Archmage Rises News

Hey everyone!

We said it was coming and now it's finally here -- you can now actually get the artifact needed to complete the demo quest which was preventing you from progressing on the game.

As Maui said: "You're welcome!" (sorry Disney, please don't shut us down...)

Plus, we crushed a lot of other important pesky bugs:

Added: Ability to save games manually - Press F5 to quicksave at any time - this is for Kaylo7, Lord Blade, and others who were asking for multiple saves with such a buggy game
Added: New load save game screen. Shows valuable data like file save date/time, character name, world name, and total wealth (not just your current gold but TOTAL WEALTH)
Improved: The Worlds and Save Files list is now newest to oldest - eventually we come around to doing it right!
Fixed: Unable to get the artifact in the final room. We no longer put it in a chest, we just put it in your inventory. Even if your inventory is full you still get the artifact. Everyone will always get the artifact! Yay!
Fixed: Encounter system should no longer lock up now in a bad state, allowing the player to continue playing. This was the source of many many bugs
1. Fixed: Quest phases breaking resulting in Soft Lock and unable to move on map
   
2. Fixed: Soft Lock which caused menus to disappear
   
3. Fixed: Game crashes after sea travel
   
4. Fixed: Money disappearing after you add it to tower treasury
   
5. Fixed: Error when casting magic on a town from the map (hex casting)
   
6. Fixed: Errors fighting guards defending a town after you attacked it with spells from the map (hex casting)
   
7. Fixed: Playing a second life skips character creation
   
8. Fixed: Equipping armor now works the same as equipping weapons
   
9. Fixed: World generation crash while generating history
   
10. Fixed: World Gen screen could be clicked through, triggering items on Main Menu screen and just making a big mess of the game
    
11. Fixed: Player note map icons were failing to load from a save file, they should show up now
    
12. Fixed: Settings menu button highlights were not working properly
    
13. Fixed: Selling draft animals now works. It actually checks for creature’s inventory instead of player’s animal count :facepalm
    
14. Fixed: Clicking leave in a building and being sent all the way out of town
    
15. Fixed: Issue with game locking up when saving generated world after world generation
    
16. Fixed: reduced town music volumes for better balance
    
17. Fixed: Bug notification pop-up not working
    
18. Fixed: Game crashing when settings file doesn’t exist
    
19. Fixed: Broken choice in caravan encounter
    
20. Fixed: some inventory item movement errors
    
21. Fixed: Killing an NPC in a building led to bad recursive errors
    
22. Fixed: Various errors loading save files
    
23. Added more error tracking for dungeon issues, hopefully this will help in the future.
    
24. Removed: Email section to bug reporter: with the time delay from reporting an issue to when we work on it, it just isn't of practical use
    

Known Issues:

• Conclave ending does not fire the final boss fight, however the quest is complete and players can freely do what they want
  
• The guards in the final battle won't die. We thought we fixed it, but testing has proven we haven't. If you encounter this here is a work around:
  Open the console with ~
  Type in Combat.Win
  You will win the combat and can continue on with your life.
  I realize that is a crappy solve to this bug, but that's the best we can do for today.
  

We've also conjured up our new Discord server here if you'd like to join us: https://discord.gg/DUE2NYPrcQ

And good news, we can officially announce our Early Access release date: Archmage Rises is officially going to Early Access on Monday April 17, 2023 (only a few weeks away)!

We'll have another build for you next week so keep those bug reports coming (or not, hopefully you won't experience too many more bugs 😅).

In the last week we've been able to make 46 lovely fixes. We intend to do updates on thursdays, but introduced 3 major bugs and needed to fix them today before getting the build out.

(I seem to have forgotten to increment the build number - whatever, i'm not going to make a new build just for that)

1. Added a new "There was an error" prompt to the game so you know if something potentially bad happened. See notes below.
2. Fixed massive issue with autosaving which broke the game (oops) and made bad saves (double oops)
   
3. Fixed saving of Quest data to save nonrepeatable quest triggers that have already been triggered: like fighting the goblins, or the renegade conversation
   
4. Fixed Frozen creatures freezing combat (ironic)
   
5. Fixed losing spell upgrades on loading the game
   
6. Fixed dungeon exit teleport
   
7. Fixed dungeon cannot interact with trapped items, some levers, and some objects
   
8. Fixed stuck in dungeon (light issue but no prompt said so)
   
9. Fixed crash following a monster to their lair
   
10. Fixed phantom towns, where once you got there there was no town (there is no spoon!)
    
11. Fixed bad town directions. No one found it realistic and funny. (Because it wasn't, it was a bug.)
    
12. Greatly improved player logging to help us see what happened before a bug
    
13. Fixed items having wrong icons (or changing icons) as you play
    
14. Fixed unable to sell items to market
    
15. Fixed unable to equip a helmet
    
16. Fixed dragging items to toolbar deleting it
    
17. Fixed dungeon generating only one room on second floor
    
18. Fixed disappearing text issue in menus
    
19. Updated demo quest text: it said someone was in a chapel but they were usually in in inn or wandering around town
    
20. Fixed an issue where household members being empty caused getting wealth level to fail, resulting in broken UI.
    
21. Fixed a bug where the guards in a boss fight were being generated with broken characters.
    
22. Fix bugs with Hex Map icons and loading into the Hex Map
    
23. Disabled Polymorph spell, it isn't implemented fully and created lots of problems
    
24. Fixed bugs with Hex Map display not loading properly if you start the game there (duplicate icons, missing player icon)
    
25. Fixes an issue that prevented quest npcs from being removed when they die.
    
26. Fixed mage tower inventory not saving, losing your gold. Your precious precious gold!
    
27. Fixed quests picking towns over 40 hexes away
    
28. Fixed when booking passage the destination town not having a port so you couldn't return
    
29. Fixed Wellbeing not showing decimal value
    
30. Removed armor and trait buffs from showing on the buff bar
    
31. Fixed buffs not showing after a load
    
32. Fixed saving for player notes in the Notes tab
    
33. Fixed duration on Drunk and Hangover buffs, now 24 HOURS not 24 DAYS
    
34. Fixed quest final quest non-interactable
    
35. Fixed potential issues with empty treasure chests
    
36. Combat: Added back row to valid places to use Force Push
    
37. Updated missing status icons like prone, stuck, and injuries like eye loss
    
38. Adjusted position of event log, so it's readable and text doesn't get cut off
    
39. Fixed item duplication error in enchanting window
    
40. Prevent ability to add same item to multiple inventory slots
    
41. Fixed autoeat attempting to eat the same food more times than the quantity of the food in the inventory.
    
42. Improved combat logic for determining turn end for the player and for enemies
    
43. Fixed error entering towns
    
44. Fixed torch initialize properly
    
45. Fixed various loading issues
    
46. Various combat fixes
    

With these above fixes we reached our goal of "Zero Critical Bugs". Sure more came in, but only 10ish, which is manageable.

I'm sure this new feature will annoy some players so I want to start off by saying you can turn it off in the options.

[h2]Problem:[/h2]
It is a systems based, data driven, simulator game. Meaning an error in town can affect behavior of levers in a dungeon. Crazy, I know. Unity by default hides errors from the player, which usually makes sense, but is brutal for this kind of game. So when we get a bug report about combat it could be due to an error in conversation with an NPC on the road. Really gnarly stuff to troubleshoot and slows us down.

Even worse, something terrible can happen which will invalidate your game, but you keep playing along for another 20+ minutes only to find out it crashes AND your save is corrupted.

[h2]Solution:[/h2]
We now inform you when an error occurs so you know if your game world state is potentially invalid. This at least saves you from putting more time into a game that may be corrupted.
Obviously this doesn't FIX the corruption issue, but at least lets you know something is wrong. You can then decide to play at your own risk.

[h2]How it works:[/h2]
Clicking the error allows you to immediately submit it with your player log and we can see what happened. We have enhanced our player logs to be much more verbose so in theory we can find issues faster and resolve them.

We have two classifications for bugs. Really bad ones will tell you you should probably not continue playing. Sorry. I don't know what else to do here.

Not so bad errors we warn you but tell you you can probably continue playing and it should be ok. Should being the operative word.

This is a necessary step to improving quality and reducing bug fix times. Some people will hate it and that's ok, you can turn it off in options and go right back to playing the game as it was before.

Possibly interesting note: When we playtest the game we always see the error prompts even if turned off in options. This means when non-programmer people test the game they can raise the issue immediately. This is how we were missing some issues. Hopefully we'll catch more now internally.

Reports came in last night of frozen enemies (by magic) in combat not ending the enemies phase. This soft locks the game.

We don't want to ruin anyone's weekend, so here is a fix!ːhappystar2022ː

Enjoy your weekend!

We're focused on bug fixing, prioritizing it over features right now, and we're almost at Zero Bugs (see below for explanation).

Today's beautiful menu of fixes include:

• Fixed losing all XP on loading the game ːsteamfacepalmː
  
• Greatly improved Save File Loading reliability
• Fixed sometimes can't fight enemies on the world map after completing quest
  
• Fixed sometimes resting at Inn crashed game
  
• Fixed sometimes reloading game loads empty dungeon and yer stuck
  
• Fixed dropping boots on the ground changed their icon to body armor in inventory
  
• Fixed resurgence of enemies not appearing in battle
  
• Fixed Net not working right - just took it out of the game for now. That counts as a fix, right?! ːtongueː
  
• Fixed 10 foot pole not detecting and triggering traps. Now it will save your hide. Please don't name or fall in love with your pole, it will break after use. I don't want you to be sad.
  
• Fixed hot bar keybinds Resetting after each encounter. Don't get too attached to it though because we have a new UI coming which doesn't have a hot bar anymore. That was so 2014.
  
• Fixed spells sometimes pull up an incorrect spell stamina window
  

In software development there is an important milestone where all serious* bugs are resolved. It doesn't necessarily mean more won't be reported, but finally at some point we got them all. It also means the dev team is ahead of the testing and bug reports. It means the software is quality and stable.
If you'd like to know more about Zero Bug and Bounce you can here:
https://www.lee-dohm.com/2013/08/14/what-does-zbb-mean/

* = we define serious as "reported by multiple users". Something like missing icons on buffs is typically not treated as serious (it is a graphical glitch)... it's embarrassing, it says we're a bunch of amateurs, but it isn't serious ːwinter2019happyyulː like a crash or feature not working.

We're pushing hard to get to Zero Serious Bugs by Monday. We had 32, three days, and average about 10 a day.
Yesterday we did 9
Today we did 9
We have 14 left
So Zero Bug Monday is looking realistic.

Once we get to Zero Bugs we can start working on features again and looking forward to the Early Access release. Team is excited to turn this corner!

Do you remember way back in Mar 7 of 2023? The grass was greener, birds were singing just a little more often, the air smelled a little sweeter with a hint of lilac?

Remember when I said we'll introduce some new bugs. ːsteamfacepalmː
Well the fix to the Weapons using Stamina broke loading of save files. Not the save files themselves, but the loading of them due to an initialization ordering issue. We fixed the ordering issue, now allowing your existing pre-fix saves to work again.

So here we are again, hat in hand, putting out yet another hotfix to fix the hotfix to fix the update to fix the build to fix the demo.
The people in charge of sacking the people in charge, have been sacked. ːtongueː

Along with this hotfix we fixed several others which just came along for the ride ːshockedstar2022ː :

• Fixed yesterdays problem with loading previous save files
• Fixed Exploitable XP system - No longer can you sit and ping a single enemy for unlimited XP.
  There is now a short term fix of a max cap of 100xp gain per battle. It matters the order of the spells you cast. If you do fire spells to 100xp, then arcane, you'll get only fire xp and no arcane. Govern yourselves accordingly. ːKeysː
  
• Fixed Shield buff/icon on the left correctly reduce the numbers when blocking attacks. I can't believe it took us so long to fix this one. I'm so embarrassed. ːsteamfacepalmː
  
• Fixed clicking on a door, going to another room had an error, causing the camera to slowly continue to slide into nowhere
  
• Camping in dungeons has too high of an ambush chance, lowered it to 20%
  
• Fixed leaving a Town doesn't change menu, exiting again exits town. This, of all things, was caused by
  
• Fixed Eternal Huntsman shooting player through solid obstacles on the battlefield
  
• Fixed missing icons for broken rib, and other effects
  
• Lesser Arcane Insight Duration was wrong, now right
  

Known issues:

1. Sometimes a Dungeon room layouts can be incorrect - floating boxes and clipping elements. Oops, we'll get to this eventually.