If I’m being honest, this isn’t the very first fight.  It’s not even the very first fight of this particular subscriber (apparently she fought a different monster, before fighting this one, since she already had a few experience points when I checked her stats, later);  this is just the first fight that I managed to screenshot in v2.  Without a “pause the simulation” button, these little fights can finish too quickly for me to make a nice screenshot!

In this shot, Erica Henderson’s character (a level 1 tourist, displayed in blue), is fighting a vile level 0 llama (displayed in red).  Obviously there are a few bugs; the two are so close together that they’re actually intersecting.  This seems to be happening almost all the time, when a monster and a player fight each other.  Not entirely sure why that is.  It’d also help if they would display health bars over their heads, the way that they did in v1.1.

Anyhow, shortly after I took this screenshot, Erica won the fight and wandered off, presumably to grind her way to level 2 (since I hadn’t placed any quests for her to work on or social hubs for her to visit).  This combat is still the same simplistic combat model that I originally wrote for version 1.1.  The players are always winning these fights, at the moment.  This probably isn’t surprising;  all the monsters are level zero, because I haven’t set up a way to tell the game what level the monsters should be.  I’ll need to do that soon.

But really, the combat model really isn’t relevant to the things I’m intending to show for milestone 1, so I’m not going to work on making it more interesting until later on;  possibly milestone 2.  I may not even address the issue of “level zero monsters” until later.  Now that I’ve been able to show players having combat and actually gaining levels, I can probably just ignore combat and come back to it after milestone 1.

So here’s the list of mandatory stuff remaining for milestone 1:  Placing NPCs and editing quests.  Give characters an inventory (abstracted to ‘weapon’ vs. ‘no weapon’ + in-game currency).  Add a weapon shop where a character can exchange in-game currency for a weapon.  Placeable mountain passes to allow players to transit from one region to another.  Then finally, implement a simple score for the player:  points for every character who leaves the starting region which the player is in charge of.  Penalty points if the character is not a particular level (I’m thinking either 3 or 4 is probably about right).  More penalty points if the character does not have a weapon.  Bonus points if the character’s subscriber is happy with the game, at the time when they leave the starting region.

So it’s getting closer!  Just not as quickly as I’d hoped.