Andor's Trail

Just some ideas for the new update:

NOTE ITEM
opening the info of item; under the menu there's an additional option to add note whereas it helps the player remember what's the use of the item
CATEGORY: Food
Note: Honey for quest requirement; keep stocked up

COMPANION IN BATTLE
maybe in late game; even just a tamed dog or in future; wild wolf. In battle it appears adjacent on the target's side to damage the enemy.
They also level up; but equipment can only have one slot e.g weapon/armor

MONSTER/POTION PROFICIENCY
Add 10% damage if the number of kills on the mob exceeds on 500.
Add 10% more healing on potions the more use. e.g bonemeal potion

MAP NOTES
Player must be on the location to add note on the map.
e.g Red Exclamation point - Location of Lodar's Hideaway

BELT OR BACKPACK
Small boost on stats.

HERO OF VILLAGE BOOST
Completing all quests on a certain village gives stats boost when farming or travelling towards the village. e.g damage boost

BRISTLE SKIN
A new addition to skills. Requires 5 Levels of Bark Skin. Adds 10% block chance per level, and returns 10% of your BC to the monster that attacks the player.

SMELTING
Items that has metal in it can make steel, silver, gold, iron bars. Don't know yet the purpose of the bars.

QUEST BOARD
Villages or just a specific one has a quest board making the game more fun in the late game. Random EXP reward and sometimes items that only in the quest board can acquire.

Just did this in my free time..

Hey, thanks for sharing your ideas, they look very nice!

Let me just comment on a few of these...

COMPANION IN BATTLE
This idea is unfortunately very hard to implement, since it would require lots of code changes to the game engine. I assume this is not going to happen, although I like the idea of being able to tame animals. A possibility would be to create e.g. a quest where the player can tame an animal which is then placed stationary somewhere like in Mikhail's garden. It could then be fed by the player or sometimes give items like sticks or pebbles. Would be a neat little addition to Crossglenn

POTION PROFICIENCY
I'm not sure about how you would implement this, but I immediately thought of a skill. I assume the dev's do not want to add boosts based on those numbers (monsters killed, potions used, ...) but there could be a skill that gives a 10% chance (lv. 1, up to 50%) to heal by an additional health point whenever the player heals through an actor condition. This would make food consumption more attractive in comparison to health and bonemeal potions, but would also boost the RolS. Maybe this should only be applied to food healing.

BELT OR BACKPACK
Generally, I would agree that such items would fit into the theme of the game.
In the case of AT however, I wouldn't know how to implement these. Which boosts should they give? Which armour slot would they belong in? A backpack doesn't make much sense since the player can already carry an infinite amount of items in it's inventory

HERO OF VILLAGE BOOST
This one again would require heavy code changes, even though I love the idea of regional stat boosts on specific maps. Maybe towards 1.0...
What I would love to see as well would be modified shop prices in towns that you helped already.

BRISTLE SKIN
Seems interesting and should almost be doable somehow without major code changes.

SMELTING
Well, there already are some metal ingots found in the Elm Mine. But without a purpose, this seems a little unnecessary. Maybe you can think of a purpose as well?

QUEST BOARD
Yes! I love this idea! As a higher level player, there are some areas that you never really visit again once you completed all the quests. Such a quest board would make these areas interesting again, also the special items would be great. In my mind, these boards should have different kinds of quests for each town. Also, this should be possible without changes to the game engine, but it is a lot of work.

A companion has been suggested many times over the years and rejected each and every time as it is a crap ton of work from the UI all the way to the game engine and back. The game was never designed to have a companion and making it have one now would virtually be a rewrite. I'm also against this idea.

MONSTER/POTION PROFICIENCY: yeah, we're not going to do anything that encourages any more grinding than what's already in the game. We're trying to get away from the grinding. We don't want players to have to do it and we're not going to encourage them to do it.

MAP NOTES: and then how does the player see these notes?


Belt: This too has been suggested many times over the years and rejected every time. Again, this requires significant work to the game engine from the UI all the way through the engine.


Hero of the village boost... Define "towards". This word is too abstract and undefined to work well in software. It's up to interpretation and is very relative.

BRISTLE SKIN: What does returning 10 of your BC to the monster mean?

Smelting: I don't see a concrete idea here.

What is a quest board?

It's not a democracy, but if it were I'd vote for filling in the critical gaps like Brightport and Carn tower, then rolling out Nor City and Feygard together (with resolutions to the Andor search) and announcing v.1.0, and only then going back and adding more features, side quests, extraordinary items, changes in gameplay, etc. as part of a new enhanced v.1.1 development stream.

Right, it's more anarchy than democracy
I wouldn't see the Carn tower as critical gap, and though it makes sense to release Feygard and NorCity together, they will be too big for one release. Probably we bring parts of them in one release and the rest in further releases.

That makes sense. In general, I think it would be great to prioritise a game that can be "finished," whatever that means.

"Finished" doesn't mean there couldn't be teasers for v.1.1 or v.2.0, of course. You might bring Andor back home only to find that a civil war has started in Feygard after Lord Geomyr's death, or that the Shadow priests in Nor have unleashed more than they bargained for in summoning Kazaul, etc etc, so that there's both a resolution and a path forward for future stories (just like The Hobbit resolved Bilbo's quest but still left the door open for the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

Canuck wrote: Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:21 pm That makes sense. In general, I think it would be great to prioritise a game that can be "finished," whatever that means.

"Finished" doesn't mean there couldn't be teasers for v.1.1 or v.2.0, of course. You might bring Andor back home only to find that a civil war has started in Feygard after Lord Geomyr's death, or that the Shadow priests in Nor have unleashed more than they bargained for in summoning Kazaul, etc etc, so that there's both a resolution and a path forward for future stories (just like The Hobbit resolved Bilbo's quest but still left the door open for the Lord of the Rings trilogy).

This project cannot last forever as the technology foundation that the game engine sits upon is constantly in fluid motion. As is the hardware that it's running on. Google has made us pivot at least once in the last year and a half or 2 years and It may happen again. My point is we can't drag this project out forever and actually realistically expected to get to version 1.0.
I need to get this project done.
And completed to us means 1.0.
There's not going to be a 2.0. there's not going to be a 1.5 or any nonsense like that at least not from this development team.
There's got to be an end. We can't drag it on forever.

Well, we'll see.
I think for the technical restrictions we'll find a way to handle it.
But we need to work on the ending, otherwise it will get ever more difficult to keep everything consistent.

But even when Andor has been found there will be much place for more quests. Nevertheless I myself won't start a version 2.0, but who knows what the future will bring...

I personally would not rule out something beyond 1.0, but getting to that has to be the principle goal right now. Anything that distracts from that in any significant way is an unneeded, and unwanted, distraction.

Most people here are probably too young to remember this, but Colossal Cave being complete in itself didn't prevent it being expanded into Zork afterwards. It's ok if v.1.0 doesn't include everything the core devs had originally hoped for, like alignment consequences.

If they don't want to continue to a v.1.1 or v.2.0, new devs might be willing to pick up the baton. It's an astoundingly rich game with a well-developed world around it.