Odyssey Developer's Journal #1

So in an effort to engage more with Patreon supporters and to give generalized development updates as we progress towards the finish line on Odyssey Act 1, I have decided to try my damnedest to do a periodic developer journal to update folks about where we are at and what I am currently working on. Additionally it will also hopefully have the effect of keeping me motivated in tough periods. So without further ado, here we go.

Currently I am on a desert island of implementation, where the only assistance I currently have for implementing quests is secondary aid by the writing team to help clarify story elements and from Picky with a few script related consultations. Due to a number of twists and mishaps amongst the team people have had to step back for health reasons, scandal, real life stuff or just flat out flaking out and that's left quest implementation completely stalled on the front lawn and in my hands.

Luckily despite the big cheese standing alone in many regards, I am making forward motion on quest building. We decided late last year that we would take quest implementation and writing finalization on a "settlement by settlement" basis and began work on finishing Singbury. I am happy to say now at this point that all quests have been implemented for the town of Singbury as well as almost all individual NPC dialogue has been put in place as well. With the AI packages and daily routines largely in place the last cog to making Singbury a fully immersive experience is applying the voice files, which is a whole other beast entirely. 

Once Singbury was finally finished I was very eager to move on to Gallomarket, the imperial port city where all the basic routines and AI packages are in place and writing finalization is probably at about 70% at this point. I began implementation of a couple small quests just to get myself back into the flow after a lapse in major progress due to my own real life situations with a busy period at my other business. After that I found it a little easier moving forward into additional quests in the city. 

Within the last month I have delved head long into building out two of Stonehands' more complicated side quests and was once again reminding how linearly the vanilla quest system is built, and how contingencies, conditions and branching paths of dialogue and progress within the quest are not an easy thing to obtain with these tools. I suppose that explains why the civil war quest is so broken lol.

One great development came amidst this "force of will to implement" that we are pretty excited about though. Awhile back we posed a survey to ask people what their character and skill levels were when they beat the "Shattered Legacy" quest in Legacy in an effort to determine what our skill check challenge levels should be and we came away with some interesting data. It seemed that on average people were around level 40-70 and most people had at least half their skills maxed out with most of the rest being pretty advanced. We also found a lot of people liked to speed run their power level to god tier, but... we can't really gear our balance around those people, so those uncapped and XP accelerated reports were thrown out of the averaging. In the end the determination was that people were going to be too skilled in the post game to really have their skills be the major mark of success and failure in our obstacles, and so we devised a new system. 

Instead of looking at speech skills for bribe, intimidate and persuasion checks, we are building our own "sub faction reputation" system where you have a reputation rating with specific groups of NPC's within an area based around your accomplishments in Odyssey or the vanilla game, and since many quests in Odyssey have multiple endings, some of which are good and some are bad, they will affect your reputation level which will in turn dictate if you can influence others within specific groups or not. This in effect opens multiple paths based on your previous choices and still allows multiple paths of progress even if those checks aren't passed. For example you start at 0 reputation (neutral) with the Imperial garrison at Gallomarket, that is of course unless you sided in the civil war in Skyrim, in which case you start at 1 if you joined imperials and -1 if you joined storm cloaks. In addition to getting more of the stink eye from imperials if you joined the resistance, you may not have certain options available in your quests or dialogue or even have access to certain quests at all. You have to do more to prove yourself before those options become available. Some quests and even conversations can alter your reputation so as to lock or unlock certain quests and topics.

In addition to dialogue reputation checks, we are implementing a different sort of "environmental skill check" where upon entering an area, you might have your skill level checked and certain special elements made available if you pass the check. For example sneaking, lock picking and pickpocket are subtle observation skills and upon entering certain areas, your skill level may reveal hidden clues and details which provide scenic story telling, optional rewards, or even optional content which would otherwise go unnoticed. It won't hand the answer to the player, it will merely enable a special activator for the player to look around for and to keep a close eye out for. 

Other examples would be destruction magic allowing hidden areas in dungeons to be blasted into, or special magically sealed chests that can only be broken into by high level destruction magic, or concealed illusionary walls being revealed with high illusion skills showing alternate shortcuts or caches of loot. The possibilities are extensive.

All of these environmental skill checks will take your skill level and randomly roll to see if it's enough to trigger. Level 100 skill won't be a guarantee of success however, as the rolls vary from 1-120 or 1-150, etc chance (where it has to randomly result within your skill level). These new features we hope will bring more interest into lesser used skill, giving them merit and utility, and make things fresh and unexpected as you progress through the game, giving you more to look for and discover.

Anyhoo. That's about it for this edition. I hope to add these journals maybe once every couple weeks, or once a month at very least, so please let me know what you think of these articles, because if there isn't much interest or engagement, there's not much purpose to doing them and I could spend that time doing something else. If it is something of interest and people find these articles "worthwhile and interesting" as Kyre would put it, please let me know, and thanks for your continued support.