Couldn't get much done on Week 26, I usually get stuck when it's time to make big changes, however, I believe Week 27 was the start of a new era
Going forward, every monster will drop at least one rare item, and at least one crafting item or collectable item
There's a new NPC that will exchange different combinations of these collectable items to useable items, so it's actually much like crafting, as far as the socket calls goes, it's actually crafting, but as far as the game design goes, it removes the need to come up with crafting recipes that need to make perfect sense (Thanks to our collaboration with Ellian, our pixel artist for items and skills)
Much of the first exchangables will be for early game, for example the Wanderer's set will also be attainable through these collectable items etc. - later on going to move onto stronger monsters, finally populate the underground with this new design and so on
Orb's are coming soon too, no more event-only Orb slot items! :)
^ One small change that makes the game more friendly to newcomers, a common early player feedback was missing chat messages when inventory is open, this little notification will hopefully solve that problem
Going to release this new system in the coming days, hopefully around Thursday, and if it's well received, going forward with the population
Early Access: Week 25 in Review
Just a small step in the right direction this week, the Code "DOCS" gets a much needed search option - It was originally requested on Discord
Nothing to show on the new content front, no momentum yet. I've been digesting all the recent feedback - Once again, hoping this week is the week that I start a new chapter in content introduction
Early Access: Week 23,24 in Review
Cosmetics system changes and trials consumed most of these 2 weeks, especially the first week. Added beards, tested long beards, almost reformulated everything to make them look good. Sadly my approach to generating new items didn't bear fruit yet, so there are no good news on the new content front
From early player feedback, started makings things easier to understand and the game easier to navigate. So today's update includes some interface changes and additions, most notable one is the one below - where the empty slots have darker borders (I still can't get used to it but it makes more sense, might revert to the original looks later on)
Thanks to the Monster Achievements list Trexnamedtom prepared, I completed the first draft of the monster achievements, now all monsters have multiple achievements. I tried to balance it as much as I could, time and feedback will refine it further - I suspect once more monsters like the Golden Bat are added, there could be some different/unique achievements in the future - Otherwise, current achievements are perfect for the game's idle nature (Also Tracktrix just exposes all drop tables to anyone without any requirements now, much simpler)
Drafted with the idea of a Mini-Map above the Travel interface, converted to an image, the Town is 5MB's, so it's not trivial to render it simply as an image and make a mini map, so might try a mini-map of a more pixelized nature one day
The plan for the upcoming weeks is adding new content and making the game simpler to understand for new players
Early Access: Week 21,22 in Review
Started Week 21 by re-visiting the Cosmetics system with the intention of pushing it to completion and releasing it - Jayson prepares the sprites and I calibrate/integrate them, design the system around them - Ultimately, during Week 22, decided to do another revision before release - It's really challenging to make the hairs, hats look perfect, this revision is to make things easier
Moved the game servers to Google Cloud, initially experienced some issues where the game servers stopped receiving incoming emits, currently the game servers seem stable
Ellian, who prepares our item sprites was busy in June, so delayed the new content additions to July, have a new approach to introducing new items, can't wait to see how it'll turn out
After making the upgrade system more open, I realised that I started this journey to make a more open, less cryptic, simpler mmorpg, and after time passed by, I just forgot about my original intentions, the new upgrade system reminded me, I believe it made the game better, so I decided to push forward:
Tracktrix received a new look and a new section: Exchanges, in addition, it now shows the monster drop tables and exchange drop rates - Having an Ancient Computer in your inventory unlocks all the data, otherwise, 100 monster kills or 100 exchanges are needed to see them!
Early Access: Week 20 in Review
This week's update probably included the most major change to the game since its inception, public upgrade/compound %'s and an accompanying roll animation!
This change makes upgrades more transparent, caps the lower and higher %'s so the economy will be more stable in the future - and slows down upgrades - making merchants more crucial and opens up the possibility of selling pre-upgraded basic +8/+9 items. Initially was going to make this new system available through Tracktrix, or a special NPC in a special cave or something similar to that, but since it's aimed to be a core part of a core system - in the end decided to make it just available - Trexnamedtom suggested a way to speed up upgrades, so it might be added through a unique item or achievement
The upgrade system is aimed to make upgrading basic items challenging, but allow "babied" items to have higher chances (so the gap between npc items and valuable items isn't so high) - and I believe this update fortifies this design too. You'll come to discover that wearing items slowly increases their upgrade % - and upgrades have a higher % after failures - so in the end, basic items usually get the lower cap of the % - while you can make sure you always upgrade near the highest % for valuable items
In July, planning to introduce a lot more items, armor sets, weapons, populate the existing token shops, maybe introduce new ones - so normalizing the upgrade system was a relief, seemed like a prerequisite - Until July, might concentrate on completing the cosmetics system
Second major improvement this week is the QOL improvements, one of the major shortcomings of the game was controlling your character and inventory while the Code was updating/changing things every second, the following improvements mostly solved these issues
Improvements:
- Inventory refreshes no longer closes open items
- New system: Focusing instead of targeting
- Your characters and others can be focused while the code targeting continues
- Upgrade, Compound, Exchange interface restores itself after an inventory refresh
As a result, even if your code is continually targeting new monsters, using potions, refreshing your inventory every second, you can now freely inspect your character, equip/unequip items, check out others nearby, upgrade/compound without the items resetting every second
Changelist:
- Arena is now a Safe PVP Zone
- Server reset cooldown now appears in game logs too
- New property: character.q - similar to .s or .c, for delayed actions
- "placeholder" item - placed in the inventory to reserve the inventory position
- upgrade/compound code functions updated
- New property: character.focus
- parent.xtarget points to the focused character
Early Access: Week 19 in Review
This week's highlight: New stat, Fortitude! Aimed as a PVP attribute, reduces player vs player damage diminishingly, 100 Fortitude currently reduces net PVP damage by 50%
Secondary new attribute: Manasteal! Similar to how Lifesteal works, Manasteal is based on the net damage with a % - so if you deal 1000 net damage, a 0.5% manasteal steals a maximum of 50 MP (Originally 0x00's suggestion on Discord)
New stat scrolls: Scroll of Fortitude, Scroll of +XP, Scroll of +Gold, Scroll of +Luck, Scroll of Armor, Scroll of Resistance, Scroll of Armor Piercing, Scroll of Resistance Piercing, Scroll of Speed, Scroll of Lifesteal, Scroll of Manasteal, Scroll of Critical Hit (Crit), Scroll of Damage Return, Scroll of Attack Speed (A.Speed), Scroll of MP Cost Reduction (MP Cost), Scroll of Damage Increase (Damage/Healing Output Increase) - Not yet available, most will be very rare, Scroll of Fortitude will be via PVP Tokens
Major Change: XP Loss is now 10% at PVP servers compared to PVE servers
Considering revamping the upgrade system, keeping the same %'s, but making the exact % and exact roll transparent, making each next roll pre-determined and provably-fair, making each upgrade take around 2-3 seconds, slowing the upgrades a bit too
Changelist:
- Network Card can now be obtained for 2000 Monster Tokens
- Stat scrolls now have a "multiplier" property
- Character Sheet updated, has "Max XP Loss" info
- Lifesteal is now based on net damage dealt
- All monsters now have an internal default MP of 0.5% of their HP
Early Access: Week 18 in Review
Added the Monster Hunt quest this week, Daisy on the Town gives an infinitely repeatable monster hunt quest to eliminate monsters that leveled up too much
Re-working some base dynamics, speed is getting nerfed, high speed characters makes the game too easy, slowly starting to re-visit other dynamics too, weapons and weapon speed will be next, currently, as a new addition, each equipped weapon drops your speed by 4, a shield drops it by 5
Worked on the Tracktrix and monster achievements further, still far from complete
Started introducing new items, Amulet of Mystery and Ring of Luck are the first 2 - Plan to introduce more through token exchanges - Thinking of making monsters drop mostly rare/regular accessories, crafting items and exchangeables, while new/endgame weapons could be obtained by PVP/Fun/Monster tokens and so on
Changelist:
- MP Cost calculation re-worked
- Evasion is capped at 90% now
- XP Tome's now cost 3.2M
- New Map: The Hut
- Network Card can be obtained for 5000 Monster Tokens too
- Class locked items - Priest's Mace is the first of it's kind
- "equip" socket method has 4, "unequip" has 12 call cost now
- Monsters can delevel now, happens during the monster hunt quest if a level 1 monster is killed instead of a high level monster
- New Code Function: find_npc - returns coordinates
- smart_move now moves to a random pack when the monster id is provided - example: smart_move("snake")
- Fixed some issues that caused the .targets logic to break - result of this change, if you agitate or taunt nerfed mummies now, they target you instead of disappearing right away
Early Access: Week 16,17 in Review
Experienced something resembling a writer's block these 2 weeks, intended to introduce more content, but there were no sparks. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I care too much about the results. It creates a certain kind of fear where you're afraid to make mistakes and end up doing nothing at all. Decided to consider the game development like a game itself and just introduce new things, have fun, deal with the aftermath - In the end, managed to break out of that fruitless state on Sunday
Out of all the things I want to add to the game, the "Pokedex"/Monster Achievements-like system was outcome/effort ratio-wise at the top
Internally, each character has it's own internal counter for monster kills. There's a new item called "Tracktrix" - it allows you to see your stats and see the achievements/stat bonuses each monster provides
As an example, if you managed to kill 10,000,000 Goo's - you get +1 permanent speed bonus, unlocked as long as the Tracktrix is in your inventory
Tracktrix curently costs 120M at the Premium Items NPC. Once the Tutorial system is complete, it will be an easy to acquire item - likely through a simple item collection quest (so the plan is to direct new players to this quest via the tutorial)
Early Access: Week 15 in Review
Json has been working on new a logo to replace the original one I created, I fell in love with this last iteration he came up with - Ideally want to the code aspect of the game represented in the icon too - maybe in a future iteration :)
For me, week 15 was a slow week, other than some small bugfixes, I didn't really make any tangible progress - I dedicated this week to introducing new content to the game, and the week was spent thinking / contemplating / procrastinating. Hoping to actually introduce new things on week 16
Our player Vaserati sponsored his friend Skylent to review the game, you can see the result above. It was a very educational video for me, fortified and extended a lot of the deductions we made over the recent weeks - mainly the need for detailed and extensive documentation and examples. After watching the video, I realised that I've never watched a stream from the viewpoint of a player that's distant from coding. Some of the initial results include:
1) From time to time, after improvements, request streams from new players to see how they interact with the game, determine common pitfalls and find solutions
2) Extend descriptions with code-related info
3) For skills - add code ID's and actual code snippets that show how each skill can be used in code
Early Access: Week 14 in Review
Most important addition this week is the new Guide with separate pages and a more visual/detailed approach, it's still a work in progress, slowly improving it
Second major change is the new account restrictions, for some reason this was an extremely requested feature - I really wanted to keep things more relaxed but in the end caved in and added these new restrictions. Currently if a player creates multiple accounts, they all act like a singular account in terms of game limits. Also if someone buys the game and refunds it, there's a system that detects it. I feel kind of mixed about the players caring more about buy+refund situations than me but it's good that the new restrictions was so well received, while in general restrictions aren't usually welcome.
As a bonus to this new system, if you buy the game on Steam, but prefer to play on Web, you are now authorised internally as a Steam player, so if you play the game on a shared network with other players, the game no longer subjects you to IP limitations!
Fixed the initial issues with the dueling system and the new instance routines
Did some internal work this week, spent one day doing some work on our tilesets, spent another day porting the photo upload and dynamic image serving routines from an earlier project of mine, mainly for the new guide photos
Added "is_silenced" to common functions - Characters were able to use skills while being stunned beforehand - Might add a silencing mechanic to the game too
