Today, I'm so excited because I completed the development of the Blighted Totems Quest. This is a culmination of several days of coding, including several features: a weather & time tracker that (among other things) ticks the blight spread in the forest; placeable totems that ward blight, absorbing it to prevent the spread; cleansing crystals to cleanse the totems. In the quest, Luna explains the purpose of totems and gives you an empty cleansing crystal. You go out into the forest, find blighted totems, and cleanse them, absorbing the blight into the crystal. Finally, you return the crystal to Luna.

For this quest, I used the simplified quest scripting language I had developed a month prior, but I made some tweaks and made the hard choice to forgo some of the more advanced features of the scripting language. Effectively, what this means is that builders will have to rely on a developer to code the objects needed for quests. So, in the Blighted Totems quest, the cleansing crystal is an example of a quest object. So for now, this will be a limitation. Once the game development matures, I can revisit this. However, at least builders can script a quest and discuss their object needs with a developer, which hopefully won't be a significant lift.

The simplifications I made to the quest scripting language will break the prior quests (harvest honey and blighted bear). I'll need to return to those at some point soon to address the issues. Actually, the significant change I made to the combat system requires changes to those quests anyway (the original combat was true turn-based, whereas now it's an active time battle... albeit slow). I really need to write more unit tests so that I can catch these breakages. However, I'm going to push forward with a minimally viable game before refactoring the code and building out tests. Because I can do that work in parallel with builders, who are building and getting us ready for the alpha launch.

Tomorrow marks a new phase in "A Day in the Life of Marianne" (I posted about this in Announce #1). Now that she's cleansed totems, Marianne is off to harvest glowing moon flowers to make moon bombs with Beatrice, and she'll have some interesting combat encounters on the way with moon bugs. I think I'll start with the moon bugs. I will need to update the combat encounter logic to accommodate some of their special features. More on that tomorrow!