New Devlog

My name is Brendan Walker and I just joined Flying Lab in the beginning of Feburary. It's been an exciting month or so getting familiar with the game, the code base, the company, and the community.

Before coming to Flying Lab I worked at Oberon Games and before that Ares Interactive (I'm willing to bet you've heard of neither of those companies). Oberon does puzzle and other "casual" games. While there I worked on subcontract to remake all of the inbox games (Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc) as well as a new game for Windows Vista. Ares Interactive was a small game company a few friends and myself started after college. We completed one game ("Barnyard Invasion") and then went bankrupt.

Since I've started here I've been fortunate enough to work on some cool projects. One of the first was to add flags to the ships. I was excited to add flags because they add some character to the ships AND more importantly they show what the current wind direction is (which is very important when in the middle of a battle). Originally, I thought this was going to be a trivial task that would only have minor implications in the game. I soon discovered this was not the case. Everytime I thought I had the flags working perfectly I discovered I had forgotten something: flags not falling with the masts, main mast flag not matching player nationality, flag scale not appropriate on all ships, etc. Most of the bugs are fixed now, but I'll be doing small tweaks here and there over the next couple of weeks. I also look forward to setting up a content import system that will let the community import new flag patterns into the game. I'm excited to see what people come up with.

The second big task I was given was to setup up interaction indicators over NPCs who had something to talk to you about. For example, in World of Warcraft if an NPC has a mission for you a golden exlcamation mark appears over their head, which gets replaced with a question mark once you start a mission. Previously in PotBS there was no way to tell what NPC has a mission (or other service) for you unless you talked to them directly, which gets tedious. The solution is to query an NPC when they come into view for available interactions (missions or services) and if so, display the indicator associated with service. In order to make this happen, Joe and I did a major refactoring of the way the interaction menu system works. After an initial wave of bugs the systems seems to be working well. Currently we only have icons for when an NPC has a mission for you or of the NPC wants you to complete a quest with them (though the art for these still needs some iteration). Once the final art is ready we'll also have indicators for other services (stores, garages, etc).