Quests that teach the town one station at a time

By now the town had Odran, the forge, Arehucaz, the Mirror’s jewels and the ascendancy altar, and nothing told a new player any of it existed. The UX review produced a plan (quests) and the next session built it.

Six quests, one station each

Each teaches a station the moment it opens up: Odran’s wares (after the introduction), Breaking it down and A modifier of your choosing at the forge, The shard dealer (a tier-2 clear, because Arehucaz only sells tiers you’ve cleared above 1, so a tier-1 boss would unlock a quest the shop couldn’t serve), A jewel for the Mirror and Choose an ascendancy (the tier-5 boss, for 1,000 gold and some orbs).

How it reads in play: a quest unlocks by itself with a toast and a chime. Its station gets a gold “!” in the world, on its directory row, on both maps and on the E prompt; E at the station opens an explanation first and the panel second, with a one-line strip under the panel’s title. Doing the thing turns the strip green; closing the panel opens the turn-in. J opens the log with the objective as a drawn checkbox, rewards as icons and the town map with the turn-in ringed.

How it’s built

QuestBook is plain C# over two progress maps (per character and per account), so it is trivially testable. A QuestService feeds it events from a static GameEvents bus (ten existing hook points, plus boss_killed, jewel_found, shard_found, hideout_entered) and announces what changed. Rewards pay through the player’s wallet. Veterans get the quest skipped without a reward, by decision of the owner. Saves are additive, so the version didn’t change, and the co-op join payload carries quests with the host capping them (entry count, id length, status and count ranges), which the security suite checks.

Things that bit

• A class named Quests would have hidden the ArpgGame.Quests namespace, so the facade is QuestService.
• The first-visit guide opened a frame after the unlock toast and covered it for its whole six seconds. The arrival event now queues behind the guide.
• A “complete” card queued while another was showing outlived the panel it was about; stale cards are dropped.
• The big map’s “New quest” suffix ran into the neighbouring badge and is now a second line.

Tests: 24 checks covering the rules, saves, the co-op caps, then the real hideout, altar, forge, log, toast and a tier-5 boss kill.