I've completed the lock system. Here was the problem. As you've probably noticed in the palace graphics, many of the doors have locks. As it were, to get through the lock you would need a key that had the same code as the lock, enough power to smash the lock, or enough skill to pick the lock. With all 3 of these methods in-play, locks provided very little barrier to stopping the player from proceeding rendering them pretty useless.

In order to make them useful as locks again, I've eliminated keys. This leaves picking locks using skill, with the % of success being reduced, and smashing locks using power, with the % being greatly reduced and maintaining the necessity of having a weapon to do that, except for a few of the races. In the place of keys, I've included a couple of Lock Picks as collectibles that increase the lock picking % by 25. They may be found by random chance or, if the Locksmith happens to be in the palace, they can be purchased directly from him. He also has a surprise item for sale which I'm not revealing here.

One of the reasons behind this method is it forces players to be more concerned about their skill level. I've tried to make all 5 attributes important in some way so that players don't fall into the trap of only addressing power and psychic because those are primarly for combat. Now, if they do that, the simplicity of a lock may become a problem if they don't have the skill to address it.

The other thing that I've done lately is update the graphics on the Relics. Here's some comparisons of the old and new with the back of the Relic piece first.

Moving on to new graphics and description mats for terrain tiles.

My last journal entry (Sept 4, below) talked about the first change I wanted to make in the palace system which was the ability to distribute rooms and relics randomly as the game begins. The next change I wanted to make is the 'event' system in the palace. As it stands, many of the rooms call for an event, which could be a creature or roamer, weather changes, a gem, gold, a collectible, some fortunate or adverse occurrence, etc. ...any number of things.

Some rooms have no events as there's some entity already in the room or it's special in some way but most do call for an event. We used to determine the number of events by rolling a D4-1.... a roll of 1 meant no event, a roll of 4 meant 3 events and that can be rough. I never really liked this system as I felt a room should be fixed once it's revealed so players can plan accordingly.

It's now set so that, when a palace room is sent to the palace, a random number of events is set for that room and when the room is displayed, it shows the number of events in the lower left corner. This random number is generated with a roll containing results: 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2. So, 1 event will occur 50% of the time, 0 events will occur about 33% of the time and 2 events will only occur about 16% of the time.

Here's a small section of the palace showing 4 rooms that have been revealed. The Locksmith has no event indicator because encountering him is essentially the event for the room. Laurica's Tomb, the Dungeon, and the Kitchen all have an indicator in the lower left showing the number of events the player must encounter when the room is entered.

Next, I'm going to rebuld the 'lock' system.

Since my last update, I've replaced all the graphics and descriptions for the palace rooms (see Article #19 - Merchants, Clans & Palace Rooms). Once I had all of that stuff installed, there's a few things I wanted to change in the palace system. The first being a system where all the palace rooms and relics are randomized for each game without having to load a new map configuration.

As I've probably mentioned before, the To Be King module is just a base game and it requires a map configuration file loaded with it as an extension, that contains pre-created maps and all the assets necessary for those maps. That way, whenever players load a new extension, the maps will all change creating a dynamic environment. This, however, presents a problem when it comes to Laurica's Palace.

Here's a small section of the palace from a typical map configuration file. You have palace rooms that are face down and a relic in each room, also face down. Players will a have a quest to find a particular relic in the palace so they'll have to search room-by-room. When a player enters a room for the first time, the room is flipped over and revealed to everyone. After completing whatever tasks the room requires, they may privately peek at the relic to see if it's theirs.

The problem with this setup was that the palace rooms and relics are static. So, if players have already played with these maps, they're going to know what the rooms are and the relics within them, which defeats the purpose the palace being a mystery to explore. What I needed to do was to somehow randomize everything in the palace at the beginning of the game even if the palace layout itself doesn't change. ...and I did that.

The new map configuration setup still creates a layout of rooms. However, the 'rooms' in this case are actually just placeholders. After everyone creates their characters, someone would click the 'New Round' button to start round 1. Doing this already stocks the merchants with goods and sets up a few other things as well. So, I just attached a palace builder sub-routine to the button. What happens is, the game randomly selects 12 out of 40 rooms, randomly sends them out to the place holders, randomly sends a relic to each room and then removes the place holders. Walla! Even though the room layout doesn't change, all the rooms are different and the relics have been scattered.

Here's an example. The first pic shows a small piece of the palace and what it looks like before the game starts. Note that there's no relic and the 'Palace Room' isn't really a room but a place holder. The second picture shows what's happened when I start the game. I've flipped the room and revealed the relic showing it's the Warp Room and the relic is Priezan's Stick. The third pic shows that when I started a brand new game, the room and relic have changed to a Private Zoo and Caul's Journal. So, in this way, the room and relics will always be different no matter how often you play with specific map extension.

My next journal entry will talk about the new 'Event' system I placed in the palace.

Over the past week or so, I've been updating the merchants, the clan shields and I'm now working on the palace rooms. I'll be posting a new article with a whole bunch of new art samples. In the meantime, here's a teaser of some of the new stuff.

The merchants are terrain tiles on the map that players visit to pick up supplies and services. There's several and, because there's a different map configuration in each game. Some may be scarce, having only one tile available instead of two, or hard to get to. Here's a few samples:

I also upgraded the clan shields. When a player enters the game, they choose a clan. This establishes their player side and a small icon of the clan shield is placed as a tag on everything that belongs to them. Their inventory window and spell book also have a display of their shield, as well as their stats.

I already had shields made from clip art but I upgraded them. As you can see, the new ones are looking much better:

I'm currently working on the palace rooms and having a lot of fun doing it. The palace map has 12 rooms but when it's built, it pulls from a pool of 40 rooms so the players never know what rooms they're going to find into someone enters one of them and flips it over. Here's just a couple of possibilites:

Time to get back to work.

I've successfully renamed all the graphics I wanted to rename ...at least those that didn't require any art updates. I've now begun updating graphics for the merchants. For this, I'll be updating the merchant's tile on the map, its description mat and the title banner for the merchants shop window all at the same time.

Here's a shot of me creating all the new pieces for the Blacksmith. Click the image to get a larger look at it.

After I finish the merchants, I'll do the rest of the terrain tiles for Mariah Island and publish an article of pictures.

All 1,993 graphics within the module are now cataloged. This doesn't count the terrain tile graphics used in the Map Maker module but I'm pretty sure every one of those are generic clip art tiles. I'll review them later to make sure. The next step is to rename those graphics that do NOT need new art or updating so I can get those out of the way. Then I'll work on the pieces that need new artwork.

Here's a shot of the catalog on the left and the 'Buttons' folder on the right duing the file renaming process. Click the image to get a larger look at it.

Now that I've renamed all the files I want to rename, it's time to put the newly renamed graphics into the module. The next picture shows the module editor on the left and the graphic catalog on the right and I'm currently updating the Mariah Lowlands [ML] setup controller on the Kingdom map.

This shot shows me replacing the current graphic with the newly renamed graphic.

Now that I've replaced a block of graphics, I'm using the 'Remove Unused Images' feature in Vassal to see if the list of old graphics that I've supposedly removed and comparing it to my list. As shown in this graphic, it's a match so I know that I haven't forgotten something within the module. I can now just move everything over to the right column and click the 'Remove file' button and all those old graphics will go away.

I'll finish doing the graphics replacement and then start working on updating graphics for the terrain tiles that need it.

Now that I've completed replacing the descriptions and graphics for the cards in the game (which amounts to about 1200 pieces), I've decided to create a complete catalog of all graphics being used in the game to, not only prevent myself from being totally confused over what needs to done and what doesn't, but also to plan my next course of action.

To do that, I've extracted the graphics library and the XML Build file from the module so that I can examine them more closely. This first graphic shows a view of the graphics library on the right and me cataloging those graphics into a spreadsheet on the left along with general information on each one. That way, I can sort the spreadsheet various different ways to look at specific items, types of items, Items that need graphic updates, alphabetically, etc. Click the image to get a larger look at it.

I usually know exactly where a graphic is used in the game but there's some graphics, especially icons and buttons, that may be used in places that I don't recall. That's easy to do considering I've been working on this module for years and it's huge. So, when I'm listing a graphic in the catalog, I'll run a search for the graphics file name in the modules XML Build file and note where it's being used.

If I maintain the original filename, this isn't really a problem as all I have to do is replace the graphic on one piece and then all the pieces that use that graphic will use the new one. However, I'm renaming a lot of the graphic files for organizational reasons and, in that case, I need to know all instances where that graphic is being used. Vassal has a nice feature in that in will auto remove any graphics that are not being used. So, if I change a file name and apply that new graphics to all the pieces that use it, Vassal should effectively remove the old graphic with the old filename. If it does, I know I got all instances done correctly. If it doesn't, then I know I missed one or more.

This graphic shows the module editor on the left, currently displaying the Wish List window properties. and on the the right is the XML Build file where I've run a search for all instances of the file name for the Wish List icon. You can see the instance I found on this search on the left in the map window properties. Click the image below for a larger view.

Once I've got everything cataloged, I'm going to start renaming graphics that I want renamed and implementing them into the module. Then I'll work on creating updated graphics for other pieces, mostly landscape tiles at this point.