Secret Agent Wizard Boy and the International Crime Syndicate News

[p]GOOD MORNING, SPIES! Sorry it's been a bit since the last post! I've been trying to wait until we had just the right things to talk about before I wrote this one. Here's where we're at.[/p][p][/p][h2]The Castle[/h2][p]As with every update post, we're getting more and more work done on the new castle! It's really starting to come together in a meaningful way. Evan, David, and I together have been working on its layout and figuring out how all the interior parts relate to each other (which is actually the majority of the work we've been doing for the last couple months, despite what the length of the rest of the update post may make you think).[/p][p][/p][p]Question: why don't I show much of the interior any time I do these dev updates? Answer: well, it's actually just because it's not lit yet. Lighting is something we prefer to do close to last in the environment pipeline, which is totally fine from a development perspective, but it's really hard to imagine what something is supposed to look like when it's not lit correctly if you're not in the project every day. For instance, in the zoom-out screenshot below, even ignoring the white cubes and sectioned off geometry, something feels. . . off about it, right? If you feel that way, it's likely because the environment light is literally just Unreal's default when you create a scene. We are changing this, but it'll be the last step of making the environment before we put in props. (Doesn't help that a lot of the walls are currently a flat texture too hahaha).[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]As another example, here's the same environment with and without lighting. Kinda a huge difference.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]As a reminder, the goal is not to fully finish this new castle for this update, but to get it to a "version one" state so it can act as a playground area for the moment and the base for us to put in what will be the main gameplay loop of Wizard Boy. Lighting will be included hahaha.[/p][p][/p][h2]Other New Stuff[/h2][p]Okay, so this is the stuff that's a bit more interesting to talk about for this update. I have been working on a lot of different types of new ideas and polishing old ideas to expand Wizard Boy apart from just adding in the new castle.[/p][p][/p][h3]Possession Changes[/h3][p]So, the spell Personum Assumum hasn't really been what it could be. I know it, you know it, and I've been meaning to take a second pass on it pretty much since we released into early access. Well, I finally did! Here's the two big, big changes:[/p][p][/p]

1. [p]You can now possess props. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like and pretty much means everything you can think of. In theory this is a small change but gives just a WEALTH of new possibilities. And yes, while possessing a prop, you can scoot around just like in prop hunt. (This took me weeks to implement, by the way - I even made a whole video about it: [dynamiclink][/dynamiclink])[/p]
2. [p]While possessing an NPC, if you get defeated, Wizard Boy will pop out into the location they were at automatically. This means that when you possess an NPC, you're not longer stuck in them, and encourages you to pop in and out of NPCs more at your own will.[/p]

[p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Prop Collection[/h3][p]We've added this kinda weird but also very interesting side questy-thing that you can choose to play with or not completely at your discretion. In the spy lair, there's now a machine that can "collect" props. If you collect a prop, it gets added to your collection permanently. It will also give you a couple biscuits as a reward![/p][p][/p][p]This seems like an "out of left field" sort of addition. . . and it is. Seemed like it might be a fun thing to run around the castle finding new items to collect. Since adding it we've also gotten some cool ideas of how to utilize it in some cool ways down the line too.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h3]Stats[/h3][p]Wizard Boy is now shows some select stats like "enemies defeated, props eaten, steps taken, etc." Small thing, but for a game like this it's really fun to see how far you go. You'll have to find the stat computer to see them![/p][p][/p][h3]Vehicles[/h3][p]The tank and broom have been polished and are ready for their V1 debut, or at least mostly (there's one super fringe bug that I still know of but it's so wild it might honestly just stay for the time being).[/p][p][/p][h3]New Missions/Gadgets[/h3][p]I've added something like 10 new missions onto the mission board and several fun gadgets as well, including one that makes you blow up when defeated, one that can transfer fall damage into jump power on your next jump, and some other ones.[/p][p][/p][h3]8 Player Multiplayer (I think)[/h3][p]I have opened up the floodgates of Wizard Boy accepting up to 8 players at once. I have to this point not been able to test it. Could work great, could be so incredibly CPU-intensive that it barely functions. Buuuuuuttt, the option is there, so if you're game to try, give it a go![/p][p][/p][h3]Some Hefty CPU Optimization[/h3][p]I took a couple days to really dig around the codebase to see if there was places I was missing that could help bring down the CPU overhead of Wizard Boy. Turns out, there were a couple really big things that I had missed before that took a bit of refactoring but should significantly help Wizard Boy to run better on lower-end hardware. To be fully transparent, this is also a safeguard against us making a larger castle and allowing more players at once, since both of those things could potentially drag down processing more. The hope is that after all these optimizations, Wizard Boy will run better in the existing area and equivalently to current in the new area. If it's not there now, we'll get there eventually.[/p][p][/p][h3]Fall Damage Changes[/h3][p]I've retooled fall damage to be a tiny bit more generous by default, scale a little slower, but then also rethought the fall damage upgrades in several ways. Overall, the changes will make fall damage a bit more forgiving for new players but for "power players" the ability to just essentially take the mechanic away entirely is harder to achieve.[/p][p][/p][h3]Dopelo Change[/h3][p]One small but important change is being considered for Dopelo, which is the idea that when you duplicate a biscuit, it's a "fake biscuit" in the same way as when you duplicate props they're "fake props." In practice, this is actually a pretty minor change in most cases (gets displayed differently on the UI, looks purple when it's duplicated), but most importantly the idea is that fake biscuits reset during cleanup day but real biscuits do not. This is so we as designers have a bit more flexibility with the in-game economy that in all honesty we currently don't have. All uses for the fake biscuits are currently the same, although maybe shop keepers should get angry if you use them to purchase stuff?[/p][p][/p][h3]Mission Failure Change[/h3][p]Okay, another small but meaningful change. We are migrating away from the idea of "failing" your mission if you reset the days too many times. Instead, "cleanup day" happens which resets the non-mission-critical things in the castle. This change is purely optics - mechanically, it's identical to how it functions now.[/p][p][/p][p]A long-winded chain of thought as to why this really small change is being made: we were originally intending for Wizard Boy to be a fairly small game that you were supposed to slowly learn about the castle and mechanics enough to be able to complete the whole thing in a single in-game week. Which, for the record, is still a really cool idea. However, once people got their hands on the game, it became pretty obvious that a lot of enjoyment comes from just "being in the world" and playing around with the wonky mechanics and finding secrets and stuff. It also was received, in all honesty, much more warmly than I personally thought it would be, which led us to realizing we really should be thinking about our game in a bit larger box than we were currently thinking about it in. You've already felt and generally really liked the results of this thinking - a lot of changes we made last update were because of this redirection (adding in upgrades, missions, spy lair, etc.)[/p][p][/p][p]Second part of this puzzle: we've got a plan on how to reapproach the ultimate goal of the game. Our v1 draft was "complete the whole game in one in-game week." Our v2 draft was "we'll have breakout dungeon spaces that you can do infinitely and then maybe one final dungeon that would act as the end of the game." We followed that for a bit but something didn't quite feel right as we tried it out. Our v3 draft was to take the dungeon idea but make them into more narrative spy-things like infiltrating an auction or skiing down a hill. For a good while we felt like this was the right call, but it also left very little room for. . . you know, having a story, making a world, etc. And it's very tough to make an environment where all of these things can either take place or have a logical in-world outlet to a loading zone where these things could take place.[/p][p][/p][p]So our v4 is taking a bit of the best of all the ideas before. The castle is going to be the main space, like in v1, but there's going to be encouragement to replay missions to re-experiment and try to do them better like in v2, but these missions are going to have more of a narrative spin like in v3. And how does this all come together? We're kinda currently mentally imagining something that maybe feels more like "episodes of a kid's TV show" where there's a bespoke goal and the castle has changes depending on what "episode" you're in, but the main pieces are still the same. This also completely allows us to still have breakout loading spaces for any given mission if we want, but doesn't at all mean we have to like in v3 and we don't need to find in-environment places for them to go. So like, you know, "Episode 1" is coming into the castle. "Episode 4" could be "Grumblemort made a big laser on the tower and you have to deactivate it." Maybe in some "episodes" the castle is nighttime and every area is an off-limits area. Some episodes could be really mundane like just going to a class to get a spell, which means if you're playing with friends that don't have that spell you'd likely want to do it. Maybe some episodes take place in a completely separate environment (we're already planning on this BTW). Let you imagination kinda run wild. We're still working on the idea, so don't be surprised if that ends up changing some before we land it.[/p][p][/p][p]That all said, though, because of this and also some other smaller reasons, we've been increasingly thinking that presenting the reset time as a "mission failed" state just. . . doesn't feel right. Everything you do is PART of the story, you know? If you "fail" that means what you did isn't narratively meaningful anymore. It's also kinda' frustrating to a certain type of player to be told they failed when the game is so. . . hard to not fail in. Maybe once we solidify the first couple "episodes" it will be like "yeah, okay, it is a fail state and should be presented as that" but for now it's just "cleanup day."[/p][p][/p][h2]Bug Fixes[/h2][p]Okay, I don't usually mention this, but I spent so much time on bug fixing I just wanted to be commended for it. I fixed a lot of bugs since last dev post. (I have a list of over 300 bugs I addressed related to prop possession alone.) Give me some credit. Please.[/p][p][/p][h2]More?[/h2][p]Yeah, this actually isn't everything we did over the last couple months. There's been a lot of small, incremental changes like UI changes, system changes (redid the whole visibility system again), tweaks, balancing, etc. It's just too much to write out in one post. Which is a good problem to have![/p][p][/p][p]We're still working very hard on the update! We hope to see you there when it drops![/p][p][/p][p]John S.[/p]

[p]This is phase two of showing some of the background work that's been going into the next update that's made it take a little while to get together! I've been working on vehicles in the background, and we're at a point where I really want to show some of it off because it's getting very cool. Additionally, I want to give some info on what our plan for beta 2.0 release is, and what you can expect that it'll include![/p][p][/p][h2]VROOM VROOM[/h2][p]So one of the major additions we wanted to make for our next Wizard Boy update was adding in vehicles. This is one of the main "gameplay additions" that we felt were necessary if we were going to expand the castle in the way that we have ended up expanding it. Essentially, if you are able to go outside, clearly one of the most interesting things to do would be to drive and fly around the outside of the castle. So not doing vehicles has pretty much never been an option since we decided to take the Wizard Boy world in this direction.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]From a creative perspective, it's really important to me to make sure that vehicles don't interfere with all of the other fun Wizard-Boy-ways of traversing (moving props around, jump potions, bounce pads, speed potions, etc.) When adding new features into this game particularly, there's a balancing act of making sure that it both adds something new to the experience while not taking away from other creative ways of approaching the game.[/p][p][/p][p]In this case, I felt like having a flying broom was going to be the most necessary and also the most challenging vehicle to approach. However, after playing around with it, I feel like I've hit a pretty good middle-ground that makes the broom fun and interesting in its own zone while not becoming a defacto solution to all problems. Specifically, if you hit walls while going fast, it will kill you. So taking the broom indoors is going to be a rather dangerous option.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p](No, we haven't done a broom animation yet, so Wizard Boy currently needs to deal with getting impaled).[/p][p][/p][p]A different hurdle that I've needed to overcome is the sheer amount of Wizard-Boy nonsense that the vehicles need to be a part of. For instance, should vehicles be able to be Minified and Bigified? Obviously, yes. Does that mean that vehicles will be grabbable when small? Necessarily, yes. Does that mean you can put vehicles into your inventory if they're small? Well, taking tiny tanks out in the middle of the dungeon sounds amazing, so yes, gonna' have to make that a reality. Are vehicles then eatable with the Metal Jaws when they're small? Well, might as well go that far too, yes. How about fire? Speed potions? Jump potions? Booster pads? Bounce pads? Explosions? Yeah, gonna' need to make those fun too.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p](Tiny tank is rideable BTW)[/p][p][/p][p]To address all of these different Wizard-cases, I had to make the decision (this is going to really horrify the programmers among us) to make all vehicles inherit from the same class as all of our props inherit from. So, yes, this means that the tank and the rubber horn are technically the same thing. As you might imagine, this causes a boatload of. . . interesting consequences. Is that a problem? Probably! But will you enjoy messing with it more because of it? Uhhhh, yeah, pretty definitively. Vehicles are adding a massive new dimension of all of the types of stupid interactions you can figure out in Wizard Boy, and frankly I wish they had been added sooner.[/p][p][/p][h2]Castle Work[/h2][p]Tons of work has been continuing to go into the new castle, and it's getting bigger every week! I'll just share some new screenshots. Note - we are keeping an eye on making sure expanding the scope is not going to fundamentally change how good your PC needs to be to run the game. This includes optimization, making sure we are only using actually fun and interesting props in our layouts to reduce unnecessary complexity (did you know that in the current castle there are pick-up-able quills on some of the desks? Bet ya' didn't! And they take up as much resources as something complicated like an explosive barrel does.), and figuring out how to get more juice out of a similar amount of NPCs (making them wander around more, having more complex routes, adding dynamic details that aren't just more classmates, etc.) This will be an ongoing process, so even when you get your hands on the first version of the new castle, it's still gonna' change in all of these manners going forward until we feel like we nailed it.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][h2]So What About the Update[/h2][p]We have a plan! We don't want to rush ourselves in getting this right, but we also don't want to go too long without giving you new content to play. That said, we are planning on releasing the new castle in multiple phases as a "beta castle," where you can select to play the existing castle with all of its functionality or play in the new castle with its layout and tools but in a partial state. This will essentially give you two zones to play in, which in our minds only gives you more to have fun with while enabling us to feel like we're able to take the time we want to in order to get it just right. Additionally, if it turns out any design isn't working for one reason or another once a lot of people get their hands on it, that will give us the opportunity to address it without making the game unplayable.[/p][p][/p][p]We're currently planning on releasing the first part of the new castle sometime early next year, which will include what you've seen in our screenshots, vehicles, and some other stuff (working on some new missions as well!)[/p][p][/p][p]Talk to you more about it soon![/p][p][/p][p]John S.[/p]

[p]Hiya! Popping in just to give some updates on what we've been working on! As I mentioned in the last update post, what we're working on now is a very large revamp to the main playspace of Wizard Boy. This is essentially some mixture of taking pieces from the existing castle, making new pieces, and, as you might be able to see from the screenshots, adding a full exterior![/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]What you're looking at here is called a whitebox - essentially a flat-colored layout that represents the final ideation of an area that allows you to move things around quickly and not get too deep into any area before you're sure it will work out. Evan has done a basic whitebox for a large part of the new castle design and is currently in the process of filling in some missing sections with rooms and doing more detailed work on sections we feel 100% confident are ready to continue production.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]If you haven't done a design like this before, it's a little hard to explain how complicated it is. Bringing the actual environment together technically is tough from an optimization perspective, but concepting what that environment should be and how it all relates to each other to make it both function in gameplay and look good from the inside and outside is really, really tough. On that front, we feel like we're finally on the downhill, and Evan has even started to re-texture and light some of the rooms that are new to this design.[/p][p][/p][p](Keen-eyed players \[Zepto] might recognize this hallway. It's coming back as part of the new interior.)[/p][p][/p][p]This is going to continue to be a long process into next year, but the current goal is to get what we want to call a "functional whitebox" put together that we can actually play and test with some of the Discord members as the next step in the process, so if you're chomping for something new to play it won't be as long to wait as for the full castle to be finished. Will let you know when we have that together.[/p][p][/p][p]I forgot to mention this when originally posting. Cody the prop guy has made like a ton of props and he just keeps posting them on Trello and I can never keep up. I'll just post some pictures and you'll get the ideas.[/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p][/p][p]The other main focus over the last month or so has been with optimization. As I mentioned before, there's a challenge related to scaling our environment this way in that we don't want the game to become harder to run. Wizard Boy has been mostly built through Blueprint, which is notoriously a little slow since it's technically a scripting language. I've been working with an Unreal developer to rewrite important chunks of the codebase to be in native compiled C++, which in theory should give a substantial boost to performance. My goal is to have the new castle run at an equitable place to the current castle despite being much more complex. How close we're going to get to that is yet to be seen, but we're putting a lot of effort into trying to make it happen![/p][p][/p][p]Not much I can screenshot to show that progress, but suffice to say as much work has been put in on that end as with the environment. Hopefully it will invisibly make the experience much better in the long run![/p][p][/p][p]Ducky Dev has brought on a new team member (everyone say hi to Anna!) In the short term, Anna is going to be working on a separate game in the background while this Wizard Boy update is continuing to churn. Nonetheless, you may still see some work that Anna does come up in the updates here and there, since she's pretty much excellent at everything and sometimes we just need her help to continue things rolling.[/p][p][/p][p]Will continue to update you as we progress with the castle! By next update, I hope to be able to have that functional whitebox ready to play with ya'll.[/p][p][/p][p]-John[/p]

[h2]Some Rambling News[/h2][p][/p][p]Heya! Just wanted to give you all a quick look into what we're working on with Wizard Boy and when you should expect looking for the next update![/p][p][/p][p]First thing - I (John) have had a couple non-Wizard-Boy responsibilities come up this last month that needed my more immediate attention (I've been nose down working on console ports for many other games), so my personal progress since the Summer Sale has been a bit slower than it normally has been. I'm getting close to wrapping stuff up, so hopefully it won't be too much longer before I can have my full focus back. HOWEVER, this hasn't ended up changing development that much, as what we're planning for the next update has a lot to do with things that Evan heads up.[/p][p][/p][p]Evan has been hard at work with a very large task that is going to be the "foundation on top of the groundwork," which is reworking the castle. Lemme' explain.[/p][p][/p][p]We've been working towards the goal of having Wizard Boy having a set of replayable missions, kinda' like a mix of "wizard life" and "Hitman." We talked about the Spider Dungeon before, and although that's still on the mind, we've had so many ideas for other "mission-like-things" that wouldn't fit in there that we've wanted to reimagine how all of that mission stuff would work before solidifying it into the game. After talking for several weeks about the best way to approach the design, Evan and I have landed on a format we feel is really solid and, to the best of our knowledge, is going to only add to what we have now instead of mutating it into a different sort of game. To do this, we found we'd need to do some reshuffling changes to the Castle to add "points of interest" that could branch into a loading zone into different missions. At the same time, we've noticed there is a couple big lacking parts of the castle design as-is: namely, you can't walk around the outside (which is a shame, since that would be super cool), and there's some specific areas that we weren't as happy with as we'd like (especially the area around the vault). After mulling everything over, we think we've found a great design that addresses pretty much all of this in one swoop.[/p][p][/p][p]On another hand, a big design addition that's going to help focus the castle reshuffling is the idea of "off limits zones." This already exists with the Goblet Lounge and the Green Student Lounge, but I've formalized that design into a "suspicion" mechanic that we can more easily use to make smaller things (like individual items, closets, doors, or even large sections) "off limits." We can use this to make the castle have a lot more areas you need to "infiltrate" in one way or another, and this has opened up a big well of possibility that we want to work with instead of just tacking it onto the existing castle design without it being able to be fully fleshed out.[/p][p][/p][p]We're essentially doing an "additive" process on the castle, where we're keeping all of the most notable areas from the current design, reshuffling them as needed, and then adding on areas that we wanted to have to begin with. Although individual hallways and side rooms may be changed, we're making sure that all of the same basic ideas are kept into the new design, and lots of rooms are getting copied over wholesale (the courtyard and bell tower, for instance, are all remaining unchanged, and so far we're planning on keeping most of the dungeon unchanged). So expect something of a "renewal" of the existing design rather than a new design outright.[/p][p][/p][p]For full transparency - we're not 100% exactly how long this process will take. I'm actually in the process of bringing on extra programming help to optimize the AI and world loading as much as possible, since with expanding the castle play area also comes more overhead, and I feel like we're already scraping at the game "only running well enough to get by." But nonetheless, everything is in-progress and going well so far, and just wanted to let you know that if you don't hear too much for a month or two, we're still working on things, just haven't gotten it all together yet. :)[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks a ton! Looking forward to you all being able to experience the next Wizard Boy update![/p][p][/p][p]-John[/p]