Friday Dev Update: Quest Journal and Boss Music

6:16 AM willsterling23 2 Comments


Ahoy!

It's been a fun and busy week over at Lavaboots. The Cartography Update is still under way and we are making some progress in some other areas as well. We are extremely excited about this year and some of the updates to come.

If you haven't already, you can read about our 2016 plans in a recent blog post. In short, the big updates coming in 2016 are cartography, a quest journal, finishing implementation of the main quest line, and multiplayer.

Today I wanted to talk about a couple new things we've been working on.


Quest Journal



As you may have read, we've been working on implementing a player journal into the game. This journal will give you the ability to write your own entries, create section links, and take notes of whatever you want in the world. If you're the type of player that likes to truly immerse yourself in a game and keep a log of your daily adventures, then the player journal is definitely for you. 

One feature we've been working on adding to the player journal is the quest portion. Salt has a main story quest line partly implemented (which we plan on finishing soon) as well as many different side quests from merchants, treasure hunters, fishermen, etc. It can be hard to keep track of what exactly you were supposed to, especially since much of the game revolves around you sailing long distances and having some down time between quests. 

So with that that in mind, what we've done is add quest entries as a portion of the journal. When you pick up a new quest or talk to a quest giver, it will update your journal with a short entry summarizing your task and an island location if one was given to you. This is mainly implemented for the main quest, but we'll be looking into using it for side quests as well.

Our goal with this is to keep the entries very short, but just act as a reminder of what you were supposed to do. We don't want to hold your hand so the entries will be fairly simple, but we also don't want you to be out in the middle of the ocean, forget the item you were supposed to be looking for and spend a lot of time trying to find the NPC again to ask.


Boss Music


This week we've also been working on some new boss music for the main quest. Progress on that is going well. You can listen to a preview of what we've got so far here: 




We get a lot of requests for the boss music in Salt, so we will include it in the soundtrack when it releases. In the mean time, you can listen to the ocean and sailing music here for free.


Thanks for reading and let us hear your feedback!


- Will Sterling (Sound Lead and Game Design)

2 comments:

  1. Gotta love how i'm just sitting here, waiting to see that update that cinches this game and makes me buy it xD Honestly, i just find it a little, tiny little bit annoying how, in what i think has been at least a year, there hasn't really been much what i've seen and gone "Wow i need to buy this!" which is a shame, because when i played it, i enjoyed doing a long haul sailing north as far as i could go.

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  2. Can't wait to for multiplayer with friends! :)

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