This week is shorter because of the Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving (Monday Oct 9). Canadian Thanksgiving differs from the American by:
- being about 6 weeks earlier
- has no retail connotations of any kind
- always falls on a Monday.
Otherwise, we eat too much turkey and wear pilgrim hats. Oh, maybe that last one is just my family! 😛
Oh Combat Rewrite! Where Art Thou?
Combat rewrite is the #1 priority right now, with Jessi, Michel, Jonathan, Josh, Mark, James, Tyler all working on it.
Last week I wrote these prescient words: Don’t know how long this will take, we’re guessing this week will reveal a lot of how well it works.
Well it did. And we got a lot of problems to solve. 😟
The system isn’t as far along as I thought. As soon as we were about to set James loose on making some spells suddenly all the unfinished bits became painfully obvious. This is game dev. Actually, this is any creative process. The good news is we are solving the issues, plodding forward, and we should have magic missile working this week.
Our approach is to tackle three different spells from three different schools to stress test the system.
- Arcane: Magic Missile - “Can we deal any damage to anything?”
- Storm: Shock - “Can we applying stacking buffs which then trigger an effect (stun)?”
- Fire: Fireball - “Can we apply damage to more than one target?”
Sadly, Combat will not be coming in October.
Update 3: Exploration Will Include Dynamic Quests
I write this knowing it will make Hybernian and Kaylo7 happy. 😊
In 2014 I was already working on Archmage Rises and I saw this inspiring talk by Bioshock creator Kev Levine about ‘Narrative Legos’.
We’re in the Inception phase of our next major update on the game and we’ve concluded that now is the time to start implementing the dynamic quest system. It was originally scheduled in the roadmap for Update #5 Prosperity but we’re going to pull it forward.
Michel and I have been discussing how to solve these ‘narrative legos’ for years, and we have some good ideas, but it wasn’t until the kickoff meeting last week with Mark (Lead Design) and Nolan (Narrative) that it really clicked: I finally have the right team to solve this! Coming at it in a multi-disciplinary approach helps minimize risk and maximize the chance it will actually work.
We’re continuing to work on this so we’re ready when the majority of the team is done with Combat.
Priority Fixes
- TrojanKaisar reports a new game failing to load and the game his tower was in also fails to load. Others have reported similar issues. We’re very concerned about this and looking into the issue right now.
- Dock Travel sometimes causes a crash
- Dungeon final room loot is sometimes really pathetic. Like 6g.
- Problem removing a book from Tower display
Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.
Patch is coming out Thursday.