Alright, I've been working these last few weeks (working with what little time I had free from real life activities) on Team Gold's RMN Summer Games Contest Entry. (It's here btw, give it a try if you wish, it's really short).

As I prepare to resume working on Legacy, I realize I've been thinking a lot lately on why it's taking me so long to finish this game.
Perhaps the fault lies within that "* Emphasis on exploration and side-quests." line below features, on the game profile.
I suppose that sentence is not one to be taken lightly. I've always loved wide-open sandbox RPGs, like Daggerfall, Might & Magic, etc., where you had lots of choices to pursue and no one forcing you to go a particular path, so I wanted to implement a little of that in this game.

Of course, I also decided early on that since this was my first game, I should not get too crazy with the open-endedness. There will be a fairly strict main plot quest, and some side quests here and there for the player to complete if he wishes to. Thus, this is nowhere near a wide-open sandbox, but those sidequests do take a lot of time. Legacy of the Guilds is supposed to be short-game: 5 towns, approx 3 hours of gameplay and 10 levels of experience. But right now, with little more than half of the game completed, I already have 13 different sidequests.

Is this too much?
What are your feelings on an wide-open-sandbox/strictly-linear RPG hybrid?

After that pointless rant, I will discuss some new small features I've been thinking about:
* On searching for hidden items: Right now, the player can find several hidden items around towns and in caves, etc.
They're represented by small glowing spots, and searching those spots rewards you with a hidden item.
I've been thinking about adding a "Perception" passive skill that basically allows the player to find more and more rare hidden items.
It would work like this: at the beginning of the game, all hidden items are visible to the player, but in the later maps, hidden items will have a minimum "Perception" requirement to be visible. Each time a player loots a hidden item spot, his perception skill increases.
This way, players who actively pay attention to the early hidden items and loot them, will be able to find the more rare ones later in the game.
Players who don't care about them will eventually stop finding them, since they never looted the earlier ones anyway.
Of course, all hidden items found this way are not mandatory to winning the game and won't unbalance the game very much.

* On respawning alchemy reagents: It has come to my attention that harvestable reagents for alchemy recipes are too scarce once the player has gathered them from the wilderness the firs time. I have decided to make them respawn. My idea for this is as follows:
After being harvested, the ingredient node clears. Upon reentering the map, they will have a 5% chance of respawning. If they don't respawn after the first revisit, the chance goes up to 10% for future visits to the same map. What do you think about this method? I intend to do this because putting an individual timer on the thousand ingredient nodes would be unpractical at my current degree of knowledge.
I have to decided to implement multiple timers to give a fixed time to each ingredient node to respawn! thanks very much to yuhikari for providing a link.

Ok! That is it for this blog post. A screenshot of a window I'm working on right now:


As you can see, states are now shown as icons (a-la RMVX) and you have a new command that allows you to see your stats (handy to check how much that PDEF down spell hurt you).

I hope it was not too long to read, and I look forward to your experiences with wide-open sanbox RPGs and stuff. :)