I’m laid up with a nightmarish holiday affliction, some kind of gastrointestinal barf-fest that seemingly comes and goes as it pleases. But since it’s currently in remission I thought I’d post an update.
The quest alluded to in my previous post is complete, somewhat. It’s currently by far the most lethal quest in the game. Grandma’s House requires you to ascend through several floors of the titular abode, each inhabit by monsters of a particular quality. In random order there may be armoured, venomous, tiny, flying, and hidden floor types. Grandma offers you items to help on your quest, at least one of which is designed to combat critters on the highest, most difficult floor.
The quest showcases the dynamics of the game remarkably well. It has a wide variety of techniques and outcomes packed into a tight space. Though seemingly linear, once its mechanics are known, there are quite a few options on the table for the player. Problematically it is unforgiving and deadly, and may cause the player to be trapped alive but hopeless.
I need to play it some more in a natural environment to understand how to tweak it, but it’s got a rock solid foundation. Tons of spice, tactically challenging, still waiting on NPC art from Santi.
Next up is going to be a further separation of concerns of the javascript. Obfuscation of the engine demanded some rigourous delineation of “Overworld” from “other” code, where “other” was mainly the pixi.js graphics engine. This pass will further separate the engine of the game itself from the .js that chains games together, updates, the server, and handles UI. With that will come random number game seeding, and game transcripts which can be validated.
With that in place I can plonk the game engine into some node.js on the server and have basically the whole core game submittal inherently securable. I say securable, because I am quite sure it will not at that point yet be secure, but the premise will be solid.