It’s been a long time, almost six months since the last blog post on August 13th, 2025. Time really flies. While I’ve participated in a couple of game jams in the meantime, I’m finally and fully back into Solivium development.
A lot has changed behind the scenes, and I’ve been focusing both on gameplay mechanics and internal tooling to make development smoother and more sustainable.
Recent Additions & Changes
- Pay Off Bounty: Players can now clear their name by speaking to city guards and paying off their bounty.
- Reduced the spawn frequency of sea creatures when the player is on land. They were appearing too often and felt out of place, so this change makes the behavior feel more natural.
- Save Inspection Tool: I created a custom tool to inspect saved game data. This helps debug broken saves and validate world state transitions more easily.
- Stat Overhaul:
- Removed: Defense, Intelligence, and Charisma.
- Added: Aptitude, Resolve, and Luck.
- Aptitude reflects how well a character performs specialized class-based actions such as casting magic, using cleric scrolls, thievery, charming, and other skill-based tasks.
- Resolve governs resistance to magic and status effects.
- Luck influences loot drops, critical hits, and certain aptitude-based outcomes.
- Magic System Overhaul:
- Only mages can now cast traditional magic.
- Only clerics can use their specific clerical scrolls.
- Scrolls now require a minimum aptitude to be readied.
Save Inspection Tool
I felt this was a necessary step, since the save file is binary and, of course, not very intuitive to read. I didn’t want to build (or pull in) a JSON library in C, so I created this tool in JavaScript to read the save file and parse its contents.
Because this isn’t really a core game feature, I wasn’t particularly motivated to code it entirely from scratch. Instead, I used GitHub Copilot to help build it in a couple of hours. I don’t usually rely on Copilot for my C code, as it rarely gives me the results I’m looking for, but for standalone tools like this one, it does a pretty good job.
At the moment, it’s not possible to modify the save file from this tool, but I may add that functionality later.
Paying Bounty
I’ll be honest: I’m not entirely sure about this bounty system yet. It feels necessary for building an immersive world, but simply paying off a murder (or teleporting straight to jail) isn’t particularly interesting. On the other hand, forcing the player to sit in jail for a while doesn’t sound very appealing either.
For now, I’ll leave it as it is. I may increase the bounty values to better discourage cheap crimes and see how that feels in practice.
What’s Next?
I’m planning to reintroduce time travel mechanics inspired by Ultima II. This will become the next major focus of development.
Additionally, I’ll be doing some quest testing, going through a complete quest flow from start to finish to evaluate pacing, bugs, and overall gameplay feel.
Thanks for sticking around despite the long pause. Development is back on track, and I’m excited to bring Solivium closer to release!