Archmage Rises News

The purpose of these dev blog updates is to answer the question “What are those Defiance people up to ?!?”

I believe in transparency in all aspects of life but especially work.

But THIS week at THIS exact moment in time, I can’t share something Really Big I’ve been working on for months. It all comes to an apogee next week Apr 2nd. (I use the word apogee as a throw back to that great shareware company in the 90’s)



I usually break up the update into sections of initiatives, but I’ll just do a bullet list of stuff going on:

• I think I can test the Rivals build tomorrow.
  
  
• We’re having design meetings about the player’s life span and the nature of time. Time is a central pillar of the game concept, but how we implement and express this is what we’re working on
  
  
• I’ve put a lot of time into planning how we get to 1.0. I’ve said this on the forums already, but I have a better idea of when the game will be 1.0 than when a particular feature or update will be available. This is related to The Big Thing.
  
  
• A fan recently asked if we will be updating the Roadmap. Yes. Based on The Big Thing we need to update it. We know better what the game is, versus last year when we posted the roadmap. As developers we need to listen to the game and you our faithful co-adventurers, on what it needs and how we add to it, not just ploughing through feature lists.
  
  • I can already see the concerned looks and hear the questions “Are you cutting features?” We’re still making the same game and pursuing the same play experience of being a powerful Archmage in a semi-realistic fantasy world, the experience you see represented on the roadmap. It’s more about how we are tackling it. Some features we didn’t think of will need to be added. Some will no longer fit as well as we once thought. Some will be pushed to post 1.0 free updates and some might simply need to be cut. This is game dev.
    
  
  
  
• We’re having design meetings about map events and how you play through Points of Interest, track monsters, and gather resources.
  
  
• We’re ideating the kinds of region problems that can occur and how the player can resolve them in different ways.
  
  
• We’re dealing with overlapping vacations of three people which is causing some difficulties to keep everything moving. When 33% of the staff are gone, it’s hard to get things like patches out the door. Phil is back later this week.
  

We’re exploring how we can do the town view better in the new UI. I’m thinking a top down view might be better than the 3/4 view we have. When I look at the time and cost of making the 3/4 view look really good, I need to explore other options before deciding.

Here is the concept coming from TTRPG:




Here is a UI wireframe mockup:


I think we can better show variety of locations and scale with this approach. Thoughts?

This week’s update is a little sparse as I just returned from a week’s vacation where I took the kids not once, but twice!, to Legoland. I believe the whole theme park is built around the singular fact it is hard to leave Legoland without new lego!

[h2]Update #3: Exploration[/h2]



Exploration is our next major update to the game. It will greatly enhance the overworld experience, map exploration, UI experience, dynamically generated quests based on NPC motives, and player progression.

• Zach has a rudimentary dynamically generated quest working in game. There is still lots to do, but this is a significant milestone!
  
• Michel is working on tooling for the new Exploration gameplay
  
• Tyler is working on the Conclave and player progression
  
• Jessi continues on the new UI
  
• Mark and I are working on something that has always been a problem with the game: the pacing of a life.
  
  
  • For those that remember Nic, he always questioned “Thomas! How are you going to fill the time? 70 years, by hours, is a lot of time!!!”
    
  • I put off dealing with it until now. One idea is instead of playing out every hour of every year, instead play through more abstract stages of life: young adult, adult, middle years, eldership
    

[h2]Mini-Update Rival Combat[/h2]



Rivals is a small update adding the ability to fight specific named mages in the game. These mages specialize in one of the schools and present a unique challenge to the player.

• Rivals has been updated and ready for another internal playtest, which I will perform this week. If the experience is good we will package it up and ship it out.
  

[h2]Other Studio News[/h2]

• New Hire! We just hired a Associate Project Manager to help with the production side of the studio. As we work towards 1.0 there will be increasing production responsibilities and complexity. Phil and I have been doing it, but having someone dedicated and focused on it will really help run things better and free us up to focus on our core responsibilities. Emily starts May 1st.
  
• Related to the above, Phil is off this week dealing with a serious family member illness. It is sudden so we don’t have a plan. There won’t be a patch this week, nor will he be on the discord server. We expect him back Mar 28th
  

This week our update is more designy focus, as we are right in the thick of designing the game’s structure and player purpose.

[h2]Update #3 Exploration[/h2]



Exploration is our next major update to the game. It will greatly enhance the overworld experience, map exploration, UI experience, dynamically generated quests based on NPC motives, and player progression.

• Zach is busy working on the Dynamic Quest engine and making good progress putting the prototype into the game.
  
• Jessi and Phil continue on the new UI. It’s about 2/3 done the design process, hopefully the design work will be done in about 2 weeks
  
• Regions are a core component to the Exploration update, so I’ll explain them a bit more
  

[h2]Regions[/h2]

• A region is a self contained section of the map like a a territory on the Risk board.
  
  
  • A region is one administrative unit
    
  • It has a name, people can refer to it, “You’ll find dyes in Fessex province.”
    
  • Contains a small number of towns (2-3), with roads between them. The region functions as one political unit.
    
  • It has one leader - a noble of a certain house
    
  • It has one set of rules/edicts that govern it
    
  • NPCs in a region all feel the same way about topics: like the nobles, a kingdom, or the people of another region
    
  • A region can be at war with another region (instead of town vs town)
    
  • A region is affiliated with the Conclave or Renegades
    
• A region has a specific biome - swampy, desert, forest, rolling grasslands, ashen mordor
  
• A region has one (or a few) resources natural to it. This makes something special about each region.
  
• A region has one kind of base problem in it: it has a giant spider problem, or plague, or drought, OR marauding goblins, instead of everything everywhere like we’ve currently done
  
• Regions have a difficulty level. This region is Level 1, that one is 10, that one is 20, another is 30. (We don’t actually have levels but you get the idea).
  
• Later when Kingdoms are added, they are simply a collection of regions ruled by one monarch. Any region not affiliated with a monarch are ‘free city states’ like medieval venice or ancient Sparta
  
• A region has specific ins and outs the player can travel between them.
  
  
  • They can no longer just walk through the mountains, have to take a pass.
    
  • The pass can be blocked by problems like avalanche, bandits, or a gryphon
    
• We can focus the map generator on making interesting regions well. Then we make a map by generating N number of regions.
  
  
  • You will be able to customize your experience at 1.0 where you can change the size (# of regions) for a map.
    
• Each region will have historical events, which you will see in the world gen screen.
  
• Regions represents a massive change to the world structure and game map. This will be a save breaking change. But don’t worry, it won’t be out for several months so you have plenty of time.
  

Regions solve tons of problems with the game! It is time we get to it. This is a core component to the Exploration update Mark and Thomas are working on.

[h2]Mini-Update Rival Combat[/h2]



Rivals is a small update adding the ability to fight specific named mages in the game. These mages specialize in one of the schools and present a unique challenge to the player.

• Phil and I playtested Rivals and found some issues. We’re both off this week, giving the team time to find solutions. Next week we’ll playtest again and see where it is at. It’s real close!
  
• James, Tyler, and Nolan are improving some of the aspects
  

[h2]No Patch This Week[/h2]

With Phil and I off this week we decided to just pause the weekly patch. There will be a patch next week. We’ll also be off Steam forums and Discord for a week. I think you can manage without us. 😝

[h2]Rivals[/h2]



Rivals is a small update adding the ability to fight specific named mages in the game. These mages specialize in one of the schools and present a unique challenge to the player.

• We’re trying to learn from our mistakes and give features time to “bake”. Rivals is ready for me to playtest, which I will do tomorrow. If everything is good, we’ll announce a launch date to Beta. If it needs more lovin’ in the oven, then we’ll do that.
  

[h2]Exploration[/h2]



Exploration is our next major update to the game. It will greatly enhance the overworld experience, map exploration, UI experience, dynamically generated quests based on NPC motives, and player progression.

• This is one of those moments where I’m challenged by how much to share I share now because some some things aren’t 100% nailed down but swirling around…
  
• We’re going to make this update a big update. We will close the game loop(s) and make the game a game. Adding in player progression is important.
  
• We’re actively working on how we handle the player’s lifetime.
  
• We’re adding in a major world altering problem which significantly affects play and provides a win condition. We’re working through how we can add the first one, now. It’s going to be a dragon like Smaug, who shows up and pursues his own goals over time
  
• We’re looking into our map generation and how we can support “regions”, clusters of towns which all know each other and interact with each other
  
• We’ve started the programming work for our first dynamic quest in the game. Once we get it working we can build from there
  

[h2]Other News[/h2]



I’m happy to report we are hiring an illustrator artist May 6! Lucas and I have been conversing since August of last year and finally we are able to pull the trigger. Above is his art test to sketch up some frost orc ideas. Lucas’ first task? Sketching dragons!

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

Fixed a bug that sometimes caused inn services to not display (along with other shops in more rare cases)
Fixed a bug that sometimes causes Healer services to not heal properly
Fixed a bug that removed all debuffs and buffs when casting Purge
Fixed a bug that caused the game to crash on startup due to a corrupt save file
Fixed a bug with Outfitter's displaying weird behaviors if the player's inventory was full
Fixed text bugs in Tower Game Room services

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

Ara now recovers at an incrementally scaling pace each turn to a max cap of 40 Ara recovered in a single turn
Purge now removes all enemy-induced de-buffs from the player instead of a single debuff at a higher AP/Ara cost