Devlog #105: poison

Howdy!

I love these bi-weekly entries as they allow me to take a look at progress periodically. And there is progress indeed!

The localisation support is nearly finished. Well, at least in its current state. I've extracted above 800 distinct translation keys to separate language files. I have to admit that being able to speak Polish is a good thing, as it's a pretty difficult language, especially compared to English. Knowing about the "feature" of words being different depending on the case and gender allowed me to simplify some of the texts and split the ones that I knew might be problematic also in other languages.

I also did lots of cleaning up. I removed some unnecessary/redundant texts.

It turned out that the extraction of the translation keys was not the most difficult part. Adding the Polish translation text was the real challenge, as it was the first time in which the UI had to support texts with different sizes.

The good thing is that the font that I am using has support for the Russian alphabet, so I'll be having no extra problems when dealing with a Russian translation.



Anyway, I will be spending some more time on the localisation stuff to make sure it's polished.

There is one other feature that I believe I haven't mentioned here yet: the poison.

Rats in Shardpunk's world are filthy. And they like spreading that filth, especially when they're busy plundering the capital city of the Human Empire which they've just sneakily attacked (as that's the plot of Shardpunk, if you're not aware of it yet).



So there's a rat type carrying that poisonous "mortar" that will make sure that your life gets more difficult. They rarely hit your squad members, but are good with limiting your movement options.



You might have guessed that when a character enters the poisonous cloud, they receive the "poisoned" trait which drains their hit points for a number of turns.



Now, when a character loses all their HPs and enters the "bleeding" state, the poison stops working. I've decided that it would be too frustrating. Poison effects can disappear after few turns, or you can heal it using stimpaks.

And, last but not least, these poisonous rats are capable of doing melee attacks if you get too close to them. That should make the players respect them more!



That's it for this update. I hope you enjoyed it! Do remember to jump into the Discord server to post your feedback. And play the demo if you haven't already!

Take care!