Double call for protection

“Mighty Marquis Sabnock, builder of impregnable fortresses—I call upon you. Raise your walls around this place and around my soul. Let the envy and malice of my enemies shatter against your ramparts. Accept this incense as a token of my alliance.”
“Hail to you, Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, King of the evil spirits of the air! You who burst forth violently from the mountains and wreak great havoc—I call upon you to enter my dwelling and heed my plea. Drink of this wine and drive away the curses and envy directed at me with your fierce winds. Crush them in the storm!”

I haven't posted in a while because I'm focusing entirely on the alpha release.

Join Lathmar's Discord if you want to stay up-to-date.

https://discord.gg/FtJp6yPeQ

First of all, I will probably never use VGen again. Not because of the system itself, the system is good. The thing is, I paid two artists who didn't deliver on time. For the first one, I waited 3 months, only for them to tell me that because of university, they wouldn't have time to finish it. I was like: Ok, it happens.

Sadly, the artist had a stream, and I really liked her art, so you know what happens when someone likes the art and has access to a stream showing it... I would go there and watch it. Then someone in chat asked her about her current jobs, and she started talking bad about me, saying that I didn't pay her enough... I will not state her name here. The price I selected was the highest one with the commercial rights option there on VGen, so yeah, I just paid the exact price she asked for. Of course, I didn't tell her that I had seen the stream; I just waited patiently. And yeah, she eventually said she couldn't deliver on time and apologized, because she knew I had been waiting for months to receive it. At least she refunded me, the only things I suffered were the bad talk about how much I paid and the 5-month delay to my launch.

The second time, I paid another artist on VGen. He asked me to release the funds early. I told him the story about the previous artist, how I waited 3 months for nothing, and asked if we could just do it the normal way. He said ok. The thing is... he didn't do it either. 2 months went by and I didn't even receive the sketch he promised me. I DM'd him, he left me on read, and after 50 days, he just completely forgot about me LOL. This second artist's work was simpler and cost $80, so I thought he could easily do it on time. The first one was a little more complex and cost $300.

Third time... No, I didn't use VGen again. I took a leap of faith with a guy on Instagram. He said he had a lot of work and it would take 6 months. I thought, "This is the guy, I can feel it." And yes! After 2 months, he sent the sketch (YES!), and now I just need to wait 4 more months for the colored version. This one was $700. The funny part about my experience is that the guy without an intermediary to protect me is the one who actually delivered...

So, my tip for you artists is this: don't accept jobs that you won't actually finish. As authors, we have planned launches. Because of these delays, I literally had to push my book launch back by a whole year.

Sorry for the rant, but take this as a tip. Also, some artists have a set price, but the moment they find out I'm an author looking for a book cover, the price suddenly jacks up by around 100%, the last one was an 80%+ increase. And no, it wasn’t the commercial use fee on VGen since that was already included; they claimed it was for complexity (no problem) even after I had already selected their highest-tier option that already included that, but I at least wanted to receive the art... End of the rant.

Is there another good platform to hire artists? For my next novel, I'm looking for quality artwork with a reliable 3-month turnaround and fair pricing, because VGen... yeah, not again.

Brand new Let's Play Lathmar: The Fallen Depths (5) - First Quest - First Dungeon

Join me, fetching the the first Quest and then jump into the first static, hand-drawn dungeon.

Lathmar is a dark fantasy, first-person, party-based dungeon crawler — a modern take on classics like Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol, Wizardry, and The Bard's Tale.

You build a roster of adventurers, send them into rival guilds, and lead a party of four down into the depths beneath a city whose doors no longer lead where they should.

The game is actively in development. Systems for character creation, guild progression, turn-based combat, companions, tavern NPCs, quests, crafting, and dungeon exploration are already taking shape — along with a full death-and-recovery economy: heroes age, they can die for real, and getting them back costs coin, time, and sometimes more than that.

Lathmar: The Fallen Depths is a dark fantasy DRPG focused on exploration, dangerous multi-dungeon delves, and a near-roguelite sense of risk and discovery.

There were three major projects outside of the code:

- The game manual is complete (V2) and available on Discord. It's just as concise as the original Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol manual was back then.

- For the next major website update, I found a powerful bot (Botpress), infused it with a large portion of my internal wiki, and put it on Discord for testing.

- During a car ride, I tested OpenAI's new free speech feature and discovered through conversation that there are many more mystical spears than just Gugnir from Norse mythology. Fascinating! This led to a series of articles that will continue into August. Perhaps I'll even drop some RPG game materials for mystical weapons.

... There was also progress in the code:

~230 commits and ca. 50 pull requests

Almost 6000 lines of text, mainly for the manual and internal documentation

~8000 lines of in-game code. This is only possible with the support of Codex and Claude.

On July 31st, the version was 0.9.8.77.

Breakthroughs

The beginning of the month was marked by a graphics cleanup. As you know, the game is written in WinForms (C#) for nostalgic reasons and has had a scaling problem on different systems/monitors from the start. This finally led to a major breakthrough. Ultimately, this meant I had to rework each of the ~40+ windows individually. But now the game works and looks the same on all resolutions.

This overhaul resulted in the crash dump. The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Very useful for the upcoming alpha.

The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Another major bug was in the tavern. It took up to 6 seconds to load. At first, you'd suspect a database problem, since all the NPCs have to be loaded, along with their "knowledge" and the dialogue system. But tweaking it all didn't help. Then I remembered I'd encountered a similar issue with the Dungeon Explorer window. And sure enough, that was the problem here too. Deep in the code, a loop had become entangled, updating itself in a circle, but not the database; instead, it updated the heroes and the systems associated with them.

While working on the manual, I regularly received feedback that the game only had 30 character levels. This is, of course, not the case. Internally, it goes up to 240, and theoretically, there's no upper limit. In fact, there were values ​​in the code for `Max_Guild_Level` that determined the point at which the HP increase stopped being a full hit die and instead became a fixed 2 HP. However, the program was interpreting this as a maximum level. The bug was then fixed in 5 minutes.

I also received feedback on the Pale Covenant and how the Pale Coins work. I took that to heart and reworked that feature. I'm curious to see how it integrates into the game.

Then I wrote a development tool that started out as a map editor. Eventually, it also included the scenario editor for random dungeons, an asset tool, and the file manager. Taking that apart again and breaking it down into manageable individual programs wasn't easy at all. But now I have better and more organized development tools for creating game content.

The next and final piece of game content before the alpha is the Vanguards, where NPCs like the guildmasters introduce the various locations in the city and explain the lore.

The plan is that you can meet an NPC (guildmaster) in the tavern who will give you a task in a beginner dungeon so you can learn the game mechanics. This will, of course, involve things like quest items or, for example, door keys. Quest items must be able to leave the dungeon, but keys cannot.

...but I'll tell you more about that at the end of August or in the next video.

As always. many thanks for reading. Please leave a like and a comment.
Michael aka Mufti999

Disclaimer
All texts and pictures are © protected and may not be reproduced or modified without prior permission. -> If you share my work on other places, please include a link to the original post.
I always appreciate a quick message letting me know where Lathmar content appears.

The text was written in German and translated with google-translator.

Thank you for your support.

r/Lathmar_TFD

July was so hot that I can't even remember everything I did for Lathmar that month.

There were three major projects outside of the code:

- The game manual is complete (V2) and available on Discord. It's just as concise as the original Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol manual was back then.

- For the next major website update, I found a powerful bot (Botpress), infused it with a large portion of my internal wiki, and put it on Discord for testing.

- During a car ride, I tested OpenAI's new free speech feature and discovered through conversation that there are many more mystical spears than just Gugnir from Norse mythology. Fascinating! This led to a series of articles that will continue into August. Perhaps I'll even drop some RPG game materials for mystical weapons.

... There was also progress in the code:

~230 commits and ca. 50 pull requests

Almost 6000 lines of text, mainly for the manual and internal documentation

~8000 lines of in-game code. This is only possible with the support of Codex and Claude.

On July 31st, the version was 0.9.8.77.

Breakthroughs

The beginning of the month was marked by a graphics cleanup. As you know, the game is written in WinForms (C#) for nostalgic reasons and has had a scaling problem on different systems/monitors from the start. This finally led to a major breakthrough. Ultimately, this meant I had to rework each of the ~40+ windows individually. But now the game works and looks the same on all resolutions.

This overhaul resulted in the crash dump. The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Very useful for the upcoming alpha.

The game detects crashes and saves a log file. Another major bug was in the tavern. It took up to 6 seconds to load. At first, you'd suspect a database problem, since all the NPCs have to be loaded, along with their "knowledge" and the dialogue system. But tweaking it all didn't help. Then I remembered I'd encountered a similar issue with the Dungeon Explorer window. And sure enough, that was the problem here too. Deep in the code, a loop had become entangled, updating itself in a circle, but not the database; instead, it updated the heroes and the systems associated with them.

While working on the manual, I regularly received feedback that the game only had 30 character levels. This is, of course, not the case. Internally, it goes up to 240, and theoretically, there's no upper limit. In fact, there were values ​​in the code for `Max_Guild_Level` that determined the point at which the HP increase stopped being a full hit die and instead became a fixed 2 HP. However, the program was interpreting this as a maximum level. The bug was then fixed in 5 minutes.

I also received feedback on the Pale Covenant and how the Pale Coins work. I took that to heart and reworked that feature. I'm curious to see how it integrates into the game.

Then I wrote a development tool that started out as a map editor. Eventually, it also included the scenario editor for random dungeons, an asset tool, and the file manager. Taking that apart again and breaking it down into manageable individual programs wasn't easy at all. But now I have better and more organized development tools for creating game content.

The next and final piece of game content before the alpha is the Vanguards, where NPCs like the guildmasters introduce the various locations in the city and explain the lore.

The plan is that you can meet an NPC (guildmaster) in the tavern who will give you a task in a beginner dungeon so you can learn the game mechanics. This will, of course, involve things like quest items or, for example, door keys. Quest items must be able to leave the dungeon, but keys cannot.

...but I'll tell you more about that at the end of August or in the next video.

As always. many thanks for reading. Please leave a like and a comment.
Michael aka Mufti999

Disclaimer
All texts and pictures are © protected and may not be reproduced or modified without prior permission. -> If you share my work on other places, please include a link to the original post.
I always appreciate a quick message letting me know where Lathmar content appears.

The text was written in German and translated with google-translator.

Thank you for your support.