Hello everyone,
In our last communication we shared a lot of information with you and wanted to keep you posted on a more regular basis, so here we are.
Let’s start with the most exciting news: we have completed the evaluation phase for client technologies and have settled on Unity being the future for Realm!
While first prototyping efforts are promising, it is a huge project with many unknowns. You all know that we are a small team and we prefer it that way. However, to keep support for the Flash game and build the Unity client in parallel, we need to scale the team up and get in some Unity specialists.
Since we don’t have the big corporate money to fuel this endeavor, we were thinking about running something like a campaign on Kickstarter, but that felt rather awkward seeing as we already have a running game. Instead, we are now planning on putting a Support Campaign in the game for those of you who want to see this project go forward with some solid momentum and help us out. We will be releasing details on this once we have them. Stay tuned!
In other news, summer is approaching and with it comes Month of the Mad God! We are hard at work to make sure we can upgrade the events, introduce new fights and items and release the New Class on time. Speaking of the new class, we went through several iterations and are now at the point where we can announce some more details in the roadmap!
While we will have to save our excitement for MotMG for a while longer, we will tell you about a bunch of things that are coming up in terms of development roadmap in the update below.
RotMG Development Roadmap Update:
Guild List
The feature has been released - let us know what you think! With it, we added additional functionalities like the “Last seen” tooltip (to both friends and guild lists) and the ability to promote and demote guild members directly from the panel. We imagined the feature with guild management in mind to allow Founders and Officers to better organize their guilds while also helping everyone socialize more.
Pet Wardrobe & Pet UI
The implementation phase is completed and we are now working on killing bugs and polishing things up. We are aiming at pushing this exciting new feature with our next release!
On top, we decided to spice it up by overhauling the Pet feeding and fusing UI to give you, for example, the ability to feed several items at once and directly from your inventory. As announced in the last Producer’s Letter, your pet stones will turn into pet skin unlockers with the update and you will be able to acquire just about any pet skin via hatching and fusing. You will be able to switch back and forth between skins of a family for a small fee in fame or gold and you will also be able to switch families for more resources.
We have also been experimenting with the scaling of pets in order to base the size of pets on their respective rarity regardless of skin. While we like the first results, we still need to optimize it and investigate a better way to implement such a change. This will likely be an additional update that will come out after the initial release of the feature. We are very excited for this release and cannot wait to see your feedback.
New Class
As discussed above, we have made awesome progress with the new Class and have locked down the core aspects of it: Katana and Heavy Armor with a damaging ability. We are also experimenting with a new status effect that will be exclusive to the new Class. A lot more iterating and balancing is required but we are confident that we are creating something fun and exciting to play. The Class Unlock will be embedded in the system you are already used to with the other classes and the star levels will be adjusted accordingly. Yes, this means you will all be bumped down to a yellow star and will have to fight to get back the honorary badge of recognition that is the White Star.
Fame System Rework
We have started working on XP with the goal of making the fame loop a bigger part of the core game experience. The first step will be to balance the XP formula, in essence guaranteeing you more XP when beating dungeons. This change is quite straightforward and will be implemented gradually, starting with our next release.
In a second step, we will be expanding on this system and will update the achievements and achievement bonuses as well as adding some new ones. Once we feel that the system above is working well, we also want to tackle the fame economy as a whole. The goal is to make more items available for fame and to make use of the currency in more features than just for pets and guilds.
Dungeon Rush
The prototyping for this feature is still ongoing but we feel that it is coming along nicely and will definitely beat the arena in terms of accessibility, fun, and rewards. We are aiming to introduce it to public testing towards fall and implement it fully later this year and have it replace the Arena long-term. We can’t make any promises yet, as we want to get it right and do a lot of playtesting.
Finally, we also picked additional topics from the last Producer’s Letter or recent conversations we wanted to discuss:
Private Dungeons, crashing and griefing
Crashers and griefing are issues taken very seriously by our team. We have made changes to both the current systems and the dungeons design in order to prevent that type of behavior and we will continue to do so. We are investigating what fitting solutions can be implemented to offer a better experience while staying true to the goal of the game which is to be one of the most co-op games ever created.
Bots?
We realize that bots continue to be an annoyance - in the past, we have managed to get rid of them but only for a limited amount of time. Based on what we are seeing in other games, it will be more than tough to get rid of all bots in a free2play game. Every change we make to combat bots and spammers has to take into account legitimate users and how they will be impacted as well. That doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking and trying new things on a regular basis. A majority of those changes are happening behind the scenes and released silently to guarantee their effects. You can also help making the game spam free: stop buying items or services on third-party websites and other places. Not only will it eventually get you banned, it also gives spammers a reason to continue.
June Mystery Shards
We know that it can be disappointing to open a mystery box and not get the jackpot that you are hoping for, so we wanted to try something different with some of our mystery boxes in June. We added in a special shard to the most common prizes that you can win from certain mystery boxes that you can collect into stacks of 10x and exchange for mystery skin unlockers at the Tinkerer. Many of the player questions surrounding this item seemed to be about the shard’s generic name and design taken from previous monthly events, and we apologize for any confusion that this oversight caused. We do not currently intend to drop these shards from other in-game events, but we may consider rolling out a larger system that includes other ways to collect similar skin shards in the future so stay tuned!
This is it for today. We are really excited about what is coming up to Realm in the second half of 2018. There is more to come and we will continue posting regular updates to keep you in the loop!
Share with us your feedback, expectations and suggestions in the comments. As usual, we are looking forward to hearing what you guys think and how we can continue making Realm a great game together!