Mr. Z here, to give everyone an update over what has happened recently. Almost immediately after the OTK expo where we won first place, we released an open Demo of the Combat Alpha for anyone to play. During the demo we saw tens of thousands of people play the game, give feedback, and spread the word about Renown. Things went much better than expected and we have the deepest thanks to all our backers who have helped and promoted the game to get this far.
We found many bugs as a result of the massive amount of new people playing the game, and throughout the last few months we've been fixing a lot of stability problems that were discovered. We have been splitting our development time between bug fixing, balancing combat, adding new features and working quietly on Raid mode.
As some may have noticed in the patch notes, there are sometimes things in there that seem related to Raid mode. This is because over the last month we've been mostly developing Raid mode and Survival mechanics now that the Combat Alpha has more or less reached its conclusion. We've been making very steady progress on Raid, as a Developer I can say that I've never been more relieved to see the game's core gameplay mechanics all working together harmoniously. Every week ItsMoxie and I have been playtesting Raid mode internally and discovering all sorts of bugs and tweaks to do, at the start we've been walking away from a test with an average of 50 tasks to care of and the number keeps getting smaller each week. We've been making a lot of progress on Raid and we want to make absolutely sure that the gameplay loop is as fun and bug free as we can, even in this early state it is in.
There were 3 other major additions to Renown during this time as well. Shield Destruction, Armor Destruction, and Archery. It is too much to go over in one Blog post so I will be discussing Archery next blog.
Shield Destruction mechanics were added recently with some expert modeling and texturing from KZ. The Shield models actually update as they are taking damage, with their textures and models changing, and they get especially destroyed with weapons like Axes. When a Shield is fully destroyed this causes the player to get staggered, this should help keep people playing overly defensive with Shields at a disadvantage.
Programming the Armor Destruction mechanics was fairly simple to add shortly afterwards. It became clear to us that our old Rendering system for Armor damage did not sufficiently convey damage details to players. As such, KZ spent many weeks authoring all the new textures as the process of making these impressive damage details is no trivial task at all, many models required a lot of reworks and improvements and attention to detail it takes to do this was nothing short of impressive. The results speak for themselves, with these new details we can say confidently that Renown has something many other games wish they would have.
The look of the armors has been designed so that someone can quite quickly see whether an armor piece is damaged or not and have a good idea of how damaged it is. When an armor has lost enough durability, its stats start to become less effective, when this happens is also when the first damage textures are blended in so there is a very clear connection between the artwork of the game and gameplay consequences.
Combat has also received many refinements since the Demo. Many balance changes were made, the movement system was redone, Parrying and Flinching was made more consistent, Kicks were reworked, the Swing manipulation was reworked, and there have also been improvements to 1vX combat.