v1.1 release & end of development

Introduction

My birthday's coming up sometime in the next 7 days, but you're getting the present. And that present is an update to a previously abandoned project!

I did, originally, plan to build a proper expansion for this game. That never really came together, between my day job and my other projects. I already have a casual long-term thing going on a different account, and of course next year will be dedicated to creating that robot RPG that I've mentioned elsewhere. This left Fantasy Dungeon World in an awkward spot. (Eagle-eyed watchers may have noticed that it went from Prototype to On Hold months ago.)

So, while there probably won't be new content going forward, I decided I'd at least finish up everything that already was in FDW. As such, I went through the game again, replacing all the placeholder art, cleaning up some of the dialogue, and fixing some of the bugs that have been reported in the last year. 

This isn't the original scope, but I'm happy calling this version of the game released. See below for details, and I hope you enjoy the game, small and clunky as it is.

Graphical changes

Let's address the elephant in the room first: The original game jam version of the project used some "AI" tools. 

Now, these weren't the ones you're thinking of right now. (StableDiffusion and the like.) None of the "AI" output was ever used directly, and I was assured that the training data was all in the public domain. However, I'm no longer comfortable with using that sort of generated "art" at all. As such, I've taken out all content that used "AI" tools anywhere in the pipeline.

Beyond this, there were several places where sloppily upscaled graphics were in use. Mostly for things like dialogue portraits, but also some items. I've re-worked the graphics to be a little less inconsistent, so there's a lot of new art now. As a result, some pictures that didn't use "AI" art have been replaced too.

Finally, I've made some minor tweaks to the UX, which you mostly shouldn't notice, except they don't break quite as much anymore. The big change is that all menus can now be navigated using the keyboard or mousepad alone, so you no longer have to switch to the mouse.

Gameplay changes

The decorative food items kept confusing people. I never found a way to properly communicate that these weren't meant to be interactive. So, I decided to just... make them interactive after all. You can eat them to restore a healthy chunk of health. As a balancing measure, health drops from defeated enemies have been nerfed a bit.

Additionally, the final boss had its HP reduced (750 -> 700), and its add-ons deal much less damage now (11 -> 5). A handful of food items have been added to the room for extra shots at restoring health. With only a melee attack, it was probably a bit much.

Event trigger logic has been slightly rewritten in general, which again should help to avoid (unlikely) bugs.

Under certain exotic circumstances, it was possible to take the "escape" route, but still trigger one of the two secret endings. You had to take some fairly deliberate steps to trigger this, but it was possible. (The conditionals that determine your endings were checked in the wrong order.) It's fixed now.

A few rather embarrassing mistakes regarding enemy logic were corrected. Enemies not being assigned movement paths, that sort of thing.

"Progress dialogue" from the villagers now gets loaded correctly under all circumstances, so you shouldn't see old lines popping up again as you progress through the game.

New content

As the food is now interactive, a "vegan toggle" has been added to the character sheet. If it's activated, no animal products will spawn, meaning no eggs, milk, meat or fish. This is purely cosmetic and has no game-play impact.

The previous version contained a lot of leftover assets. Like, a *lot* of them. These have been pruned, as has some of the dead code, which should yield a slightly reduced file-size and improved performance.

Default voice, SFX and music volume is now much higher.

Finally, I've done another pass on the dialogue, and cleaned up the writing a little. It's marginally less clunky now, I hope. Also, there were a few spots where pronouns were set incorrectly, which has been fixed.