I do not imagine any need for it; even if you absolutely must do this, you can use the invisible option for one of them.

-- -- -- --

I may begin some light documentation on GAM3 soon, particularly for instances like the above. I am hesitant to write documentation on an in-development product, so we won't see full docs probably until 2015.

The next update will be more of a maintenance patch where I finally fix the awful move-result dropdown bug.

[gam3engine]

Patch 5.3: Chronos

Scheduled Events This is huge! We now have a "scheduled" result for events, which means you can specify one event to be fired off once the player takes X actions. In order to use this, set an event to "scheduleable" by ticking its little briefcase near the event options. This will make the event appear in the drop down. This system is very powerful:

For one, this means we have a way to simulate time passing in the engine. You might tell the player to wait for a package which will come after they "spend their time" (actions) waiting for it. (10 actions total) Alternatively you may want to create a game about surviving waves of zombies and you'll give the player 40 actions to build between waves, with action 40's completion firing off the event that starts a wave.

A result of this system being in place means that you can set the actions required to be 0 and therefore be able to serve an event up instantly. In this way, you can link choices to a player in a more fluid manner without having to have them branch off.

Finally, we have the "To Parent" option in the dropdown for where to send them. This will send the player back to the referring event. You can use this to keep the player around instead of having to pass them onward down the "tree of branches". Example! The player enters a cave and you give them a few choices: build camp here, search for clues, sleep, leave. Without To Parent, any of those choices will forward the player over to the next branch in the tree and they would have to run the entire event again. Simply using To Parent will instead send them back to do whatever they'd like, with every event except "leave" using the To Parent option.

Configuration File The configuration file for GAM3 is now editable. There's not much in it yet that you should be touching, but you can mess around with difficulty and a few others I'll be documenting in these notes. Find it under the World submenu.

Icon Improvements Added a tabbing system to icon selection. By default you will see all and favorites. Favorites orders your most frequently used icons by usage. We also have icon tagging available now, which is configured through the config file described above. For now, I've only tagged weapons and tools. Note an icon can appear in multiple tags.

Finally, I've added many new icons. Went from 161 to 213 and removed some redundants. I also converted the icons to the new version of IcoMoon.

General Improved readability of event results and made the corresponding buttons look much more professional.

Challenge labels have been improved and clarified. For example, you'll see a "difficult" challenge at 35% -> 50% success rate. Note you can change these in the new config file!

Made it so all links can only be clicked once between loading. (triple-click on my mouse would send an event thrice)

Bug Fix If you had a cooldown on the main zone/locale view, and used actions to summon a new hand in a hand-pool, it would not update the cooldowns visually. (if you were to refresh, it would)

[gam3engine]

Patch 5.2: Themis

A patch modest in size, but not in effort.

Log System Creators now have basic logging available for all their actions. When you change an object (qual, item, event, etc.) in the engine, that change will be logged and you will be able to view it in the new "System Log" under the sidebar Data tab. Hit the H key on any object to view its personal history, unless there is no history. The system is preliminary. On the next iteration of the log system, you'll see what exactly changed: previous value to current. Things will look nicer. NOTE: Result and requirement changes are not tracked. I'm aware of this, not everything will be saved in this iteration of the system. The log should still well serve its purpose.

General The middle content of the page now stretches considerably lower than it did before. You can now update a player's location by making a text result and using the html button to input: <script>update_loc();</script> Expect a lot more of this in milestone 6. You must use this if you want to update locations after unlocking one of them for the player's view. The other option is to unlock and then move them to the area, because both will update the location box. This will likely not be too important with the map system. Various small feature or back-end improvements.

Bug Fixes Pools inside locales were giving an error when returning from an event.

[gam3engine]

Patch 5.1: Cerberus

Cooldowns! The entire cooldown system is now in place. When dealing with an event, set its cooldown (x) to prevent the player from running the event again until they've spent x actions of that type. This is useful for a "sleep" command that restores health but can only be used "at night" - say, after 30 actions have passed. The "9999 bonus" is not currently in.

Clones You can now clone: events, qualities, and items. NOTE: for events, branches are not cloned.

Dual-color Default Layout Our default layout now supports two colors and has been made a bit more sensible. I wanted to support three colors in total, but couldn't think of where the third color should be used. In the stylesheet, you will see @prim0 -> 10 and @sec0 -> 10 where we once had a mono-color @0 -> @10. We also had a lot of in-betweens which were getting out of hand. We now have only one in-between: @4b, between @4 and @5.

Secondary colors are presently used in all progress/qual bars and the top header. Check out The Bear for an example. Remember if you do not want a two-color layout in your project, you can just use the same color twice. Remember, too, that you can swap usage of the primary and secondary colors at your will. (though in the state of the ever-changing GAM3, I would wait past milestone 6)

General Every backend page now has its own title, which means you'll see your browser tabs have better names! No more simple "GAM3"; if you're looking at the event named "Go Fishing", your tab will now read "Event - Go Fishing". This is especially useful when editing via ctrl+click and therefore having many tabs open.

Began work on the log system.

Improved the action banks visual.

Various improvements, like a better "locked" event visual. Bug Fixes Fixed broken items view on navigation to the page. (hitting back after editing an item)

Fixed the bug that broke URLs when adding / to the end of gam3/plays

[gam3engine]

Milestone 5 Feature List

The focus on milestone 5 is getting the engine to the point where it could support a full release of a "standard" game. This includes managing the player's account. It implements cooldowns, a core feature of GAM3 and many video games.

Backend

- Cloning events. (copy its info into a new event and work from there.)

- Just a generally better log of changes to the system. Nothing sophisticated.

- Quality/item adjustment. Put in the player's name, (defaults to your active play) and it will show you a list of quals and items they have. Ordered by ID! Next to each object's name will be a box with a submit button. Put a number in the box to set it to that number. (whole levels for qualities; we're not getting fancy here) When you key in a number, it will save automatically, but you can still hit the submit button for purposes of repetitive testing. ie: you'll be going back and forth between tabs, constantly saving the value that's otherwise been changed by your playtesting.

- registering an Orbium account via GAM3 games. Moved to Milestone 6.

Front Features

- Make default layout support three color choices. Right now the default style for Play only supports one color, and then finds shades and nearby hues to color with. We'll support 3 in the final version of the default style. If you'd like to have a mono-color theme for your game -- like The Bear -- you simply use the same color three times.

- Cooldowns and "action counts". This is very important. Every action ever spent will be marked behind the scenes and used for "cooldowns". A cooldown is a feature you put on an event to lock it on play, and then have it unlocked and available to the player only after X actions have been taken. For example, say you want the player to be able to sleep to restore their health and energy. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to have that always available, because the player could just sleep any time they get hurt. If you make it so they can only sleep again once they've taken 40 actions, then sleep becomes the mechanic that they remember and account for, and be sure they're close to if they put themselves in danger. -- BONUS: setting cooldown to 9999 actions means the game keeps track of that event so it may only be played once, ever. An easy and convenient method to avoid making a bunch of hidden qualities. I decided this BONUS would not be useful or even used enough to justify. While it would be neat, most of our "never show again" checks are based around being at a certain part in a story that ends up getting cleared anyway. We may see this some day, but only towards the farthest end of GAM3's development, past characters.

- Equippable items. Simply that: put an item on your player, increase some stats. This will support percentages as well: +10% STR, -5% DEF. We will have modifiable slots for equipping, of course. Feel free to make a crab battle game where you can only put on better shell armor and claw weapons. - World & Zone map generation. We'll be able to visualize zones and locales for visiting, as seen in traditional RPG games. We will define a grid of xy size, and each square will be generated by your "scope" value. Zones/locales can only be placed between these grid lines.These lines will be invisible to the player, and the end product results in a display of clickable locations that appear on a map. You will have a list of areas to drag into the grid, configurable by icon and background color. You will be able to set a custom background image for the entire grid, so that you may have a "building" drawn on there where you will drag the in-game locale to. This will support a world view for traveling between zones, and a zone view for looking through a zone's locales. -- This was imagined out of necessity; no player wants to look a list of 20 locales under a zone in order to get where they want. It's also just incredibly cool. :} - Custom quality up/down text: you'll be able to say "you've gotten a little stronger" instead of "Strength +1!"

- widgetify side panels. I want a gear symbol to appear somewhere that will allow the player to view panels and track quality categories that are important to them. As of this writing, we have storylines, characters present, important qualities, and navigation. The player should be able to hide these and track a few more of them. Also support not requiring them to be in little styled panels, but rather just hidden segments in a large panel.