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[sambojin]

Whilst you're certainly only a barkeep for the coin, do the drinks you serve have any additional effects than mood and sobriety? In some games, food and drink is virtually a magic and potion system in itself.

Someone going off to fight a dragon? Maybe a little something to boost fire-resistance could cure what is about to ail them?

Feeling a little slow? I've got just the drink for you....

It might even be nice to do a few background rolls (DnD style or from any system) to see if it had any effect. If they rolled a 15, and your drink changed their fire resistance to a 17, and that was what made the difference between success and being burnt to a crisp, they'll be forever in your debt and laud your tavern's drinks for years to come.

They'll be pretty happy with just a drink. They'll be really happy that you have a keg of Dragon's Blood out the back. They'll be ecstatic if that drink made all the difference (whether they know that was the reason, or not). No real negative if it didn't do much, at least you tried (and perhaps lost a sizable profit margin because specific booze is damn pricey). Word gets around that your tavern is THE place to hangout before an adventure, even if only you know that it's your drinks making the difference. It's like an investment.

It also gives a nice way of being evil. They're happy with the drink you got them, it was expensive grog at a good price, but since they were a problem client, you just made sure the dragon won. It wasn't bad for them, it just kind of made them a bit faster and a lot less impervious to flames. The last guys loved it. Top quality drop they said. But then again, they were fighting zombies, not dragons. Oh well.......

Cement mixers, DnD style.

Might make for more interesting rumours, specific mission send-offs, recovery of favoured clients, drink-type collection and utilization, and the ability to harm annoying clients all the more fun.

Have specifically good drinks (pricey/fairly unprofitable, but good happiness and a specific boost to an adventurer on his next mission), mixed-bag drinks (good for some things, with negatives to others) and specifically bad drinks (very pricey/completely unprofitable/costs you a lot, so gives high happiness, but could kill people. No upside other than being the most top-shelf liquor. Plus, can kill people that break your furniture, but only on their next mission).

Plus all the "normal" grog you need to serve customers to make the money required to buy these things.

[Yolan]

That's a nice idea.    At the moment the idea is it will just effect sobriety/mood, but there are still a lot of things up in the air. For example, there aren't even any adventurer guests just yet, and I'm still not sure how I will implement what is unique about them (going away and doing things between days and coming back again at a later point). Selling them some kind of special drinks might work depending on what kind of system I go with.

[Parsely]

As the owner of a bar you're always hearing about people's problems, so you act as a middleman by hooking people up with adventurers and business partners and such. Classic RPG quest giver.

[Yolan]

Yeah that was Sensei's suggestion. Definitely going to go with that. But also jokes/stories that you can deploy for improve guest mood. They can be collected in some manner and used at strategic moments.

[Yolan]

I've written a fairly lengthy post on the site (now at www.innkeepgame.com) on developments to the vision of what the game will be.

http://innkeepgame.com/new-developments/

After several months developing the idea of the game world and play space, a final piece of the puzzle has clicked into place. The adventurers who populate your inn in Innkeep! will be persistent. Your inn is where they rest and recover between their adventures, gain new members, plan their next trip, and receive advice and a fortifying meal.

[scriver]

And most importantly, where they spend their hard-earned loot!

[Yolan]

;-)

[Yolan]

Surprise! Dev diary #7.

Be warned, the sound quality is not so great on this one.

https://youtu.be/Dmy9po5qOTg


 == Major Features ==

- Addition of new kitchen area. Smooth camera transitioning when the player enters or leaves this area. Lighting of the kitchen or common room is turned on or off when the player moves in or out of the area, as is transparency of the kitchen walls. The lighting on the bar and tables as well as the pipe smoke is also factored in to take visibility into account.
- Trapdoor with cellar GUI has been added. This is the first GUI interface to be added into the game. It initially allows for swapping barrels in and out of use under the bar, although other possible functions may be added later.


 == Minor Features ==

- Addition of day counter appearing briefly in the middle of the screen at the start of each day.
- New camera system. Zooming has been removed, with what is visible on the screen fixed to make sure all the tables can be seen properly. When the player walks to either side of the screen it will move a little to show what is on either side, but then snap back once they are in the main area where all the game play takes place. There are basically two main areas where the view is fixed. The common room, and the kitchen.


 == Improvements ==

- Replacement of path finding system... While I had managed to improve the previous system it was still too unreliable and hard to work with. An entirely new approach was necessary. It has been working now without any serious problems. While implementing this system I have also improved related/connected code and unified some processes that were done separately, making everything more clear and concise.
- The code handling the players pathing towards interactable objects has been revamped. Partially as an improvement using the newly added pathing code, but also in how it handled the required distance the player needs to be from the interactable object. Previously you could directly interact with objects with certain radius, but outside that radius you would path to a specific coordinate. Now you will instead path to that coordinate -until- you fall within that same radius limit that made the pathing take place to begin with. This is much more sensible and easier to use.
- Rationalization of guest sprite system to make more modular. Tankards are no longer baked into the guest sprite, but are drawn separately. Decreases workload later for adding new guest types as the total number of sprites is much reduced. This was done previously, but baking was used to deal with the scaling issue. I found a better solution by simply changing and drawing the sprite index multiple times within a single frame of animation. Underlying code has also been vastly simplified in preparation for reproducing with new guest types.
- Guests will now come up to the bar properly instead of standing at some distance from it. They will also place their tankards on the bar surface.
- Adjustments of background tiling and positioning of objects such as the fireplace in order to ensure matching between grid and objects and room borders.
- You can now see the tankards of guests sitting facing away from the screen.
- Tankards held by guests facing the screen are now drawn on top of the tables.
- Position of the shadows of sitting guests now match up properly with their bodies.
- Tankards now have three variations instead of two, with an added "drunk a little bit" version. As guests drink the tankards transition through these states, giving you a little bit more information on how much they have left to drink.
- The contents of barrels are now shown simply by mousing over instead of selecting for ease of access to information.
- Needs icons will now pop down a little when highlighted, and also be more colorful, in order to increase visible feedback. They will also highlight (but not pop down) if their owner is moused-over.
- You will now longer highlight guests you mouse over when holding a full tankard. Instead only those guests without drinks will highlight in response to being moused-over, making it easier to quickly locate and provide drinks to those who need them.
- Improvements to menu and GUI icons to make them displayed relative to the resolution of the screen. Basically making things less likely to break and look odd when playing on other computers.


 == Bug Fixing ==

- Fixed a bug where sending a guest to a table before they had arrived at their bar slot would leave the bar slot unavailable.
- Massive streamlining of code for sending guests to tables. This had the benefit of fixing a bug which made it necessary sometimes to click multiple times to send a guest to a table which was quite full. Kind of happy about this while also embarrassed about how crazily I coded it the first time though.
- Fixed an issue with mouse-over text being written directly over the top of selected-guest text instead of replacing it.
- You will now now longer move if you click on top of a guest needs icon.
- Guest masks will now adjust to take into account if the guest is sitting (i.e. the invisible mask object will also sit), meaning you can no longer select them by hovering your mouse some distance over their head.
- Fixed character shadows being too light.

[Yolan]

Hi everybody. Here is the dev diary for January. Expect the next one in about 30 days. I did get a new mic (two actually...), but still not the greatest sound quality. Sorry! At least no nose sniffling or watermark with this video.

https://youtu.be/WwoB2219clg

 == New Features ==

- New guest type! This one is a soldier.
- New sprite for both the innkeeper and for the commoner guest. They look prettier, but also have been done with a new simplified sprite system in mind. Instead of having left, right, front, back variations, we have one simple variation. This makes more sense for when they need to be animated in the future. The new sprite faces a little to the front and to the right, and can be flipped to the left if needed by simple code. These sprites can also easily be modified slightly for making seated variations.
- Along with ale there are now two new types of drinks, wine and mead. Each have their own barrel sprites, stein sprites and needs icons.
- Guests will specifically ask for a type of drink now, rather than just generically ale. You can only serve them what they have requested.
- After standing for a little while guests will generate an icon showing that they would like a seat. This disappears when they are directed to a place to sit.
- Icons will begin to change from white to pink to red as a warning when they have not been met for some time. Neglect addressing a guests need for long enough will now result in the need being "failed", with it disappearing and the guest taking a hit to their mood.
- The display at the bottom of the screen showing guest information now also displays all current active needs of that guest in icon form.
- The mood icon in the guest info display has also been replaced. It now shows a close-up of the guest's face.


 == Improvements ==

- When moving barrels in the cellar GUI it is now possible to drag a barrel over a slot where a barrel already is present and swap it with the location of the barrel you originally grabbed.  This is just more convenient, but also necessary for when the cellar is full and you want to shift your barrels.
- When serving from behind the bar to people at the bar you now always path behind the bar to a point that is closer to them, rather than pathing out from behind the bar and around, which used to happen. Makes serving easier and more sensible.
- When mousing over a guest if they have a needs icon it will now highlight and pop down a little, basically the same but in reverse as if you moused over the needs icon and had the guest highlighted. This makes sense now that we have multiple needs and wish to know right away what that specific guest wants.
- Added a few more sound FX. These will all need re-doing later, but it's nice to at least code in some temporary ones here and there for now. There is now a sound for pouring drinks, a popping sound for needs icons, a sound for moving barrels, and a sound for the front door opening.
- Various drink qualities now exist, instead of everything simply being average. An integer between 0 - 100 is represented as very poor quality, poor quality, average quality, high quality or excellent, with each of the five descriptions representing a spectrum covering a range of 20 percent out of 100.
- Filled out the tankard shelf with more tankards. Later these might need to be purchased as you progress.
- Guests now wait a moment by the front door when first appearing, with audio playing for the door opening and being shut. They also don't issue a request for drinks until they are up near the bar.

Webpage: https://innkeepgame.com/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielOBurke

[Puzzlemaker]

Looks good mate!

[Yolan]

Cheers! Going to try and keep a sustainable steady pace going this year. Just one dev update per month going forward. Hopefully by the end of the year there's a playable prototype that people can test.

[Parsely]

Keep up the good work Yolan.

[Yolan]

Hi guys. Just recovered enough from my gross illness to be able to sit up in bed and record the February update.
 
https://youtu.be/K5lYe2KdXa0


=== New Features ===

- New guest type. A hedgewitch. Crude like a commoner, but a little more honest.
- New "shout" system using speech bubbles. When a guest wants something they will generate a clear speech bubble which contains an image of what they want, instead of simply displaying the icon above their head. The speech bubble will re-appear as the need becomes more severe, with its appearance changing to be more jagged to indicate yelling. The bubble has its own lighting object which is incorporated into the shading system, so that the shout is always clear regardless of how dark the room is, making it look like a GUI object while still actually being a regular object in the room.
- New guestbook GUI screen. Along with the cellar barrel GUI, the game now has a guestbook GUI which is accessible by clicking on an icon next to the time candle in the bottom left of the screen. This book initially serves as a bestiary of sorts, including information on the types of guests who have visited your inn to date. The pages of the book expand as new guests visit, and navigation through the pages is by way of either clicking on the corners of the pages or by using the mouse wheel. It might later be expanded to be a gateway to other game functions too, such as for keeping track of rumours and jokes/tales.
- New end of day screen. When the day ends the game now takes you to a screen where you can see a summary of the day. Information such as the amount of money made can be displayed here. The player will also have the option to save and quit from here in the future.


=== Improvements ===

- Further revamping of how guest information is displayed at the bottom of the screen. The guest mood sprite is now drawn quite a bit larger with the guest's name drawn over the bottom of it. Nicknames/titles have also been fleshed out with more variation. They now also can come before or after the guest's name.
- If a barrel is emptied out then it will no longer display "0 pints of very poor quality nothing", but instead say "an empty barrel".
- Updated the look of the game title sprite in the main menu.
- Redesigned the system for scaling characters in order to resolve an issue where mask objects were not always facing in the same way as their owners (i.e. facing to the left when their owner was facing to the right, causing the mouse-over area to not match the sprite).
- Fixed a strange bug that was causing guest masks to become solid sometimes. Turned out it was due to wrong bracketing in the player object relating to the trapdoor GUI.

[scriver]

Glad you're better. Update is looking good!

[Yolan]

Thanks. The next one should be really cool too. I'm looking forward to it. ;-)