All the small things...

This week saw many small improvements to the Conquest! game engine.  A portion of these have no impact to how the game functions, such as standardizing constants used in the code, removing global variables, or collapsing like functions into one.  The engine itself is written in C and over time had gotten "messy".  The past several months have been spent not only adding new features but doing quite a bit of house cleaning.

Some of the new things this week include 8 magical items for players to quest for: Book of Prayer, Robe of Vermin, Potion of Invisibility, Bracers of Defense, Lens of Detection, Rogue's Dice, Horn of Fog, Stone of Weight.  This brings the total amount available to an even 50.  Magical items are loot in Conquest!; most (38) are beneficial in nature, the rest are cursed.  Items can be sold for gold and are an important way for new players to build wealth or assets early on.  The exact descriptions of all the items can be found here.  Several artifacts also saw a boost in power.

I also corrected the way troop bonuses are calculated and sent to the client.  With the exception of one bonus given by the Alchemist hero, the bonuses you see when looking at your army are what you will use during combat (before these bonuses were not displayed properly until combat).  Summoned armies, such as barbarian hordes, are now balanced instead of strictly being based on the player's army composition.  This was done to prevent certain classes from being able to fight the horde risk free due to certain combinations of troops.  The total in the summoned army is still based on the player's army.

I removed support for two commands this week: "spy conquest" and "spy conquest list".  The former used to show 10 random players on any continent; the latter, showed a list of the total number of players on a continent by level.  "Spy Conquest" has been supplanted by the "population" command (which shows 10 players on your continent only) and "conquest list" wasn't very useful (and the client didn't support it).  These were some of the earliest commands created in Conquest! but over time not needed.  The total number of commands the server understands is now 129 and I may remove a few more to tidy things up.

Finally, effects of weather are governed by how much of a continent you control: the higher the percentage, the more likely a weather event will affect your kingdom.

On the client side, there was lots of good work done by Steffon and Krees this week.  Steffon is working on a prototype of a mobile client in Unity, with art and design from Krees.  Steffon has the login page working with the new design and it looks great!  Once Krees finishes designing the new Kingdom, Travel, Combat, and Subterfuge screens we will have everything in place to launch a crowd funding campaign to complete development.

Until next week, I hope to see you in the game!