Archmage Rises News

This is the last update of 2023. Thanks for adventuring with us. It has been an adventure!

[h2]Quick Recap of 2023[/h2]

What a year! From getting a demo (sorta) ready for Next Fest in Feb, to Splattercat becoming a fan and posting some great videos, to launching into Early Access in April, to two major content updates across the summer. The game has grown. So has our following. We started the year with < 5,000 wishlists and now have 37,316. We’re near the top of Steam in a couple of metrics that matter to us:

• Top 15% lifetime units sold
  
• Top 13% in positive reviews
  
• Top 9% lifetime gross revenue
  

This all says to me: I’m not the only one who wants a real open world mage simulator!

[h2]NEW Combat[/h2]



It's all hands on deck on combat! We have an internal milestone to hit this Friday in order to keep Jan 19 on schedule. Lots of systems are coming online:

• Items, weapons, and armor
  
• Spell XP gains and progression system
  
• Monster AI to pick optimal battlefield locations and avoid harmful things like fire
  
• Storm school spells and debuffs
  

[h2]Dynamic Quests & NPCs[/h2]



In a recent discussion about the Rivals feature, people raised how ‘dumb’ the rivals are with not recognizing the player or speaking to you appropriately. We have all the data, we just need to connect it up. Given that there isn’t a lot of narrative work to do on Combat, Nolan took a stab at utilizing the new Dynamic Quest tech to solve this problem. And it’s working! He’s able to get far more sophisticated greeting for each relationship level and how long it's been since your last visit (very long time, long, medium, recent, very, recent, moments ago, and first visit ever).

Having NPCs recognize you, react to you, and talk to you based on relationship will come just after Combat ships Jan 19. Getting this working and out will really help get Dynamic Quests out in Update #3 Exploration.

[h2]Game Design: Spell Use In World[/h2]

I want to bring your attention to an important shift in the game design. Until recently, I’ve had the design objective to make each spell functional in combat AND the world. While it sounds cool, there are serious ramifications to doing this and I see now we need to pivot away from it. You can read more on why and what this means in this post:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/506480/discussions/0/4030222834124307825/

[h2]Christmas Time![/h2]

Die Hard is a Christmas Movie. Just like Elf.

The office will be closed next week and hopefully none of us working so as to enjoy Christmas with our families. This means we won’t be answering forum posts or Discord until the following week. Lots of new people are buying the game each day, so it would really help us if some of you veteran adventurers can help out the new ones in our absence.

We appreciate you all! See you in the new year with some new combat!

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

• Fixed a bug related to quest givers that could potential prevent save games from loading (thanks to Ashpeef for the bug report)
  

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

• Added option to disable rivals when creating a new game (requested by TakeMyLunch)
  
• Improved text highlighting during NPC dialogue to recognize more opportunities to highlight keywords
  

As we get closer to the release of the Combat Update we'll be sharing some info about each school of magic. Today we wanted to talk about the School of Ice Magic:



[h2]What is an Ice Mage like in the new Archmage Combat?[/h2]
Cold, Hard, Calculating.

The core gameplay behind our Ice Mage is mastery through controlling adversaries, primarily through target prioritization and measured spellcasting.

Most ice-based spells, in addition to dealing ice damage, apply a stacking debuff called Chilled. This debuff builds up on an enemy, eventually Freezing them in place.

Once Frozen,

• Enemies become locked down; they can’t move or attack for a turn or two.
  
• The next Physical Attack shatters the frozen effect and deals excessive extra damage.
  

The allows players to pull off devastating hits on frozen enemies by mixing in weapon attacks like a Battle Mage...

Or cleverly leveraging a spell that deals physical damage, such as our re-imagined Ice Lance.

We're knee deep in snow testing and tuning this school's spells. Just yesterday some changed some single to multi-target. What about targeting one enemy but adding debuffs to neighbors? It's changing every day as we find the sweet spot. Sweet, like maple syrup on freshly fallen snow. Try it, it's delicious!

As of today, here are some of the confirmed spells you'll be able to learn:

• Frost Bolt: Fling a frigid bolt of pure winter at the enemy.
  
• Ice Lance: Pierce your frozen foe with a mighty shard of ice.
  
• Sleet: Drive your foes before you with a relentless onslaught of sleet.
  
• Frostburn: Smother your adversaries beneath a deadly shroud of frost.
  

We'll have even more details diving deeper into the magic of an Ice Mage as we get closer to release.

What do you most want to see in the new school of ice magic? Let us know in the comments!

PS: If you haven't yet, we'd love for you to vote for us for the Indie Game of the Year Award! You can cast your vote here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises

As we mentioned in our last dev updates post, we're really excited (and very honored) to have been chosen as one of IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2023, and we really couldn't have done it without all of you, so a huge thanks and congratulations to all of you!

Let's see if we can swing this momentum far enough to nab the Indie Game of the Year award for 2023! We'd love your help to make that happen, all you have to do is take a few seconds of your time to jump over to the link below and cast your vote for Archmage Rises!

https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises



Thanks again, and we'll have another post coming later today to dive a little deeper into our upcoming Combat Update!

Before we jump into today's update, got some exciting news! We received word over the weekend that we made the shortlist of IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2023, so a huge thanks to all of you who jumped on and nominated us!

Now is the voting round, and our chance to nab the 2023 Indie Game of the Year award and we'd love your support! You can cast your vote for us here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises



[h2]Update 2B: NEW Combat[/h2]

WIP on NEW Combat.

We set a date! New Combat is coming Jan 19!

Behind the scenes it took three days of work and super long meetings to finally set a reasonable publish date. Mark kept reminding us “I’d love to get it out soon too! But we need time to play, test, and refine it before it goes out.” Finally I just asked for a date he’d be comfortable hitting. This is how we arrived at the 19th. The most tested and balanced work we’ve ever done. Will it be perfect? Nope! But it will be good.

Some details in the screenshot:

• Spells are now data driven from tiny little JSON legos (combatons) all defining what the spell is and does: how it applies damage, does it apply a status effect and if so how?, how it affects neighboring spots. A standard spell has about 7 combatons, more complex ones could be 15.
  
• The casting power bar is back, but now per school, representing player mastery in that spell school. It is unlocked through our new School Progression system (not a quest).
  
• New monster race of Crocodons is coming as part of this combat update.
  
• New cast box, method of casting, and targeting. The UX is improved
  
• New tooltip system. We had to, as it is now all data driven from tiny little combatons.
  
• Ara numbers are much larger. We’re still experimenting with the right numbers.
  
• We will post info on Ice School later this week.
  

Combat is basically everyone’s focus.

[h2]Weekly Patch Priorities[/h2]

I caught up reading the Steam forums last week since I was swamped doing reviews. It is important to me: If you take the time to say something about Archmage Rises, I will make the time to read it. Most of the time I will respond. Based on the feedback I saw these are priorities for this week:

• Ashpeef has a crashing save file we are going to solve.
  
• Phileosophos brought up an issue with NPC directions to things. People say ‘East’ but it is more South than East. Super misleading. We’re investigating
  
• TakeMyLunch wants the ability to turn off the Rivals. We’re looking into a simple way to do this.
  

Currently Phil and D2 aren’t on the critical path for Combat, so we think we can do these. But it might change.