Hello everyone!
Last Friday, the first public version of Tales of Kathay (0.1) was released. While still in early development, several people have played the game and gave me valuable feedback for the game!

This week, I started work on the next version of the game. This version will be focused on a few game mechanics that are missing, and the sooner I implement them into the game, the better. The planned features for 0.2 are:

• Saving and loading;
• Simulate the world as you play;
• Consumables;
• More gear variety;

Enabling the saving and loading of the game was the focus of this week's work. While I had considered since the beginning what data I would eventually have to save and load from disk, actually implementing the serialization exposed some flaws in the data flow of the game.

After a decent bit of head scratching, I managed to refactor everything that was in the way, and got the serialization and deserialization working.

I also implemented a load screen in the main menu (which is still quite buggy), the offloading and reloading of chunks as you navigate the world, and the saving of the game while you play.

In general, I would say I'm 90% done with the save system. Just need to do some UI tweaks, and it should be done early next week.

Simulate the world as you play

This feature is probably the big promise of Tales of Kathay that I'm currently not delivering. The world is intended to feel alive, with a deep simulation of settlements, economies and personal lives. All of that simulation should react to the player's actions, on a small or large scale.

However, while the bare-bones of the simulation code exists, it is simulated only before you play, to create the world, or when you die and want to respawn.

It doesn't simulate while you are playing, and most of your actions will only take effect after you die and respawn as a new person.

In this version, I want to have at least a basic implementation of this living world around you. My idea is, when you go to sleep, step the whole world a day in the simulation. This could be eventually tied to a day/night cycle (which doesn't exist yet), and feel even more dynamic and alive.

This, in tandem with the current simulation I have in place, will hopefully start to create the effect of a living world. Did you ignore the quest to kill a monster in the woods? Well, maybe next time you return to this village, more people will be dead. Maybe even the whole village.

This mechanic has a few scary side effects on the generation that I'm still not 100% sure how to solve.

Consumables

This is a small content upgrade I plan for the next version to give the player more things to do while playing. Currently, the only game loop you have is:

Get quest > Kill something > Complete quest > Get reward > Repeat

This gets stale very fast.

Another problem is that the only way for you to heal is to return to a village and sleep in a bed. There's no way to heal mid-battle.

To solve both of these problems, I plan to add a few consumables. A plant that you can find in the wild that can heal you slowly, giving the player a reason to explore a bit, and a potion that heals you quickly. The potion will be a new reward from the quest system, and is intended to be using during a hard battle to give you a second wind.

More gear variety

Finally, I want to add a bit more gear variety to the game. Nothing big, just one or two extra weapons, and armor pieces. Just so you have some more variety in NPC gear and rewards.

This is not a large content update, just enough to make the game less repetitive. 

Conclusion

I am pretty much done with one of the scary parts of the update, that being the saving and loading mechanics. Next week, I want to tackle the last scary part, which is the dynamic simulation of the world around you.

Consumables and gear variety aren't scary, but there's plenty of work there for another week. There's also some new bug fixes coming in 0.2.

Overall, being optimistic, version 0.2 should be done on the 5th of September, but being more conservative, on the 12th.