Today’s Music Choice

“For Glory & Order Everlasting.” Just one of the random battle themes you might encounter while on assignment. I suppose I should mention that I’ve created a playlist of all the music I’ve shared thus far right’chere.

Character Introduction: The Dwellers

All character designs and artwork by Bianca Augusta.

Today’s introduction is a cluster of characters representing the “dwellers” of Cradle – that is, natural-born surface inhabitants in opposition to the “spacefarer” factions. As such, they have more mundane, fantasy-like designs to their clothing, and prefer to use simple weapons and magic in combat.

At the start of the story, you will be able to choose whether you want to represent the dwellers or the spacefarers. This will change your possible story paths, and also your starting allies. In this case, choosing the dwellers will start your army off with these four (plus your “commander” character). Other characters will join naturally over the course of the story, depending on your path, and of course, you can fill your ranks with custom characters if you desire. However, story characters will be able to join you in “social” scenes, which will grant them unique abilities and other bonuses as you gain their trust and learn about their histories and help them with their problems.

Here’s the main dweller-side playable cast. Note that, depending on your choices, you’ll be able to recruit the spacefarers as well, and vice versa if you begin the game as the other faction. Or, you may clash with them instead. It’s up to you.

Starting from the left:

• Reflen Farborn is a young human from the city of Sunbreak in the humans’ country of Duleur. While working as an office clerk for the city government, he seizes upon the opportunity to act as a civilian ambassador to the spacefarers to make the first peaceful contact in over 200 years. Naive but eager to impress, he always speaks his mind and is prone to acts of carelessness. His starting class is the journeyman.
• Jess Kelana is next, accompanying Reflen as his government-appointed guardian. A drekoran from the Ana region of Sevurox, she is stoic and terse, but makes for an imposing figure at her ward’s side. Her starting class is the bodyguard.
• Kesh Alkara is third in line, and joins as a volunteer after witnessing the events at the first contact between the dwellers and spacefarers. A cheerful old soul, Kesh is a carnavin living in Sunbreak, where he teaches world history and the history of magic use on Cradle. His starting class is the sunspell.
• Falitza Sunswept is last in line, and like Kesh, she volunteers after seeing the first contact for herself. Always high-spirited and fiery-tempered, she divulges little about herself, but is recruited into the Cradle Project out of desperation for any helping hands the ambassadors can get. Her starting class is the flightblade.

A couple of these characters are returning from some form or another from my previous series of games, as Eden’s Last Sunrise is a half-reboot of those games. But, even if you’re familiar with those incarnations, there will be plenty more surprises to follow.

Progress Report

Last week, I was working on implementing a “virtual cursor” of sorts into the game to allow a gamepad to control the game in similar ways to a mouse. This is pretty much complete now, barring some testing, and the gamepad allows a few additional shortcuts as well, such as tabbing between characters or UI pages quickly.

So this section isn’t completely devoid of pictures, here’s a shot of the cursor in action. That pointer graphic is definitely not finalized.

This week, I’m finishing up more of the secondary systems so I can get the boring stuff out of the way. I’ve already finished the custom character creation interface – choosing a slot, creating and recruiting a unit, and deleting them if desired.

Next, I’m going to finally work on the save data handler. I will probably port in my code from The Tenth Line as a base, and then just change the static data objects that need to get serialized. The loading process is basically this in reverse – pulling the serialized objects and plugging them into the live data members. This should go pretty briskly. The most time-consuming part will be building the save/load UI itself. I will be allowing way more than 4 slots this time around, so I’ll need to build some pagination and whatnot into the interface this time. Excitement.

After that, I’ll start on the crafting interface. “Crafting” in Eden’s Last Sunrise involves upgrading weapons to make them stronger, more accurate, and able to carry more ammo. Weapons are a finite resource, and most are pretty specialized (especially when elements are taken into account), so collecting crafting loot and upgrading your gear is a good way to stay ahead of the curve. My original plan was to make crafting take up time on the calendar to encourage planning, but I think that will just over-complicate things. The good news is, unlike some other Tactics games released in the 21st century, there is no chance of failure for the upgrade.

Next time: Re-introducing the spacefarers!