Knights of the Chalice 2 July 2018 Update
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If you like Dungeons & Dragons-based RPGs and are yet to play Heroic Fantasy Games' Knights of the Chalice, you should try and remedy that as soon as possible. But if you already know all about that particular top-down party-based cRPG, you might be interested in checking out the latest development update for Knights of the Chalice II. Here's an excerpt, but be sure to check out the link above for plenty of screenshots and additional details:
Graphics: I have completed the transfer of many art pieces from KotC 1 to KotC 2, greatly expanding the number of available monster tokens in KotC 2. Even though they are not high resolution, KotC 1 sprites actually make fine supplementary tokens and portraits for KotC 2.
Help entries: I'm very happy to say that that work is 100% complete. As well as information on controls and shortcut keys, the help covers all of the topics found on the website. But the in-game help is more in-depth and more exhaustive and everything is interconnected with hyperlinks. You can right-click almost anything in the character-sheet screens, character-creation screens and level-up screens to obtain specific information about what you clicked on.
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Soundtracks: I'm happy to say that I've finished adjusting the volume of the 50 soundtracks available in the game. Volumes needed to be adjusted so that one song is not much louder or much quieter than other songs. The KotC 2 soundtracks include new tracks from Manuel, new tracks from Tyson, all the tracks from my past games, plus a small number of ambient/nature tracks. Manuel and Tyson recently contributed new tracks.
Bardic sound effects: I now have the complete set of bardic music clips from Robert. There will be four musical instrument categories: lute, harp, panflute and bagpipes, each resulting in different sound effects when the party's Bard plays a song. I also have item icons for all four categories. Now I just have to make sure that the bard can equip musical instruments and implement the four sound-effect sets in the game. Robert is also planning to do a Tavern soundtrack.
Voice effects: I've just started processing the voice effects from voice actress Ariana. First I need to process them and prepare them for the game. Then I need to implement them so that they play at the right times in-game. For example, a random acknowledgement sound will be played when the player clicks to have the party move from point A to point B. Voice effects may also be played through scripts.
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What's next: First I need to complete work on voice effects. Then I need to implement equipped musical instruments and Bardic clips. Then I need to implement all the remaining wondrous/magic items that I've been planning to have in the game for a long looong time. I'm also planning to give more feats to a number of classes (as discussed in this forum thread). I also need to complete work on the spells that can be cast automatically after resting. There is also some work needed on certain script commands that I want to improve. For example, there's a script command to add dialogue answers, but I want that command to allow specifying the text colour and whether the answer can be selected by the player. That way, we can have the game display options that are not available to the party because it requires a certain Skill. Then there's some extra work needed on combat spellcasting AI. I also want to review all my notes to see if there's something important I forgot about.
Basically, the above is what I'd like to finish before focusing only on the demo adventure. In the demo, I'm planning to use high experience-point awards so that the party gains levels quickly, just like in the demo of KotC 1. It will feature a number of locations, a good number of combat encounters and several interesting riddles and puzzles, such as a piano riddle for which I recently collected piano sounds and created the following image. Traditionally, each piano key is marked with a letter, so you have to find a sequence of letters somewhere and then play the associated melody on a piano to solve the riddle and unlock something.
