Archmage Rises News

[h2]Update #2b: Combat[/h2]
It’s not quite ready to ship yet.. 😂

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

What you are seeing above is a NEW combat scene with all new GameObjects recreating basically what we have already: showing an enemy, casting a spell, etc.

There is entirely new damage calculations happening under the hood. Something Michel thought would take about a day and now has invested three. Why? Because it matters how and the order it is done. If you cast a spell doing 100 damage, and it crits for +50% damage, but the target has 75% resistance, is the +50% = +50 damage or +12.5 damage?

The combatrons that make this all work are separate little pieces of data to make this all clear to you through onscreen UI and the combat log.

I’m expecting we have our first data-driven spell working tomorrow or at least this week. Once that happens things will go faster.

This new data driven (as opposed to code driven) makes it possible to do mod support for spells. Am I saying we’re going to support mods? No. I’m saying we are not doing anything that precludes mods, if we want to go that way in the future.

Combat is James, Mark, Tyler, Michel, Josh, Jonathan, and Rubi. Rubi is back from her honeymoon and ready to start making VFX for your spells.


[h2]Update #3: Exploration[/h2]
Had a great internal meeting with Design Lead Mark and Narrative Lead Nolan about the new way players will go about exploring and interacting with the map. The new fatigue system is way better than the current stamina system. Based on Kaylo7 and other’s feedback about big resource harvesting we are looking to have the player find an abandoned (and monster filled) mine, clear it out, and setup a foreman and workers to harvest the goods for you. No more living the fantasy of being a solitary mage running around with a pickaxe.*

It’s gonna be amazing, I’m super excited about it and think we are solving core problems that need solvin’.

(* Apparently no one actually has this fantasy)


[h2]Dynamic Quests: A Story Engine[/h2]


Work continues on the dynamic quest system. We’ve argued through many points of what it is and isn’t and now the time is to stop talking and just make something terrible.

Yes, you read that right. The next step is to make a completely awful quest/story generator that is embarrassingly horrible. So that we can test and see what is so very horribly wrong and fix or redesign it. That’s how iterative creation goes.

I hope this test can be completed this week. Maybe i’ll even share the completely awful generation.

Thomas and Nolan are focused on this.

[h2]Priority Fixes[/h2]

• Taliensin recommended we remove completed dungeons from the map. We will, and add a tooltip to let you know what is remaining (rooms, # of monsters) if you got to the end but missed some stuff.
  
• Allow the player to get extensions on quest time limits. This requires a persuasion check to negotiate more time to do your job!
  
• When buying items that require a skill prereq (like weapons or armor) we will show the player skill next to it
  
• We’re going to make the Innkeeper be able to provide a list of everyone in town who has an available quest, this will make it easier to see who to visit
  
• Dock Travel sometimes causes a crash, or gets stuck, or is closed. It’s been dragging on for a long time and it’s time to finally make it work nice nice.
  

Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.

Patch is coming out Thursday.

Happy to report the following fixes this week!

• NPCs answer questions based on "domain knowledge". So if you ask them a question and they don't know, they tell you who has the domain knowledge. A helpful player reported the NPC would tell you the expert's name, but not the town they were in! Now they do so you no longer have to go looking for Joan Coppard in EVERY SINGLE TOWN. ːsteamfacepalmː
  
• Loot drops in the final room of a dungeon were too RNG. One poor adventurer only got 6gp! :crying_yeti: We've bumped them up to make them feel much more significant. This is excellent feedback and relatively easy to fix. Early Access helps us see where the RNG needs 'help'. :happystar2022:
  
• A VFX will now play when casting Light or Arcane Insight
  
• We added a button to the quest log for abandoning a quest. This is intended only for situations where a quest breaks and you'd like to restart it. This is much easier than using console commands, though console commands makes you feel more like a Hacker! :poeIIshifty:
  
• Princess Katherine (which my staff assumed was my wife but I assured them definitely was not! I cannot get her to play the game!) reported a problem with the weaponsmith hammer duke quest turn in options. These have been better clarified. Thanks!
  

• JBreezy reported a problem removing a Book from a tower room display slot: it was going to the tower inventory instead of the player inventory. It now goes to the player inventory.
  
• TrojanKaisar and Watuhboy reported issues with loading a New Game. This ended up being an inability to spawn the tower quest throwing an error and wrecking everything. We downgraded the error so it will no longer block, and updated the quest tech so that save should be able to have the tower quest now
  
• Monster Tamer Bloba reports being stuck in dungeon after a fight. This is a tough one due to race conditions, we made a temporary bandaid for it that we hope will quash the error. More investigation necessary.
  

This week is shorter because of the Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving (Monday Oct 9). Canadian Thanksgiving differs from the American by:

• being about 6 weeks earlier
  
• has no retail connotations of any kind
  
• always falls on a Monday.
  

Otherwise, we eat too much turkey and wear pilgrim hats. Oh, maybe that last one is just my family! 😛



[h2]Oh Combat Rewrite! Where Art Thou?[/h2]
Combat rewrite is the #1 priority right now, with Jessi, Michel, Jonathan, Josh, Mark, James, Tyler all working on it.

Last week I wrote these prescient words: Don’t know how long this will take, we’re guessing this week will reveal a lot of how well it works.

Well it did. And we got a lot of problems to solve. 😟



The system isn’t as far along as I thought. As soon as we were about to set James loose on making some spells suddenly all the unfinished bits became painfully obvious. This is game dev. Actually, this is any creative process. The good news is we are solving the issues, plodding forward, and we should have magic missile working this week.

Our approach is to tackle three different spells from three different schools to stress test the system.

• Arcane: Magic Missile - “Can we deal any damage to anything?”
  
• Storm: Shock - “Can we applying stacking buffs which then trigger an effect (stun)?”
  
• Fire: Fireball - “Can we apply damage to more than one target?”
  

Sadly, Combat will not be coming in October.

[h2]Update 3: Exploration Will Include Dynamic Quests[/h2]
I write this knowing it will make Hybernian and Kaylo7 happy. 😊

In 2014 I was already working on Archmage Rises and I saw this inspiring talk by Bioshock creator Kev Levine about ‘Narrative Legos’.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We’re in the Inception phase of our next major update on the game and we’ve concluded that now is the time to start implementing the dynamic quest system. It was originally scheduled in the roadmap for Update #5 Prosperity but we’re going to pull it forward.

Michel and I have been discussing how to solve these ‘narrative legos’ for years, and we have some good ideas, but it wasn’t until the kickoff meeting last week with Mark (Lead Design) and Nolan (Narrative) that it really clicked: I finally have the right team to solve this! Coming at it in a multi-disciplinary approach helps minimize risk and maximize the chance it will actually work.

We’re continuing to work on this so we’re ready when the majority of the team is done with Combat.

[h2]Priority Fixes[/h2]

• TrojanKaisar reports a new game failing to load and the game his tower was in also fails to load. Others have reported similar issues. We’re very concerned about this and looking into the issue right now.
  
• Dock Travel sometimes causes a crash
  
• Dungeon final room loot is sometimes really pathetic. Like 6g.
  
• Problem removing a book from Tower display
  

Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.

Patch is coming out Thursday.

We're mostly all focused on combat right now, but I carved off a programmer to help fix and improve the game this week. Here is what we accomplished.

• Donkornleone suggested dungeon lairs show the race of the inhabitants on the tooltips. A darn fine suggestion! We added it.
  
• We had a "realism" where an NPC has a quest available, but sometimes it shows and sometimes it doesn't. This just annoyed people and caused them to spam talking to the person over and over to get it to display. Now, once they have a quest, it ALWAYS displays it.
  
• Monster Tamer Bloba asked: How do you get art for your mage tower? Well he was really onto something because the answer was: you couldn't. Through a series of unfortunate coincidences it wasn't possible to get them in towns or in dungeon loot. We're adding it back in and pretending to call it a new feature (don't tell anyone)! You can now get Art objects (Paintings & sculptures) in dungeon loot OR commissioning them from an artist workshop.
  

Here is how you can commission at an Artist Workshop:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

• Laiken reported a branch with no dialog options in the Mabren Tower quest. Fixed bad duplicated variable checks.
  
• Pig Boy reported never ending combat. We fixed it, you can finally get out of combat!
  
• Also fixed quest related problems we saw in Pig Boys save file.
  
• Fixed an issue when removing items from the cart when trading which was preventing negotiation from working
  
• Fixed trading negotiation counters not resetting on sleep
  
• Fixed Quest Log to show other quests even if one of them is messed up
  
• Fixed three save file loading issues
  
• Fixed a soft lock when saving when nauseous
  

Next week Monday (Oct 9) is Thanksgiving here in Canada. It'll be a shorter week.

We're really thankful for all of you playing and following the game.

This time last year, we had dozens playing the game and were making plans for Next Fest. Now we have many thousands of players. We appreciate all of you and the positive reviews!

[h2]Holy Goblin Drums! Combat Rewrite is Almost Working[/h2]
I was pleasantly surprised in a meeting last week to hear we can start James and Michel on designing spells for the new combat engine.

We’re nearing the finish line!

This requires some explanation:

There is a whole new combat engine, built from the ground up by Jonathan, Josh, Michel, and Tyler, designed to run tiny data lego components I call ‘Combat Atoms’. But now I’ll now call ‘Combatons’ cuz it sounds cool; like a G1 Transformer. 😊

Combatons are instructions to do things like:

• Apply physical damage
  
• Armor piercing damage
  
• Adding burn damage over time
  
• Increase miss chance
  
• Freeze active character
  

Combatons can also have rules and equality checks to see when they fire. So we could have an effect that reduces HP for X turns, but only if HP is > 1. It won’t kill you, but will reduce you down.

Player actions, spells, and monster actions are simply combined Combatons. We make new spells or monsters by combining the combatons differently or with different seed values.

Getting the tooling, data structions, and system to work has been a herculean effort from Mark, James, and about half of our programming team for 6 months.

Why do this?

By having the programmers focus on making combatons and an engine to run them, now the work of making spells, items, and buffs can be done by designers.

The real benefit is in iteration. A designer can setup a spell, test it, change it, and repeat in seconds without involving a programmer.


James & Michel are creating spells today, and seeing how it works. We’ll keep adding combatons as needed until we have all that we need.

Don’t know how long this will take, we’re guessing this week will reveal a lot of how well it works.

Then another 2 or so weeks to really start building out the spells.

Our goal is to hit ~5 spells per school (5 schools) when we release this combat update.

No dates yet, I’m hoping end of Oct, but we’ll see what we see.

Combat is ~80% of our resources now: Jessi on UI, Michel, Josh, Tyler on programming, Mark & James on design


We appreciate everyone who goes to the trouble of logging bugs and posting issues we need to look at. This game is hard to make and knowing where to put the attention helps alot.

These are the issues we are prioritizing this week:

• The slider quest is getting squashed by the new Mabren Tower quest and no longer appearing, meaning you cannot ‘upcast’ spells.
  
• In general this whole slider quest is going away in the Combat Rewrite because the ability to ‘upcast’ a spell is now handled per magic school and is something you unlock with experience.
  
• A couple of people have posted about inability to find Art objects. We’re investigating.
  
• Monster Tamer Bloba reports trouble trading and negotiating with the Merchant, wrecking the game.
  
• Rival mages from school were sometimes choosing a non-magical career, like Fishmonger. Oops! We’re adding a new job to the game of House Mage which in the world of Vaelun is the next normal step.
  
• There is a dumb bug where the player log repeatedly spouts: Skeleton Corpse is immune to Undead.
  

Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.

Patch is coming out Thursday.