This week we have made significant progress on some of the new systems we have been working on. We are also preparing for final pass on the Badia de Cara zone before we can open it up for testing, and of course we are continuing to work on bug fixes and class abilities/mastery. Check out the details below.
Design and Narrative
Working on spatial dialog for the Port of Rulun that players will “overhear” as they move through the city.
Fixing up NPC pathfinding and navigation issues in the Sea Dragon Hatchery in Badia de Cara.
Bringing some missing parts of Enchanter Mastery online with support from the Programming team, along with some features for other classes.
Significantly overhauling most of the uncommon items in the game to match up with updated itemization rules and combat tuning.
Investigating and fixing bugs, including a few things that were causing Wizards to do far more critical damage than intended (sorry, Wizards).
Continuing high-level design work for Faerthale.
Worldbuilding and Environment Art
Building rocks and trees for Faerthale, including the great trees of the Oldwood.
Finalizing collision and NPC navigation fixes for the Port of Rulun.
Addressing some reported problems in Thronefast, Avendyr’s Pass, and Wild’s End.
Planning for the areas just outside Faerthale City.
Working on additional assets for Faerthale City, including pillars, floors, and other structural building blocks.
Character Art and Animation
Animation refinements for sprinting animations with weapons out.
Finalizing skinning for the updated armor meshes and building out the pipeline to begin updating all of the game’s armor textures for the new system.
Styling hair for elven players and NPCs.
Discussing the different types of spriggans and other unique Faerthale creatures with the Design team so that updated concepts can be fleshed out.
Programming
Working on revisions to core server processes to help improve scalability and performance (this is a large effort and will likely take several months to complete, but is required to enable several important gameplay-related features).
Hooked up data connections for the Market system, internal testing to make sure that items can be listed, purchased, and fulfilled via the Mail system as expected.
Additional functionality needed to fully bring Mastery online for all classes.
Working on an updated toolset for modifying class abilities to help simplify the work that Designers need to do for building ability logic.
Bug investigations and fixes, with a priority focus on bugs that impact the mastery system or server performance.
Prep work for hooking up an automated ferry boat that will travel between the Port of Rulun and Detihauna in Badia de Cara, and for hooking up the small player boats so that they can be spawned and piloted.