Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand - Kickstarter Update 15

Couchpotato spotted Kickstarter update 15 for Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand:

Update 15: Art and Programming Updates

Greetings Demanders!

The team has been hard at work this past month (as always). Our character artists have kept pumping out monsters, while Gabriel (lead artist) and Philip (art director) have continued to hammer out our character system for swapping heads, hairs, armours, body poses, and facial expressions between ancestries. We also expanded it to include customizable things like tattoos, scars, makeup, and face paint.

Trying to accomplish all those features really took us down the rabbit hole during February. We had to redesign parts of our framework a couple of times based on testing, and needed to devise an automatic bone-posing system for skirts/long robes, long hairs, and big dangly sleeves (ala Gandalf). But we’re happy to say we’ve managed to build a robust system that should both satisfy players for creating the PC they envision, as well as reduce our own internal workload. There’ll be stuff to show on that in a couple of months after we’ve built more assets to plug into the system. In the meantime, check out some of the cool monsters we’ve been working on and see if you can recognize them from the module’s story. :)

Thanks for everyone’s input on our Stretch Goal Poll on Discord! It’s given us a very good indication for what you all want to see: more DLC adventures and Crafting. We’ll factor this into our planning, based on what we manage to raise over the course of this year for stretch goals.

On the programming front, Kevin (lead programmer) and Rich (rules programmer) have been busy and wrote their own mini updates on their progress.

Kevin
Last year, I had wisely postponed implementing Oracles because I grumbled that the original Oracle curse system did not translate well to a CRPG. After Paizo delivered the PC2 remaster, along with a completely redesigned Oracle class, I was eager to finally bring Oracles into the game, along with all of their unique spells, feats, and (of course) curses!

With future expansion packs in mind, I implemented all of the required higher-level feats for all the PC2 classes since these will be needed for the expansion packs (and for various villainous characters who just might happen to be "slightly" higher level than the player).

One of the promises that we made during the Kickstarter campaign was to add full-party creation support to The Dragon's Demand. So, I implemented a completely new user interface in the pre-game, which allows players to create an entire party of playable characters rather than just a single character.

Recently, we migrated The Dragon's Demand from the Unity 5 engine to the Unity 6 engine, which is the most advanced Unity version currently on the market. I don't think anyone would describe an engine migration as easy, and this one certainly was not. However, this upgrade allows us to access all of the cool new Unity engine features. On the technical side, one of my first changes was to migrate from our old method of launching asynchronous tasks to Unity's new tasking system. Because Unity's new tasking system is better integrated with Unity's game loop, this change solved a large number of annoying race conditions and timing-related crashes, such as characters not immediately stopping what they were doing when the game was paused. Overall, we're very pleased with the new engine performance.

Rich
I have been updating our scripts and stored procedures which access, manipulate and extract the data in the format we need from the Remastered Rules Database. There are currently 60 different configuration files to migrate the database rules tables, and once they were imported into the game, there was a lot of work to address the many changes required to cater for the addition, removal and renaming of feats, spells, class features, traits and formulas that the remastered ruleset brought. We are currently working through each of the classes to ensure any changes to the remastered core classes are implemented, while ensuring that our automatic level-up utility uses the extra spells and feats that were added in the remastered rules.