Greetings Mistwalkers,
We know it's been a while since we have given some news, so here it is.
Since our last post there was no tangible progression on the game, We will not get in the "why" here, but the short story is that it did not work. We are now correcting the situation with a change of plan.
And the plan is?
We are creating a secondary team dedicated to the game that will be directed by us (<--that the TL/DR). Work has already begun, training is ongoing with the first member of the new team.
We are also creating a Players Council that will help with player inputs on what we should do.
What to expect?
We will first create small updates to test the release pipeline and make sure the team is able to create releases. We expect the first update to be called something like "Quick Wins" where we target a few evident things of the game that we can change. The team will then analyze progression vectors and create new content to get to theses. The game engine will not change anymore, we will be focusing on game content.
Falkarma will act as Creative Director for the game, making sure we respect our original planning and that the new content match the quality we want for the game. He have been busy preparing an overview of the current state of the game, to set targets for the new team.
| As an example, we are categorizing the part of the game map that is not yet opened. Making them available and meaningful could be a viable long-term target for the team. |
The overview also include the progression of the players, your capabilities, where are your caps, what you need to finish the current raids, what you can or can't craft, etc. For this I will need the cooperation of the community via the Council, because checking value in the database is never the whole story.
Cloudigger is revisiting the storyline and world lore, to see how it can be transferred to the new team and how he can help with that. Sicklab will keep an eye on the build process and be ready to intervene when needed.
How does this plan will work?
(bonus part, not really news)
Mist Legacy was created as a forever game, meaning the engine is made to consume data stored in a database. We have an homebrew editor that helps create any type of content in this database, may it be quests, monsters, talents, crafts, regions, etc., etc.
Here are some pictures of what the new team has to learn. It's a complex editor, but once you get the way it works, you'll be creating dungeons and epic story all night.
| The cartographic view of the starting area. You can see Leonidas and his dialog tree on the right. On the map you can see all kinds of nodes that represent gameplay elements. |
| A "worktree" is a group of elements related to a specific part of the game. Here is the last adventure we created in the Lithofortress. You can see the parameters of Gularzob when he is possessed. On the right is another worktree for the monster talents and who has them. |
| Here are some crafting and balancing views. The list of metal in the worktree shows us where you can get them. The pivot grid will help us create some kind of balance in the skills. And the "Armes" worktree will show you all the weapons and how they are crafted. |
(This table was sponsored by the new visual editor of Steam! It works like a charm!)
As for the Council, we will create public and private topic on the Discord server. That will give us a better feeling of what and how we need the game to progress. We will also open more data to help player analyze our system.
Conclusion
We are very happy with the new plan for the project, it was painful to watch the game being idle because we could not get back to it.
In short, we have a new plan, work has begun and we expect to have results.
Thanks for playing with us!
