Project: Gorgon News

I wanted to give you an update on our plans for near-future game updates. But first, let's talk about the demo!


We're happy to announce that the "demo" version of Project: Gorgon is available. This has taken a while, but we knew it was important for this game. Project: Gorgon is pretty unusual, and you can't really tell if it's going to be your thing until you try it. So now you can! (You can download it from our Steam store page here -- just click "Download Demo" on the sidebar.)

I wanted to make sure the demo encompassed more than just the tutorial area, to really give demo users a feel for how the game plays. So the demo lets players explore Anagoge (the newbie island), Serbule, and Serbule Hills, as well as most of the dungeons in those areas. Demo characters can unlock new skills as usual, and they can raise any of their skills up to level 15. This gives demo'ers a broad sampling of the game's content to explore. Once they buy the actual game, demo characters automatically become "real" characters without any restrictions, so it's quick and painless to transition from the demo to the regular game.

We also worked hard to prevent "demo abuse". Since players could theoretically create as many demo characters as they want (limited only by the number of Steam accounts they want to create), there are a lot of potential abuse scenarios, such as harassment, market-manipulation, muling, even power-leveling. (Power-leveling? Really?! Yes... at least, in limited forms. Imagine someone using in a bunch of demo characters to play music for their main character's garden -- that's technically power-leveling, since music makes plants grow faster!)

Let's go over the CANs and CANNOTs of the demo. Demo users:

• CANNOT join a guild
  
• CANNOT trade with other players
  
• CANNOT send or receive money via /tip
  
• CANNOT pick up items dropped on the ground (except items they themselves dropped)
  
• CANNOT milk other players (or be milked, if they become a cow)
  
• CANNOT listen to poetry orations or recite poetry
  
• CAN unlock and use regular storage
  
• CAN sell items at vendors, but CANNOT buy other players' used items
  
• CANNOT buy consignment items or place their own consignments
  
• CANNOT purchase from player stores or open their own stores
  
• CANNOT play any instrument, but CAN listen to performances
  
• CANNOT place or complete player-work-orders
  
• CANNOT use deployed gadgeteering items such as vending machines and rafflers
  
• CAN add friends (it prompts the other player to confirm, as normal)
  
• CAN join hunting groups (and can chat in hunting group chat)
  
• CAN speak in Local chat, and in Group chat (when they're in a group)
  
• CAN speak in a new chat room called Demo
  
• CAN listen, but CANNOT speak, in all other chat rooms (including Global, Trade, and Help)
  
• CANNOT send private messages (PMs) unless both the sender and recipient are in the Demo chat room (see below)
  

We want to let our amazing community help Demo players if they get stuck or have questions, but it has to be easy to opt in and out. That's why we've tied private messages to the new Demo chat room. If you want to help Demo players, simply join this chat room. (Right-click a chat tab, choose Edit Chat Tab, and add "Demo" to the tab's channels. Or you can type /join Demo to quickly create a new chat tab for it.) While you're in the Demo chat room, you'll also be able to communicate via PMs with demo users. If you leave the Demo room (by closing the Demo chat tab), demo users will be unable to PM you further (and vice versa).

Demo users are still bound by the same code of conduct as regular players, and demo users that are abusive will be gagged or banned as usual. And you can always use /ignore to ignore obnoxious users. But since it's so easy to create new demo characters, we wanted this extra layer of abuse-protection for our community. To sum up: If you're happy to help demo users, join the Demo chat room. If it becomes too distracting, just leave that chat room.

No design is ever perfect on the first try, so I'm sure we'll need to tweak these rules after we see what problems demo users run into. But I think this is a good first version.


We've talked before about the next big engineering task, which is rewriting the animation code to use Unity's newer 'Mecanim' system instead of our current home-brewed system. This coding work has been outsourced to our partners, who are developing it in a separate code branch. Unfortunately, it's taking longer than anticipated, and I'm not yet sure when the new animation system will be ready to integrate into the game. That also means horses are delayed, because the mounts need Mecanim.

In the mean time, we're working on other parts of the game: improving the UI, fixing bugs, adding missing content, and revising game systems. Plus adding a few more new game systems to keep it interesting.


The next update has some iterative improvements to the UI. For instance, it seems that a lot of players never find the "More Info" feature for items. (You currently find it by right-clicking an item and choosing 'More Info', and it can tell you things like who to gift the item to... no note-taking necessary!) I'll be adding an alternative way to get to that info so that it's easier to discover.

More substantively, there's a new little feature called Practical Summoning. This is designed to make it a little easier to manage crafting ingredients. I can't count the number of times I've been trying to craft something and realized I forgot an ingredient and have to run and get it from storage.

Once your character masters Practical Summoning, there's a new button in the crafting window to summon missing ingredients. (As shown by the "Summon..." link in this in-development screenshot.) Clicking that button lets you summon items from nearby storage areas -- all the storage in the current town you're in, more or less.


There are a few caveats -- namely, it only works on fixed ingredients, not ingredients that you drag and drop into recipe slots. And it can't help you put stuff away after you're finished crafting. But I'm enjoying it and I think it'll be a nice little quality-of-life improvement. You'll be able to learn this trick from a mantis in the casino -- it costs a few thousand Councils and requires Teleportation level 12.

The next update also fixes a bunch of annoying UI bugs, and there are some other new UI features that I don't want to talk about yet (because they may not work out... they're still being prototyped as I write this). And there are, of course, many more UI improvements to come in the future, too.


Over the next few months we'll be taking a look at the higher-level areas: Kur, Ilmari, Rahu, and Gazluk. These areas all need more points of interest, more things to discover, most stuff to do! There are also a bunch of unfinished NPCs in these areas, and even entire storylines that just haven't made it into the game yet, plus some missing dungeons (a few larger ones, but mostly smaller soloable ones).

Some areas will also see heavy revision for technical reasons. In particular, the terrain of Rahu will probably need to be remade. It was created via a different method than the other outdoor areas, as an experiment. We'd hoped this new method would work better than it did. (But hey, that's what experiments are for.) We'll be revising it to use the technique we used in other outdoor areas.

I'm not sure what new content will be in the very next update yet (if any!). But I wanted to give you an idea of what we'll be working on for the next couple of updates. (Plus, of course, there's the Christmas event! It will be based on last years' alpha event, but with more stuff.)


This game has a lot of game systems. A LOT of game systems. Many are pretty nicely fleshed-out, but some are basically just prototypes that need a lot of revision. I have a long list of systems that need to be improved. Some of those systems include mushroom farming, "dangerous improvement" recipes, guild features, and several combat skills.

Some of these things just need tweaks and refinement, while others may go back to the drawing board entirely.


I don't want to give the idea that all of this stuff will happen in the very next update, which is only about a week away. The next update is mostly UI stuff. We like to work in short sprints of two or three weeks, so we'll be rolling these changes out piecemeal over several months. This way you get access to the features ASAP, and we get timely feedback.

A big advantage of this work style is that we can pivot to new priorities very quickly. And we often do just that! When the new animation system is ready, it'll probably be higher-priority than a lot of these tasks, so unfinished tasks on this list may go to the back burner. However it goes, I'll keep you posted!

Thanks for supporting us!

- Citan (Eric)

PS - we could really use your help getting word out about the demo. It can be downloaded via the "Download Demo" link on our Steam store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/342940/Project_Gorgon/

Discuss this blog post on our forum

This is a small bug-fix update. The Halloween event is NOT over yet -- it will run through the middle of the week (Wednesday or Thursday).

• Fixed navigation issues with the boardwalks in Serbule and Anagoge Island
  
• Fixed bugs that prevented the thick green "queued ability" overlay from showing up on a queued ability
  
• Fixed bug where the faces of some male elves were lighter-colored than their bodies
  
• Fixed bug with human and elf female eyelashes (they looked creepy in some light conditions)
  
• Tried to work around weird behavior with Windows 10 firewall: if you log out or disconnect due to being AFK too long, the firewall would sometimes decide the game wasn't allowed to use the internet anymore and constantly break any connections to the server, requiring you to restart the game to log back in. The cause of this is unknown (Microsoft does not document much of anything about how their firewall app works or why), but we've made some changes based on hunches and we'll see if it helps.
  
• Worked around Unity 2017 bug that caused the lowest graphics tiers (Bad, Abysmal, and Retro-Terrible) to be less efficient than they should be
  
• Partially worked around a Unity engine bug involving shadows (where performance gets worse at certain times of day when facing certain directions outdoors). This is a partial fix, meaning the issue persists but is reduced. There is a side-effect, though: interactive elements such as monsters, NPCs, signs, lamps, chairs, etc., are no longer lit by the sun or moon. Usually this is completely unnoticeable, but sometimes it can be really surreal: "why is that lamppost not casting a shadow?!" If it's distressing, you can disable this fix by opening Settings and adding EntityShadows to the special-settings box. (There are better ways to address this problem in bleeding-edge versions of Unity, so we anticipate that this workaround is temporary.)
  
• We'd like players to test out a new experimental graphics feature: spherical culling. To enable it, open the Settings window in-game and add SphereCull to the Special Settings window. Normally the game uses frustum culling, meaning anything that's not right in front of the camera isn't rendered. This is theoretically optimal: why render stuff that's not on the screen? But it has side-effects. One problem is that when you spin around in a circle, a lot of art assets have to be swapped in and out of video memory, which can cause framerate to drop momentarily. Spherical culling means everything in a circle around you is rendered. This may have a lower framerate overall, but it will greatly reduce "turning lag". Please try it out and report your experiences with it (especially bugs, such as missing water or other things being invisible)! And remember: you may need to lower your settings to effectively use this, especially if you've overridden settings like view distance or animation distance!
  

Strange things are going on in Alharth. You'll receive more information as soon as you log in.



If you have noticeably worse framerate after this update, read on:

In this update we disabled one of the experimental optimizations known as "slow boxes". This optimization *does* improve framerate when lots of selectable things are on-screen, but the improvement often isn't worth it: the targeting selection-boxes can move around randomly, which can be deadly in combat situations. We've turned this optimization off while we improve it. If you want to re-enable it (which might be needed on low-end machines in busy areas), open up the settings window in-game, click "Special", and type SlowBoxes into the special settings box. This will reactivate the slow boxes optimization.

(The old special setting NoSlowBoxes no longer does anything, since slow boxes are off anyway.)



We've corrected a problem with how damage is calculated for target-conditional modifiers that increase damage by a percentage. Target-conditional modifiers are things that only apply if the target is a certain way. For instance, "+X% damage to non-Elite targets", "+X% damage to undead", "+X% damage when the target's rage meter is 66% or higher", etc.

Previously, if these modifiers added a percentage of damage to your attack, that percentage wasn't added to your other percent-boosters like other mods; instead it was multiplied separately, very late in the calculation process. These percent-boosters are now included with other regular percent-boosters.

In other words, if you had two mods, "+25% damage all the time" and "+25% damage if the target is Elite", the combination will now result in +50% damage. Previously that combination would result in +56% damage, because they were multiplied together instead of added together.




The three blacksmithing recipes to "dangerously" improve an item have returned. (The "danger" is that the item may shatter and be destroyed.) The chance for the item to be destroyed has increased from 2% to 3%, and the weapon now gains simple damage, not regular damage. Simple damage is not multiplied by any other gear mod benefits, but it is still multiplied by the enemy's vulnerabilities, or lack thereof.

There is now a cap of 300 simple damage that can be added to an item, and to prevent these items from being used as insanely overpowered newbie gear, the weapon must be at least level 30.

Weapons that were dangerously improved with the old recipes have been updated to use simple damage and have a cap of 300.

To sum up, the recipes now read like this:
Add +2 Simple Sword Damage to a sword, up to a maximum of +300. The sword must have enchantments of at least level 30. Simple damage is added to the total damage after all other multipliers. This recipe does not use Enhancement Points, but there is a 3% chance the weapon will shatter and be destroyed. (Must be near a forge.)




Ultra Item Rafflers with timers set to greater than 1 hour could sometimes be garbage-collected by the server before their timer was up (causing a winner to be immediately chosen from the people who had already bought a ticket). Large-Capacity Item Vendors and Fancy Item Vendors that are deployed in busy areas will now last longer before being garbage-collected by the server (and unsold items mailed back to the owner).

A note about how these work: when there are a lot of items in an area, the server deletes old items based on internal priorities. If the server decides to delete a vend-o-matic, the remaining unsold items are mailed to the creator. If a raffler is destroyed before all tickets are sold, a winner is immediately chosen from among the sold tickets. If no tickets were sold, the raffle items are mailed to the creator.

Most gadgeteering items will last about an hour in a busy area, but can last much longer in areas that don't have a lot of items on the ground. The above-mentioned high quality vend-o-matics will typically last 90 minutes in busy areas.

• All pet damage is increased noticeably. This is especially true of necromancers' skeletal pets. The most dramatic example is high-level skeletal mages, whose base damage increased by more than 50%. (The adjustments in this update are a "bulk" formulaic change; further adjustments will be made in the future.)
  
• As of the last update, Elite monsters that are killed with only area-effect attacks are no longer combat-locked. But if a group killed an Elite with ONLY area-effect attacks, the elite would incorrectly act like non-elite for turn-based looting. Non-combat-locked elites now "faux lock" themselves to the group of the main killer when they die so that the group's turns are honored.
  
• Higher tiers of the ability Spade Assault did not correctly have the lower tiers as prerequisites.
  
• Fixed a scenario where you could skin an illusion of a dead werewolf if you were really, really quick.
  
• Fixed weird particles appearing when drake worms burst out of the ground.
  
• Fixed a client display bug that caused some damage attributes to not be updated after equipment was taken off. This was only a tooltip display bug.
  
• Fixed a server-side rounding error with base-damage multipliers that could cause attacks to deal 1 less damage than the client tooltip indicated it should.
  
• Stuffed toy bears can now be deployed for others to be able to hug. (The bear is not destroyed; only one bear can be deployed per 15 minutes per player.)
  
• The map in the casino was shifted over a bit to include the new party room. The fog is reset, and any map pins in the casino will be off by a small amount. Sorry about that!
  
• Added signs to the Red Wing Casino to help guests navigate more easily.
  
• Added a "secret" entrance/exit to Gazluk Keep.
  

The Red Wing Casino is now open! You can find the entrance to this "teleportation-accessible luxury resort destination" in Rahu. (And perhaps there are easier ways ...) To help us test the games in the casino, type the command /redeem RedWingTickets in chat to receive some free game vouchers!




In this update we've tried to clean up a lot of storage-related weirdness. For example, one big problem was that many ingredients couldn't be stored in storage for "ingredients" -- because every ingredient had to be manually flagged by us and we often missed some. Now we've switched to automated tagging of ingredient types.

We've also cleaned up the categories. Several NPCs stored "Ingredients for any skill," but now that all ingredients are being tagged automatically, this is far too large a category -- nearly everything is an ingredient for something! In practice, only food items were reliably tagged as ingredients in the past (and not even all of those), so "ingredients for any skill" storage were effectively cooking storage. As such we've converted "ingredients for any skill" storage into "food or cooking ingredients" storage in this update.

We've also changed the storage of Joeh in Serbule. He offered a large amount of storage for equipment, but Serbule is the newbie town. Newbies don't have a lot of extra equipment to store and it's a much better idea for them to sell or gift any excess equipment instead of trying to store it! So Joeh was actually hurting our newbie experience by teaching newbies that they should hoard low-level gear. Joeh now has storage for any type of item, but fewer storage slots than before. (Tyler Green remains unchanged because his equipment storage doesn't open up until players reach Best Friends favor level, at which point they aren't likely to be newbies.)

We've added more Equipment-specific storage in the new casino area (along with tons of other new storage), but it's been tweaked a bit: Equipment storage now also lets you store ammunition. This includes things like arrows (obviously) but also includes anything consumed by an ability: throwing knives, first aid kits, diamonds (used by a certain ability), and many others. The intent is to let you store all the items for a particular combat skill in one place.

In all cases where a storage vault changed, existing items are still there. If you take those items out, however, you won't be able to put them back in if they no longer meet the requirements for that storage.

Specific notes:

• Laura Neth: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
  
• Selaxi: "ingredients for any skill" ==> "Food or Cooking Ingredients"
  
• Julius Patton: "Food or Cooking Ingredients" ==> "Food, Cooking, or Brewing Ingredients"
  
• Joeh: "Equipment" ==> "any item". Max slots reduced from 64 (at Like Family) to 40.
  
• Tyler Green: "Equipment" ==> "Equipment and Ammunition"
  
• Charles Thompson: "Alchemy [potions]" ==> "Potions and Alchemy Ingredients"
  

High-level monsters needed to do a bit more damage, and high-level combat also needed to be a bit less predictable. So instead of just buffing monster damage as we've done in the past, this time we've introduced monster crits. Monsters now have a chance to critically-hit for double damage. The chance is based on the monster's internal combat level. For every level after 30, monsters gain 0.25% chance to crit. This means that by level 70, they have a 10% chance to crit for double damage. Elite and Boss monsters have an extra +5% chance to critically-hit. (This is a flat bonus that's the same at every level. This means that even newbie bosses will occasionally lay the smackdown. It's for your own good! Dying builds character.)




Some of the pet skills are in an awkward place right now because high-level player damage is still so high that pets can't contribute very usefully. We're still working on high-level player damage scaling. In the short term, the tech for these new monster crits give us an interesting way to buff pets a bit.

For every pet-level above 30, the pet gains 0.25% chance to crit. Note this is not YOUR skill level, but the pet's level. (Each summoned pet has an inherent level; to get a higher-level pet you need to use a higher-level summoning ability.) Pet crits deal +100% damage at level 30, plus 1% more for every level above that.

• Example: the pet summoned by Raise Skeletal Archer 4 is level 47. Thus it has a 4.25% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 217% damage.
  
• Example: the spider summoned by Incubate 5 is level 70. Thus it has a 10% chance to critically-hit, and crits deal 240% damage.
  

This change may not be permanent, but it will help high-level pets in the short term. Note that this applies to all pets EXCEPT animal-handling pets. Animal-handling pets use a different critical-hit mechanic already. So this affects necromancy pets, baby spiders, summoned deer, minigolems, etc.

• Monsters no longer notice players before the player's loading screen finishes.
  
• Area-of-effect attacks no longer "loot-lock" monsters hit by the burst.
  
• Added a button to sort storage vault contents. (This uses the same sort order as the inventory-sort button does.)
  
• About 200 new Work Orders have been added to the game; there is a new Work Order sign in Red Wing Casino, and all existing boards have at least a few new ones.
  
• In addition, many old Work Orders have been moved from one city to another (to try to make things a little more sensible... but it still needs more reorganization in the future). You may want to check your active Work Orders in case they now need to be delivered to a different city than before!
  
• Some melee abilities were not flagged as melee, so buffs/debuffs applicable to melee attacks did not work on them: Phoenix Strike, Bun-Fu Strike, Rabbit Scratch, Doe Eyes.
  
• Some burst attacks were not flagged as bursts, so buffs/debuffs applicable to burst attacks did not work on them: Wave of Darkness, Song of Discord, various minigolem abilities.
  
• Druid ability Cloud Sight did not benefit from equipment that boosted druid base damage by a percentage.
  
• Stopped damage-reply effects (such as Fire Shield Potions) from activating due to friendly damage (e.g. from Restorative Arrow).
  
• "Fight Me You Fools" had untyped damage instead of Crushing damage.
  
• Some healing abilities that normally deal 0 damage (since they're heals) could inflict damage when flat damage-type boosts were added (e.g. a Ring of Psychic Pestering, which adds +2 psychic damage, would cause some mentalism heals to deal 2 damage).
  
• Corrected the Causes of Death from Priest attacks.
  
• The sidebar ability Fish Gut has been completely redesigned: it no longer uses fish scales as ammo and instead uses a skinning knife (with a 5% chance the knife will be lost). Creatures with Fish anatomy take double damage. This is considered a (non-bleed-inducing) variant of Gut for purposes of equipment and combos.
  
• Renumbered the IDs of poetry appreciation effects to allow room for new effects in the future; if you had a poetry appreciation buff on, it has been dispelled - sorry!
  
• Recipes for exotic mushroom substrate have fewer ingredients but only yield half as much substrate.
  
• The cow ability Chew Cud now only consumes regular "Grass", and not other grasses such as "Evil Grass" or "Barley". This is because chewing something besides regular Grass is pretty much always a mistake, and sometimes a tragic one (like when you chew up your Eternal Greens).
  
• For similar reasons, the ability Organ Displacement now only takes basic Aquamarines, not things with aquamarines in them (such as Aquamarine Rings).
  
• For similar reasons, the ability Resuscitate now only takes basic Diamonds, not fancy diamonds (such as Winterprize) or equipment with diamonds in them.
  
• The recipe for some alchemy potions has been simplified: Persona Reducer Potion, Memory Inhibitor Potion.
  
• Reduced the ingredients needed for high-level Shamanic Infusion recipes.
  
• Fixed recipe icons that did not match the items generated by the recipe.
  
• Bottles of Fertilizer now stack to 5.
  
• Rennet now stacks to 5.
  
• NPCs that like specific flowers (e.g. Brianna Willer likes Dahlias) now really like bouquets containing just that flower (Dahlia Bouquets in this case).
  
• Fae Felt can now be dropped by all killable fairy enemies. It is an extremely rare drop for low level fairies such as fairy slaves, and an uncommon drop for higher level fairies.
  
• Crazed Alphas are more dangerous.
  
• Fixed missing icons (shown as all-white squares) when viewing player raffle boxes or vend-o-matics.
  
• NPCs that interact with lamps (such as Sir Coth does at night) can once again actually turn said lamps on/off.
  
• Slightly shrank the default NPC dialog font text from 18pt to 16pt. (This does not affect existing installations. You can always manually change the font size in Settings->GUI->Font Sizes.)
  
• Upgraded to a new version of Unity, 2017.4.10
  

This is a server-only update to fix some networking and database performance problems.

The only gameplay change is the following:

• Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Song of Discord Damage +6% and Song of Resurgence Healing +6 for 20 seconds." => This now stacks up to 12x (instead of infinitely)
  
• Bard treasure mod: "Whenever you take damage from an enemy, you gain Bard Base Damage +8% for 15 seconds." => This now stacks up to 10x (instead of infinitely)
  

That's it for now, but we're hard at work on a new content update which will be ready in a few weeks. More info soon!