Archmage Rises News

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.

Here with another hotfix for the build that went out last night. Apparently we like to break things as much as we like to fix them! Well, maybe we don't like to break things, but sometimes it happens anyway. If you're a developer, you know what we are talking about - you fix one bug only to introduce another.

This hotfix addresses these issues:

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

• Fixed Legacy screens appearing blank. The some of text gen on the Legacy tab relies on data from dungeons (to get dungeon names), but after you complete a dungeon, it gets destroyed and no longer exists. The Legacy screen doesn't like that very much, so it goes on strike. We've managed to negotiate it and got it back to work, but refuses to return to previous saves since the data it requires is gone. It sends it's apologies and will work on new games from now on.
  
• Fixed getting stuck in Town Centers. We've provided exit signs so you can find your way out now :D
  
• Students during your character creation can now find jobs as House Mages instead of non-magical jobs. The job market for mages is a lot better in this patch.
  

We're still working through issues that have arisen in the Legacy update. These are the things we are able to fix so far.

• In the Mabren's Tower major quest, upon finding the etchings the game thought it was locked in combat preventing the use of items like torches or tents. Now fixed.
  
• NPC Dialogue: Fixed scroll window would not reset to the top
  
• If you are a real jerk and get tossed overboard from a ship, it will no longer soft-lock the game. :-) you'll be sent to the nearest healer GTA style
  
• Sleeping in camp now has the appropriate screen fade
  
• Fixed inventory error that could occur from auto-eating
  
• Made food "everfresh" property actually function so that it won't go stale
  
• Inn dine-in food should no longer go bad and give players nausea
  
• Inventories will properly pull food when auto-eating
  
• You can now eat as long as the food doesn't put you over the max fullness
  
• Hunger notice only appears when actually hungry
  
• Cleaned the UI in several instances where the X button was not top right
  
• Character Sheet: Relationships: Added tooltips for the sort options
  
• Knowledge Picker: Added tooltips to the sort options
  
• Fixed an issue where town music wouldn't play after character creation
  

• We have hunger and starving debuffs disabled for now until we rework the nourishment system for Update #3 Exploration.