An optional fight decided by weather
The Ember Lord, a fire knight, has been in the game since September with nowhere to stand. He now has the Burnt Hall, an optional room off the Citadel's Great Hall. A fire took half its roof: the end where you walk in is still covered and the far half is open to the sky.
That layout is the design. Like the plant boss in the courtyard, his fire is his armour, and while it burns your blows barely scratch him. When rain falls through the broken roof the fire goes out and he becomes very hittable. A Monument one door away lets a player wait for the weather. He pays a memory core and a large pile of Vestiges, and because he is optional, the main road does not change. No new art went in: it is the Citadel's own stone with ash on the floor and embers in the air. A later pass added a chalked note by the door pointing players toward the rain.
Companions with a job
Jess, the blacksmith's apprentice, joins through a short quest about proving a hammer she made herself. Her fighting rules were written to match that character instead of using the generic companion attack:
- She cracks shields. When her hammer lands on a raised guard, its weight follows a beat later and wears the guard down. A regular soldier's shield should go in three to five of her blows. Bosses take half.
- She knows whose turn it is. When an enemy's guard breaks and leaves it open, she steps back and leaves the opening to you.
- She uses the scenery on purpose. If something in the terrain reacts to iron and stone next to an enemy, she runs over and smashes it.
- A special move, "Crack it!": she sprints at your target and brings the hammer down overhead. A raised guard breaks outright, every time, and the opening is yours. It comes round about every 18 seconds.
Nora, a hooded trapper, is the next recruit and fights as a marksman, with a long reach and less health than most of the party. Her quest has you walk her snare line to find out what has been robbing it.
Jess and an old boar she tests the hammer on both got their own sprites that day. The boar is about a third bigger than the regular boars, grey round the muzzle, with a notched ear, chipped tusks and a splinter of the painted plaza rail still in his back. He uses every regular boar move, so he fights like one, only tougher. Like everything since September the art has no black outlines: every edge is a darker shade of whatever it borders. Both were baked like the rest of the creatures, compared against the existing art at true in-game size, and approved before they went in.
Written, then compiled
The Jess and Nora work was written one evening and not compiled, and the update that day said plainly that it would change once it was tried. The next morning it went through the editor and compiled with no errors on the first try. The quest content was generated and checked, 12 quests and 29 readable notes, all clean. Rule checks went from 749 to 750 passing, none failing, and the combat play tests (18 of 18) and the village protest tests (5 of 5) pass.
What the tests caught
Two kinds of test pollution turned up again. Two automated tests could leave an enemy behind when they failed, which then tripped the next test. Their enemies now belong to the area they are tested in, so they are cleaned up whether the test passes or not. Separately, a test that takes a picture of a conversation left that conversation open, so the next test found nobody willing to talk.
One small fix of the same kind in the game itself: the party health display now has room for a fifth companion, so nobody silently drops off it. Nobody had played Nora's quest by hand yet at the end of the day.