How a party works
Companions are the day's main system. A party is the hero and up to four companions, and three pieces of it went in.
- Enemies scale with the party. Every companion with you adds 1 percent to each enemy's health and damage, live. An enemy keeps the same share of its health when the party changes, so sending someone home takes the bonus straight off.
- A tactics grid for each companion. One axis runs from Attack to Guard and the other from Approach to Keep Away. Together they set how often a companion swings, how carefully they dodge, how far they chase and how close they stand.
- A ring menu for quick orders in a fight: Attack my target, Regroup, Hold back, Go all out, and each companion's special once you have seen it. Time slows while the menu is open.
Managing the party came later in the day. A villager who has joined for good can be sent home from the Party page, with a second press to confirm, and asked back by talking to them in the village. Two companions never leave, so they have no button. Building it surfaced two layout limits: the party screen and the on-screen bars each had room for only two companions, and both were widened.
The first complete test run
The game has two kinds of automated tests: quick checks of the rules, and play tests that boot the game and drive it with a simulated keyboard, walking every area, fighting, talking and starting from the title screen. The play tests used to hang partway through, so they always ran in small groups. That night the whole set ran to the end for the first time, in about two hours: 128 passed and 50 failed.
Most of the 50 were not real. One test left an enemy standing after it finished, and every test after it tripped over the leftover. Run on their own, the combat, guard and parry, title screen, castle gate, cave and balloon-quest tests all pass.
The run still caught real things:
- A way out you could not reach. In the Valley of Balloons the road back up the mountain started just past the last ground the hero can stand on. The exit was visible and unreachable. It now sits on the road.
- Two out-of-date tests. One still believed the crash site had a single exit, when it now has a second that stays locked until a quest opens it. The other did not know the AI player now resumes from its own save, and it now puts that save back afterwards so a test never costs the AI its progress.
The honest part: the scorecard that tracks the game's completion went down slightly that night, because admitting the failing play tests cost a little.
Smaller fixes and a build
- The Forbidden Cave had a way in and no visible way out. A tunnel now runs west from its Monument with daylight at the far end, and the Monument also offers to take you out. The walk-out passed its play test the same night.
- Rebuilding the item data blanked some names, including the arrows and the Letter of Passage. That is fixed at the root, not patched per item.
- Every Monument now stands on its own statue from a sheet of twenty, in the order you reach them.
- Every play session now leaves a log: errors (each counted, with a screenshot the first time it appears), deaths, bosses, quests, levels and a frame-rate check every 30 seconds. One command turns the logs into a short report.
- Castle carpets. The foyer runner and the Citadel patches were rated crude, so four woven runners were drawn, approved and installed. A capture then showed a shrub from a separate tree pass growing through one of them, so the runners now exclude scatter.
The Windows build came to 3,363 MB in 153.5 seconds. Rule checks went from 722 to 731 to 740 passing through the day, none failing, though the build itself has not been played by hand.