Adventurer Manager Devlog #1
Hello! Welcome to the first Adventurer Manager (AM) Devlog! These devlogs will be a part of our ongoing mission to keep you up to date with the behind the scenes development of the game as well as remain as transparent as possible in the development plans for Adventurer Manager.
Early Access is finally almost here! We’re incredibly thrilled about where the game is at the moment but we have a long road ahead full of exciting updates. The game has come such a long way from when we first started working on it and we can’t wait to continue to improve it with you. Looking through our art today, I came across this old image that was used as part of the pitch image for AM. I’ve included a current image for reference. Kind of crazy huh? I certainly think so! We have an amazing team and we’re going to work our asses off to make sure we can deliver a game you’re as excited about playing as we are about making it.
[img=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1950450/AM_Devlogs/Devlog1/early_adventurer_manager.jpg]
Early Image for Adventurer Manager (Cave Dungeon)
[img=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1950450/AM_Devlogs/Devlog1/Cave%201.png]
Current Image of Adventurer Manager (Cave Dungeon)
Now that we’re here at Early Access you will get to see some of the cool ideas as they come to fruition week to week. What’s even more awesome and more exciting for us is allowing you, the players to have significant input on the systems and features in AM! We will be reading up on the discussions on Steam daily and don’t hesitate to drop us a line on our forums at va-studios.com.
All that being said, now it’s time to get into the nitty gritty of what we’ve been working on right now! There has always been a long debate among the team about whether onscreen UI for the Dungeons should be minimal or robust and informational. Up until this point, the game has contained very minimal on-screen UI in dungeons. While this is nice for the aesthetics of the dungeons it is not very informative. We've decided at this point to move forward with an on-screen UI for dungeons. Here’s an early sample that you will see in Early Access:
[img=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1950450/AM_Devlogs/Devlog1/in_dungeon_bottom_ui.png]
The benefits of this change are two-fold. The first one, the most obvious one that was just mentioned was the ability to provide far more information about what’s happening in the dungeon, both in combat as well as in ease of moving from room to room with our new minimap compass feature. The second benefit of this change is that it lets us shrink down our dungeon art to basically appear more crisp on the screen while still retaining our retro look. Previously, the size in pixels between the other screens and the dungeons was pretty substantial, so much so that in my opinion the dungeons were kind of hard on the eyes.
The minimap compass will let you quickly travel the different directions on the map without having to open the full map. Arrows will appear for possible directions that will pulse. In directions you cannot travel, the arrows will disappear. This should make navigating the dungeons much easier. We’re really excited about this change and are hard at work making sure it is filled with useful information as well as working on improving the look of the UI piece.
Another thing that went in recently was ghosts! Previously, when an adventurer died he was replaced with a permanent floating tombstone that would awkwardly glide around with the party in the faint hope that the adventurer would be rezzed before the party returned to town. Now a fun ghost will appear and float alongside the party until they are rezzed or return to town where the adventurer is then deposited in the graveyard.
[img=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1950450/AM_Devlogs/Devlog1/human_ghost.png]
We’re also working on a really awesome new scene that will become our Town UI. Right now when you click a town you just get three big and boring buttons. The new UI will be a scene of that town with different buildings and NPC’s working in the scene. Long term we plan to have one themed for each Race, but for the short term when this goes in, it will replace all of the town menus everywhere. This should hit fairly soon! I’ve included a WIP image below:
[img=https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1950450/AM_Devlogs/Devlog1/town_sample.jpg]
These things listed above are all fantastic, but largely aesthetic. I’d like to take a minute to talk about a planned system that’s going in! We’re calling it our Injuries system. When your party is on an Adventure in a Dungeon and one of your adventurer’s health drops below a certain amount of HP he will receive an Injury and Injuries will be cumulative! The Injury will be located in one of 4 possible body locations, each with their own negative effects: Head, Body, Arms, and Legs. Just as an example: Head Injuries cause the adventurer to receive a -%ToHit value whereas Body Injuries will cause the adventurer to lose -%Max HP. One or two Injuries will be not terribly detrimental, but if you let them accumulate, the effects will definitely be noticeable. How do you heal those Injuries though?! Injuries will be healed in a brand new Town service, the Inn! The Inn will provide multiple quality bed options for resting adventurers that have tiered costs as well as tiered rest times. There will always be a free sleep option, but the time it takes to heal 1 Injury will be pretty severe. The higher quality beds will heal Injuries much faster. In addition, future upgrades will reduce these costs and reduce the time if that is the upgrade you decide to invest in. Adventurer Manager is about the Adventurers and this system helps us get closer to our goal of having you, the player, use more than 4-8 Adventurers at all times and have a large pool of Reserves that you are utilizing. Having your beefy Warrior out of the action for a while will hopefully make Adventuring more challenging and exciting!
One last thing I want to mention that we are working on: Side Adventures! Right now the Dungeons are a bit grindy as you work your way towards the boss to complete the story and advance. We really want to give you more reasons to stay and explore in the Dungeons. Coming soon we will have Side Adventures for each location. These will be simple tasks to complete in each dungeon and some will most likely require a Dungeon Reset or two to complete the tasks. They will reward you with XP and Gold and possibly items for completion and they will complete immediately without having to go turn them in. They will also be repeatable! Side Adventures will generally consist of Killing a number of X Monster, Collecting a number of X items, Defeating specific mini-bosses, etc. This will also allow us to bring in our silly randomized dialog that we use in our Auto Adventures.
That’s it for the first Devlog of Adventurer Manager, I hope you’ll continue to follow along with me as the development for AM progresses! If there is anything you’d like me to talk about during these Devlogs, don’t hesitate to post in our Steam Discussions our on our VAStudios forums!
Happy Adventuring!
Thomas Spradling (froren)
Game Designer & Producer
VAStudios