Midnight Status Update

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Rorthron

This week has seen The Lords of Midnight finally get the 1.12 update across all the stores. That means that OSX and Blackberry players can now enjoy the features that other users have had for nearly 4 months. Sorry about that, the OSX issue came about because I could no longer submit to the App Store, and it has taken this long for Marmalade to fix the issue, and Blackberry was just an oversight – never noticed that I had not updated it.

Doomdark’s Revenge has now hit version 1.2 across all stores. This resolves a number of early issues and brings the remake more inline with the original. There is still some work to do on that, and version 1.3 should be pushed out later this week which will hopefully close off the remaining problematic areas. You can see a full list of upcoming changes here.

I’ll be honest, it has taken me by surprise at the number of issues that crept through the testing process. Looking at it with hindsight, not enough testing occurred that compared it to the original. I have spent a large amount of the last two weeks pouring over the original code looking for subtle things that I had previously missed, in order to try and explain the variances. For example, Shareth’s stronghold is Imiriel, but for the routing AI it get overridden as Glireon. Morkin is actually and AI lord which means he moves. And, Characters will not attempt to recruit another character while at a stronghold.

The OSX version of Midnight and Revenge both have a problem with Mac Book Pro Retina screens. I shall be looking into that. As a work around, place you laptop in one of the smaller virtual resolutions, start the app and then change it to Large Window mode in the options. The change you desktop resolution back.

I thought the War was lost and Midnight doomed.

Posted on March 2, 2014 by Rorthron

I’ve been working my way through the outstanding bug list. One of the areas that seems to cause contention, is battles.

It causes me some problems because the original is actually pretty haphazard where battles are concerned. So I’m going to talk about the battles in a little more depth, just so that you can get an understanding as to why certain things seem to be happening.

Firstly, night processing goes like this…

1. Reset all characters at dawn
2. Give all AI characters their turn
3. Process Battles
4. Place things on map
5. Move Mists
6. Remove things from map at location’s where characters are
7. Check if characters can recruit soldiers from strongholds
8. Re-spawn armies at strongholds
9. Check for important deaths

Secondly, the interesting point here is, characters are given a chance to move BEFORE battles take place. So, if you attack a character, there is a good chance he will move and thus a battle will not take place.

To understand that a little more, let’s look at the AI turn.

The AI character must decide what to do every night. Each character will react to a number of objectives.

1. Goto Liege
2. Goto Foe
3. Goto Object
4. Goto Home
5. Do nothing

If they have a liege, and that liege’s objectives are 1 or 2, then this characters objective also become 1 or 2.

Otherwise, we pick a new objective

When picking a new objective we pick a random number between 1 and 16. If we choose 1 to 5, then these are our objective. Otherwise we continue with our current objective.

So as you can see, there is a 68% chance that we will just continue on with what were we previously doing. Which means that unless you are at a characters stronghold, and his current objective is to go home, then the likelihood, he is moving away from you.

There is only a 6% chance that the character will stay at his current location.

Personally, I am very surprised at these stats, because it makes battles bloody difficult. Unlike The Lords of Midnight where a nearby army would drop everything to attack, or an attacked army would stay until the death, in Doomdark’s Revenge, everything apart from battle seems to be of more interest.

The Forest Keeper

Posted on February 24, 2014 by Rorthron

When Mike and I were talking about The Lords of Midnight remake, one of the things we were going to do, was start the game earlier.

The Novella starts with Luxor and Morkin at the Forest Keeper’s hut. They are on their way to The Tower of the Moon in order to be part of the Council of the Wise.

The Novella is effectively all exposition. It’s about giving you the player, the information you need to know, in order to continue on and immerse yourself with the game.

This came to mind the other day because I was asked about remaking The Lords of Midnight, again. It is something I would love to do. I’m just not fully sure anymore what it would mean. However, there was one thing that I remembered that we did want to do, and that was change the Novella into a Animated Graphic Novel, and split it up with the initial game play which would then start from the Forest Keeper’s hut.

The game would place in you a restricted map, inside of the Forest of the Moon, and you need to find your way to the Tower. This would allow for the Narrative to be blended with the tutorial, and thus, by the time the game starts proper, at the start of the Solstice, you would have all the information you needed without having to read any manuals.

Once you start to increase the production values, then maybe there is something that could be for a larger audience.

I’ve already had some conversations about the audio. About how to score the game.

And visually, we have an idea of how it would look. Most of you already have an idea from Jure’s art that was non-original style for The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge. But I place a gallery at the end of this post. But if you then take into account this image the Jure sent me the other day when were were discussing how we would make the game look…

The real issues comes down to the interface and the gameplay. What would we need to change in the actual game. The main thing is to stay in the narrative. Every decision we make must be based on the story, and staying in story. We would probably need to make a few slight changes to the original just to give it some breathing space.
And all that text… it’s problematic but it’s also the charm of the original, you wouldn’t want to get rid of it, but should some of it be lost? I really don’t know the answer to that yet. What if it was all spoken?

Now, if I could just find some money to allow me and Jure to work on it full time… or almost full time…