FreeHolder
FreeHolder Alpha 7 Hotfix 3
10.13.2017
Delays. Delays? Delays! Delays...
I apologize for the lack of updates and communication for months. I have literally never been busier in my life, as being a nearly full-time dad consumes both my planned times of watching my daughter solo and pretty much any other time when I'm trying to work continuously without interruption. I have been clawing my way back through a wall of fatigue and difficult encounters with troublesome people. Fortunately, FreeHolder is the very project I devised to rectify this situation and banish worry and emotional vampires from my life. With your help, of course. Despite my complete lack of recent time to work, I am so psyched about getting FreeHolder finished. This is the beginning of the end. I am finding the time and also as my daughter gets more independent I will be able to reclaim some more time. And it will all go to this game and getting y'all what we all hope for and what you paid for. I have a clear view of everything but the very end of the game and discern a finite amount of work to get there. And we shall. Thank you for your patience and support for FreeHolder. Remember, great games take time. A lot of time. A lot. :D But hopefully not so very much more.
Also will be hitting up the forums soon. Bugs to fix.
Ledger Character Info Page Added
Finally a considerably better info page that keeps it simple and shows all relavant statistics at your fingertips. Use the number hotkeys or click back and forth to change characters. Survival stats (weather, fatigue, and disease resists) are shown as icons and special bonuses are displayed below. You can equip your characters here. The huge clunky old equipment ledger is gone. You'll love it.
Final Ledger Upgrades
I want to get the Tools section up and running. The Events section will probably wait until some more pressing matters are addressed. Once Tools are in, the Ledger will finally serve as the central information resource it was always meant to be. I also want to reorganize the Equipment Crafting categories to better fit the new category split I added some time ago.
Upgrades
-Ledger character info page added
Bugfixes
-Fixed a bug where the resources categories would not re-enable when closing ledger
Upcoming Features
(! = Major feature)
*Finish action/ledger upgrades (ledger tool,fabrica category changes)
(!)Steam Achievements(!)
Dark Gadgetry for Agent (requires addition/reworking of Use Items)
Muse's Song skill for Guildmaster (requires addition of art objects)
Journeyman Smith for Warrior (requires additional items and iron)
More battle gear (battlecapes, battlepack, sling pouches and special ammo)
-----alpha 8 (tentative)--------
More advanced classes and class skills
Remove studio action
Second factorium size upgrade
Air!
Whew.
The demands of fatherhood have exceeded my rather pedantic expecations and I have had to convert to full-time baby care while my wife gets back to work. Until recently my days were filled with constant attention and emotional availability and nights with fatigue and an inability to focus or do much useful work. Exhaustion has been the watchword for well over a month. I have never been so tired in my life.
My daughter is the best, by the way. Just saying. :D
It has caused me a LOT of pain to step away from FreeHolder, not least because you all have waited such a long time for consistent momentum and despite my intense desire to bring it to you, my life has demanded my attention elsewhere, however temporarily. This game was conceived of originally due to its supposed simplicity to code, but the open-endedness of it has made swinging it around and bringing it to a tidy close problematic. That and my relative coding inexperience, which has been greatly remedied though artifacts of it remain in the game, i.e. old bugs to be squashed.
However, I am FINALLY starting to feel just a bit like my old self. The massive chasm between my old life and new has lessened slightly and I can see the possibility of integrating the two properly, as I must do. I know that generally when you pay for a game you are also not paying to learn the personal narrative of the creator: "Just finish the damn game, please." Of course.
But at the same time, indie games have so much of the personal stamp of the creators about them that such things are somewhat unavoidable. And I would hope that this type of open communication, admittedly sporadic at the moment, would show that I have not been ignoring FreeHolder and, frankly, all of you out of malice, or laziness, or anything other than personal necessity at this point. It has been one hell of an adaptation to fatherhood, and I am sorry that you all have had to sit and wait while I undertake various necessary personal baggage clearings and get right with everything so I can make FreeHolder the game it should be.
This weekend in general is still pretty much completely booked for me, though I will be working through tonight in an attempt to finish the long overdue status screen patch. It is my intention to hit the ground running on Monday and pick up all of your forum posts in the morning. Not much of indie game if the creator never says anything to you. Sorry about that.
Thank you, one and all, for your exceptional patience with our game. And I do mean collectively our, ours AND yours, for without you FreeHolder would just remain the fevered dream of a madman. You all kick severe ass.
Chris
Electricity/Heat-Based Delays
I had to recode the equipment system more or less like I did the battle gear because the old code was some of my very oldest and, er, not so good. So that took all of Friday, without even getting around to coding the character info page proper because it was all reliant on the new, considerably better equipment system.
On Satuday, my wife having finished her classes, we again fled back to our house with the intention of bunkering down for some time. Of course, our AC was not working on the hottest day of the year thus far, um, I think it was about 110 degrees. We had a portable unit that we deployed in the bedroom, which lasted until all power to our neighborhood failed not long after.
Babies are not supposed to get hot. My wife spent a lot of the next many hours giving the bub cold baths, and me harassing the power company, before power was restored, though our house A/C, which cools my office area, is still non-functional.
I deal with heat quite poorly. My productivity suffers no small amount when sweat is pouring down my back. Today, theoretically any time in fact, an A/C repair person will get here and restore my ability to work to some fraction of nominal. In any case, I will be working to get the improved equipment page out today or tomorrow. If I really manage to get ahead I might get the tools page in as well but that will most likely wait for the next fix, to follow in a few days.
Thanks for your patience.
Chris
(In Progress) New Character Info Page
Will have this upgrade for you most likely tomorrow. I (will) have collapsed all vague survival stats from gear into six resistances which the game tracks for you: cold, heat, wet, wind, fatigue, and disease. You will see these resists go up and down as you equip gear, making things much more comprehensible.
Skills and equipment will be at your fingertips, and all other character info (health, disease status, herb boosts) is already available on the left side of the display, so there's no need to reproduce it in the ledger. You will simply mouseover a character on the left and their info will be shown in the ledger.
Freeholder Alpha 7 Hotfix 2
7.3.2017
Ledger Equipment Page Added
A small but necessary and intended upgrade whereby the player can now click the Equipment tab in the ledger and get a display of all of their domestic and battle equipment sorted out and it can all be moused over to find out its properties. Some sort of explanation of what the properties mean would be nice. An in-game encyclopedia or something of the like will be implemented sometime on the way to 1.0, but that's on the oh-so-distant horizon at the moment.
More Ledger Upgrades
I want to get a tools page integrated into the ledger so that the player can check their tools status as easily as any other information, and also to redo the character equipment and status screen to fit an arbitrary amount of characters, 3 for now, at least 4 total planned for the future, and it could be more, although unlikely given the amount of art it would take. With the tools and battle equipment separated out, all that's left in terms of domestic equipment is cloaks, clothing, and two accessories. As long as these things remain tactically significant and do not become micro-managey, I intend to leave the remaining domestic equipment slots as they are. Once the ledger becomes an actually central source of information in the game, this will hopefully lessen the confusion regarding at least what the players actually have and what the things are for. One hopes.
Upgrades
-Ledger equipment page added
Bugfixes
-Fixed a layering bug where other graphics would be displayed in front of the ledger
Upcoming Features
(! = Major feature)
*Finish action/ledger upgrades (action character switch, ledger tool and character pages,fabrica category changes)
(!)Steam Achievements(!)
Dark Gadgetry for Agent (requires addition/reworking of Use Items)
Muse's Song skill for Guildmaster (requires addition of art objects)
Journeyman Smith for Warrior (requires additional items and iron)
More battle gear (battlecapes, battlepack, sling pouches and special ammo)
-----alpha 8 (tentative)--------
More advanced classes and class skills
Remove studio action
Second factorium size upgrade
FreeHolder Alpha 7 Hotfix 1
6.27.2017
A Few Small Upgrades
I'll be providing a more substantial update again before Friday I hope, but I added mouseover descriptions to battle gear when loading out your characters in battle. Obviously very necessary. Plus I crushed a few small battle system bugs and redid some obsolete code. More to come. Thank you all.
Upgrades
-Gear description and properties displayed when mousing over in gear selection screen in battle
Bugfixes
-Treasure Cache no longer returns obsolete equipment types
-Now only Warriors can wield 2H Greatweapons as intended
-Fire resistance now calculated properly on Greek Fire attacks
-Equipping 2-Handed items when a shield is equipped is no longer possible (it will be for Gladiators)
-Now main weapon must be equipped before alternate can be equipped
Upcoming Features
(! = Major feature)
*Finish action/tool system (character switch, tool list/ledger,armory/equipment display,fabrica category changes)
(!)Steam Achievements(!)
Dark Gadgetry for Agent (requires addition/reworking of Use Items)
Muse's Song skill for Guildmaster (requires addition of art objects)
Journeyman Smith for Warrior (requires additional items and iron)
More battle gear (battlecapes, battlepack, sling pouches and special ammo)
-----alpha 8 (tentative)--------
More advanced classes and class skills
Remove studio action
Second factorium size upgrade
FreeHolder Steam Alpha 7
6.21.2017
Battle System Upgraded
It took some time, but I'm pleased to say that the battle system upgrades that included a number of cleaned-up or fixed systems has finally been implemented. These include, among other things, a newer clearer GUI that serves as an interactive menu, the ability to create, save, and load battle gear profiles for easy equipping of different custom sets, vast recoding of massive amounts of old and not so efficient parts of the battle system, and the introduction of use items such as healing potions and throwable fire bombs.
Of particular note is that now quivers and throwing weapons will not have to be dealt with outside of battle. In battle, you can simply choose to take as large a stack as possible of any throwing weapons from your stock, or take a quiver and fill it with the arrows of your choice, and at the end all of these things will be dumped back into your stock again. Fletch away.
Also, equipment and battle gear are two different categories of items. You never equip battle gear outside of combat, and you never equip "equipment" inside combat (with a few necessary exceptions like bows and some accessories). When you create battle gear at your Fabrica, it is simply placed inside your armory, which currently you cannot actually look at outside of combat. This feature will be included in the tool/ledger upgrades I have planned next. I also have to reorganize the Fabrica categories to reflect the actual battle gear types, so I apologize for the lack of clarity. All the gear is available.
More of the changes and upgrades will be listed below. This fancier new system is not without a few remaining glitches that I am continually hunting down, and a few more improvements to be made to the behavior of enemies, but it is my firm hope that it will make combat more fun, accessible, and satisfying. I will be trying to update it a bit more before the weekend. From the 25th up to my birthday the 30th, I am likely to have severely reduced time to work. I am so excited to keep pushing this game ahead to the next stage, so please stand by and thank you for supporting FreeHolder!
P.S. Achievements are coming soon. I don't think it will take that much time to implement but I keep pushing it back. Soon.
Alpha Videos
We are going to revive our necessary but long-dead practice of providing videos for new alpha upgrades outlining the key new features. The video outlining the features of the new battle system will be up as soon as possible. Please provide feedback about anything we can do to improve these if it occurs to you. Thanks!
Upgrades
-Upgraded battle system GUI to interactive equipment display
-Use Items can be used in combat, such as healing, stealth or berserk, or flame cloud attack
-Player can now select which weapon to react with in combat if they have alternates
Development
-Split "equipment" into "equipment" and "battle gear" to clearly differentiate combat items
-Quivers are now loaded only in combat with arrows of choice from stocks
-Throwing weapons are taken and removed from stocks only in combat
-Added Berserk, Exhausted, and Burning status to combat
-Battle gear consists of three (four for promoted warriors) weapons slots and three wearable slots and one use item slot
-Weapons: Main. Alternate. Throwing. (Offhand/Shield for Myrmidons/Gladiators). Alt weapon can be shield. Quiver replaces throwing.
-Wearables: Cloak. Armor. Accessory. Also: Use Item.
Added Features
-Can now create Battle Gear profiles that can be saved and loaded
Bugfixes
-Added revised equipment, XP, and money rewards for faction enemies
-Fixed several battle loading glitches
And Yet More Battle System Upgrades
Let's say you had a car. It's a sweet car, but it has patched-together engine system with some shiny new parts and some old-ass improvised parts. So you decide to replace the old parts. You start taking them out one by one, with the intention of replacing each of them with a shiny new one, but each one requires an additional part to be removed to get at the one behind it, and at a certain point, you've taken three-quarters of the engine apart and you realize that it would actually be easier to just build a new engine altogether than reconstruct the old patchwork one.
This is roughly what happened while I went in to revamp the battle system while keeping it compatible with the old hotfix. For a while it looked like I would be able to bridge the gap but at a certain point I realized that I should just overhaul the jalopy right now, no more excuses. This is the right time.
So yes, I am parsing in the new GUI, the new gear profiles, and revamping all the old code to fit it. But I am also getting rid of other persistent bugs, graphical glitches, and enemy loading errors that have plagued the battle system for a long time and have prevented people from enjoying it properly, or at all. This will take some extra time, but it will be well worth it.
I'm actually making rapid progress BUT I want to actually test it out a bit before I release it for y'all. I'm hoping within a few days I will be within striking distance of getting a SUBSTANTIAL hotfix in your hands. Metaphorically speaking.
Thanks, everyone.
Close To Postable Hotfix
I'm excited to say that things are coming along on the equipment system upgrades. Quivers, arrows and throwing weapons have finally been put into simple, comprehensible, and far less glitch-prone formats. I will elaborate when I post the fix.
Now, I have to integrate the new equipment system into the existing battle system. But while I'm at it, I want to do some upgrades and bug-fixing, so I'm recoding some battle system stuff along the way.
Many things from the new equipment system require the new UI to be functional, so even if you were to equip some sort of use item, there wouldn't be any way for you to actually use it. But since you couldn't do that before either, that's not much of a change. In that vein, once I get the equipment system into the battle system as it is, with the aforementioned tune-ups, I will post a hotfix to get your early feedback on the equipment profile system while I work on the UI.
It is my sincere hope that I will be able to get the fix up on Friday. The GUI upgrade should then only take a few days more. Once all that is nice and in place, I will finish addressing other battle system glitches, the save/load issues, and then we can turn our attention to a few other small features in anticipation of alpha 7.
We are still unsettled in our living situation, and it is slowing me down somewhat. My apologies. Thanks everyone.
Severe Battle System Upgrades Underway
I have fixed the majority of house problems and have actually had an excuse to work alongside Matt for a few days due to evacuating my domicile. I have been coding away at making the battle system what it should be.
After parsing in the new and quite handy equipment profiles, I realized that I needed to update quite a bit of the battle code to reflect the fact that now cloaks and armor are both usable whereas "clothing" is not, and I also think that a cleaner, nicer GUI for the battle including interactive equipment icons that make picking the weapon or item and action you want more intuitive, as well as actually displaying helpful information about your equipment while you fight, would be a long-delayed necessity to hit up right about now.
So although I have made some good progress I have no cogent way to post these updates until I make some more substantial upgrades to everything. But I am so excited to turn the battle system from the weak link in FreeHolder into something that meets the potential of the other aspects of the game. Once we get more battle accessories and usable items in you will have a little more survivability, which will be necessary when I start putting the actually hard enemies in the game. :D
Please stand by while I overhaul this jalopy. I'm hoping it won't take more than another week to have a nice, clean, and at least somewhat tested battle system/equipment system upgrade. From there, we see to crushing the remaining battle bugs and save/load bugs, and then we'll be close to alpha 7, and from THERE we'll get back the biz of getting the mid-game up to snuff.
My appreciation to y'all.
Chris