I think I managed to fix the Witch Glitch!
A friend of mine came over for a bit this afternoon and I let him play through Tears of the King. Among other bugs he found, the Witch Glitch happened when I wasn’t expecting it to. So after he left, I set about trying to fix it and a few other things he found (like the fact that the woodcutter starts clearing the path to the Fairy Forest way before he’s supposed to). I ended up removing the ability to grab the first ingredient before you’ve talked to the Witch. As far as I could tell, having the ability to grab it either before or after talking to her was a big part of my problem because then I was trying to make things happen with two different switches. So rather than dealing with the two switches, I’ve simplified things for myself and only have to deal with one. As far as I can tell, this has solved a lot of the problems I’ve been having with my events.
I’m hoping that the way things are now isn’t too rail-roadey for players. But making the game more linear has helped to make things easier for me designing the game, and to get the player to the Witch’s house faster. When my friend was play testing, he wandered through the mushroom cave (without finding the mushroom), up to the tower, and got confused about where he was supposed to go until I told him he couldn’t do anything there yet. So realistically, allowing you access to the mushroom cave (or the tower’s base at the very least) early in the game wasn’t a good thing if it lets you get sidetracked and lost. But I’ll have to see what other people say when they play it.
Oh, and I’d like to give a shout-out to GrandmaDeb for her switch tutorial game! I played through it before deciding to take out the mushroom functionality.
In addition to all of these bug fixes, I actually did build another map last night. I’ve been needing to build a mine near Storm Point, which is where another of the ingredients is going to be. I was planning on sketching out ideas for a mine, but I ended up just building, which resulted in this:
Sorry that this picture is so tiny. The original picture was in 1/2 scale, but it’s now a lot smaller because I had to stitch two screenshots together in paint. Plus I had to shrink them so I could properly crop the map into one image. From here, I need to keep building a few more maps that connect to this one (basically the player will be going deeper into the mountain until they find the next ingredient). Oh, and I need to straighten up the path of that second big forest map I started (it’s still not finished, and probably won’t be for awhile yet). Right now the paths are too windy, which is a pain to walk on. After playing through parts of a different game made with RPG Maker, I’ve decided that I’m going to have as few diagonals in my maps as possible because they’re really annoying in a grid.
An Acquaintance with Letters 