Archmage Rises News

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

• Fixed dynamic greeting bug when speaking with Shipwrights, Ship Captains and Harbormasters
  
• Fixed an issue with selecting dialogue options with keyboard shortcuts while services and subject pop-up windows are open
  
• Fixed an issue with creatures not showing up in the subject pop-up
  
• Fixed an issue with notifications (for example, letters from the Chapterhead) being hidden behind US in resolutions higher than 1080p
  
• Fixed a bug introduced in the first Rivals release where custom portraits could not be displayed or changed
  
• Fixed a bug where town tooltips were displaying during combat with a Rival
  
• Fixed a bug preventing the spell power slider tutorial from popping up
  
• Fixed 2 incorrect animation triggers on specific earth mage abilities
  

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

• Knocking on doors now actually sound like knocking on doors instead of bashing them down
  
• Made the spell power slider easier to adjust
  

[h2]RIVALS COMBAT BETA NOW AVAILABLE![/h2]



It’s finally here! You can now find and fight your rivals. They won’t go down easy though and will put up a good fight, with mages from each school of magic bringing it’s own unique challenges and strategies to the battlefield. We released the beta on Friday of last week, and so far early feedback from the weekend has been positive.

Here are a few of the new things that come with this update:

• New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
  
• New option to attack your rival when you meet them
  
• Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
  
• Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
  
• New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
  
• Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
  
• You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
  
• New combat arena - Town Street
  
• New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
  
• Plus other improvements and bug fixes
  

You can now try out the new Rivals update by switching to the Beta branch in Steam. We’ll be Beta testing it for at least the next week or two for some extra polishing and optimizing before we release it to the main Steam branch.

Emily and Alex, our new hires from last week (with some support from Phil), will be taking on the Rivals beta through to it's official public release. If you try it out, let us know what you think, we’d love to get your feedback on it!

[h2]EXPLORATION:[/h2]

Mark and the rest of the team are continuing to plow forward on the next big Exploration update. For those of you who ready our last weekly dev update, this list hasn’t changed much, but we’re continuing to make progress on all of these areas:

Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.
Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System
Zach - Dynamic Quests
Jessi, Phil, Jonathan, Andrey - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul + Controller Support

[h2]OTHER NEWS:[/h2]

By request of some in our Steam and Discord communities, we’re working on putting together a “Known Issues” list that will be publicly available on both the Discord server and the Wiki (which we can hopefully now put a little more attention too now that we’ve got some additional help).

Just a reminder, if you do try out the new Rivals beta, let us know what you think!

It's been a while coming, but now you can finally fight your rivals! Prepare for a brand new challenge, as your rivals not only bring magical attacks your way, but they also bring some interesting defensive challenges for you to face.

[h2]NEW:[/h2]

• New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
  
• New option to attack your rival when you meet them
  
• Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
  
• Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
  
• New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
  
• Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
  
• You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
  
• New combat arena - Town Street
  
• Added new magic XP book reward to Innkeeper starter town quest
  
• New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
  

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

• Prompt to abandon a quest when talking to a quest giver now shows the name of the quest
  
• Added AP cost to button tooltip on weapons
  
• Additional "do not know" NPC responses
  

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

• Fixed VFX glitch when casting Fireball
  
• Fixed a bug with enemy difficult scaling
  
• Fixed some gender-related text generation bugs
  
• Fixed some minor combat background formatting issues
  
• Fixed a bug where abandoning the tower quest wouldn't remove the prompt to abandon the tower quest
  

There are likely more fixes and additions not listed here that I may be missing :)

Also, there are a few bugs remaining that we need to fix, but we have already made you wait long enough, so we decided to release this beta build with these issues outstanding so we don't keep you waiting any longer. These aren't game breaking bugs and we'll get these fixed up asap.

[h2]KNOWN ISSUES:[/h2]

• While NPCs will not reveal the location of your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest prematurely, it's still possible to potentially encounter this rival by chance and kill them prior to completing the Tower quest. This should end the quest, but currently does not. We'll fix this soon.
  
• If you kill a rival and then find them on the Relationship screen, it currently does not indicate that they were killed. This will be fixed soon as well.
  
• When visiting a Shipwright, there is a text bug related to displaying his current activity when greeting you.
  

Thanks for testing out this beta and we hope you enjoy it! As always, we'd love to hear about any bugs you come across that we may have missed and would love to get your feedback on the new rival combat. Enjoy!

We are winding down on the final touches to the Rivals combat update, and ramping up on what is shaping up to be our biggest update ever!

Here’s what folks are working on this coming week (and beyond):

[h2]RIVALS WRAP-UP:[/h2]



We are so very close to putting a lid on the Rivals combat update, at least as far as being able to push the update to the Beta branch. Last week after testing, Thomas and Phil were both pleased with how it all plays in general, with just a few more important bug fixes to squash.

Once we finish those, we’ll release it to the Beta branch for another round of testing where players can try it out, we can find any other bugs that may have slipped through the cracks, and do some more final tune-ups (if needed) before finally releasing it to the main public branch.

Phil will be heading the charge on this with the assistance of D2. Alex will also join the fray later this week (more on that later).

[h2]EXPLORATION:[/h2]

Mark and the rest of the team are full steam ahead on what is currently known as the “Exploration” update, which essentially (as of now anyway) will be our biggest update/release between now and our 1.0 launch!

This is what we’re focusing on this week:

• Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.
  
• Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System
  
• Zach - Dynamic Quests
  
• Jonathan, Jessi, Phil - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul
  

We’re all very excited with how exploration will be improved in this coming update, which will (at least in Phil’s perspective) make the game feel a lot more like a TTRPG-like experience. BTW, an easy way to get Phil’s stamp of approval internally is to compare how the feature/idea we are working on is like D&D and he’s pretty much on board 😆. For those of you who might be worried about the game losing that feel, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve got several torch bearer’s within the team carrying that torch for you!

[h2]OTHER NEWS:[/h2]

We’ve got 3 new team members joining us this week! Starting on Wednesday, joining us on our quest are:

• Emily: project management and helping us all stay on task and hitting our goals
  
• Alex: QA testing and running our regular patch updates
  
• Andrey: For the summer he’ll be joining us as a developer before returning to his teaching work
  

Next week our new artist Lucas will be joining us as well. Would love for you to give them a warm welcome!

[h2]Recipe for Success[/h2]

The last several weeks have been planning and transition. We’re bringing on four new team members in just over a week, so getting everyone aligned and on the same page as far as game vision has been pivotal.

Mark Webster is a 15+ year veteran game designer (GoW:Ragnarök, God of War 2018, Guitar Hero, Skylanders) and Lead Designer on Archmage Rises since last fall. Last week he laid out for the team how and why we are tackling development in a Play Experience way.

I recorded this meeting for the new employees starting in May. But afterwards, I felt it was so good and explanatory that I am taking a chance: I’m sharing this internal meeting with you, our faithful fellow adventurer.



This is the first slide, which I forgot to record.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Notes:

• What we’re working on is Update #3 Exploration, but it is so comprehensive of an update that it is most of the major parts of the game. It is going to take us a while, many months.
  
• We will continue to make patches every other week as long as we need to, while we are doing the above.
  
• Mark mentions something about ‘Adventure Books’ and ‘Seasons of Life’. These are concepts around structuring the overall ‘life’ of a player character still very much still in design discussion. I’ll have more to say when we figure out what it means!
  

[h2]Rivals[/h2]

• All five mage types are working: Fire, Ice, Arcane, Earth, Storm
  
• Phil and I are doing one last round of experience testing before we release to the beta branch. Think it is this week.