Halloween event is extended and I'm really happy with the reception
Adventure Land: The Code MMORPG
Early Access: October in Review
Event: Halloween!
Halloween event is live!
There's a new buff system, .cbuff in G.monsters - defeating a monster provides different buffs to different levels of players
New boss Slenderman, new Priest Mace, new cosmetics, 2 new Lolipop Mace's that pop are coming soon!
Also looking for feedback regarding fish, they'll occupy an inventory space each, so you'll be fishing and going to Desertland to exchange the fish, thinking of exchanging fish to a random interval of tokens each, and there'll be a token shop
As an example, a rare fish could give 1-5000 tokens, so even if you catch one, there's an added layer of randomness
Early Access: Week 139 in Review
2 other unfinished changes this week, a better limitations enforcer to prevent abuse of using characters above the limit, the change included a server to server communication system. The second one was mailing all the giveaway items and limiting the entry to 1 per authorized buyer.
I was in a car accident, nothing major but my car was damaged, lost a lot of time this week and sadly will lose more as anything car related is a hassle, avoid buying a car if you can :)
Halloween is coming soon and Adventure Land's Spotlight on https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/ is on 18th! It will show up on the sidebar this week!
Early Access: Week 138 in Review
As a short recap, continuing from Week 121's Thoughts, forcing progress is the better option, going to try and add 1 little thing to the game every day whenever there's nothing else on my plate
[17/09/21]: Procs like freeze/burn now roll when a projectile is launched and other attributes are adopted by the projectile itself so weapon swapping etc. doesn't affect things anymore
[18/09/21]: Buff Orbs: These Orbs will provide specific buffs like fire/freeze resistance, only one buff will be active at a time, Orbs will be scattered and hard to reach
[19/09/21]: Enriched mining, a slightly better animation, a misc zone in the beach cave and introduced nuggets as drops
[20/09/21]: Warrior skill: Dash - to dash over obstacles or just dash forward
Maps are getting new zones that can be blinked or dashed to
As far as open sourcing goes, I've received a lot of honest and constructive feedback this week on Discord, most of the pro's in my mind were eliminated, and the cons that remain are amplifying the hard parts of developing a game that other developers play, it won't be easy to collaborate as collaboration wasn't on my mind when I was developing the game - so delayed the decision for a while
Early Access: Week 122 in Review
Jayson has been working hard, there's a new Desertland map coming soon, the complexity of the map is going to increase too
Mainland also has a new upcoming look with a lot more detail
Early Access: Week 121 Thoughts
The obvious solution was to open source the game, as pretty much every player wants to develop the game too. The right/hard way to do this was to re-write the entire backend codebase in NodeJS, as releasing it in Python 2.7 wouldn't help anyone - as Python is obsolete now. This approach, which I intend to do at one point, will allow anyone to create their own MMORPG and experiment with the genre in minutes
I think I'm going to build up to it and do things the easy way tho, open source the game as it is, see whether the game can progress creatively with a community effort - and if there's interest, then re-write the backend in NodeJS
Early Access: Week 120 in Review
Early Access: Week 119 in Review
It was sad that most new players didn't even discover upgrade or compound, so started by adding 3 new tutorial steps, kill a goo, upgrade and compound - and looking at new players from yesterday, indeed it seems to be a move in the right direction, now most of them do basic upgrades
There's also a new first drop logic, for the first character of a player, it includes 90,000 gold, 3 rings and a belt for the time being - so the tutorial steps can be followed immediately
I guess a next stage could be to introduce the multi character aspect of the game, and maybe provide an interactive merchant code that visits the characters, collects items, upgrades, compounds etc.
Added "Warpstomp" to "xmagex" - Warps and stomps - Both the Crypt and Lair adversaries have armor/resistance's now too
Ice Golem now becomes an announced boss like Franky
If you are fighting the same monsters, now all skills that directly check for the party consent will work if you are not in a party
Early Access: Week 118 in Review
The instance "Lair of the Dark Mage" is ready
There's a new ring that adds the "Zap" ability, shoots a 200ms cooldown ray that deals 200 pure damage
As with everything, this instance will get balanced a lot too, I plan to introduce more common orbs that drop easily
One noteworthy experiment this week was NexusNull's suggestion of a new approach to disappearing texts, the last phase was more readable yet a bit awkward after getting used to the current look of things, as texts moved with entities too - shelved it for now, but the new name tags etc. were also shelved experiments at one point, I think the next stage of disappearing texts will be free texts, yet once a text overlaps another text, the text above will move faster so they quickly clear each other, also dot damage's should have a lower priority and fly away fast into a random direction when this happens
I think the most noteworthy addition this week will be the "NewCharacter joined Adventure Land!" realm announcements, instead of #game_events, they will also publish to Discord/#general - similarly level>=80 announcements will be realm announcements too, but won't get published to #general - I suspect the new announcements could get bugged and spam the game or bring down a server etc. - so best to be on the lookout
In addition to this, new players have an aura that lasts an hour, the aura emits for a day, it's a small incentive to visit them from time to time
Early Access: Week 117 in Review
There's a new instance coming soon to Winterland
Where you battle a Dark Mage that goes through 4 stages
There's also a new island with the Ice Golem dropping the key to the dungeon, Ice Roamers also drop the key but not as frequently
The big news this week is the auth bug NexusNull discovered and shared to be fixed, a big thanks to NexusNull and number_e for their help - the bug was allowing any account to be accessed
Many many weeks ago, again during the Summer, I had a strict work/life schedule that worked very well, however it fails in Winter as the lack of sun is usually demotivating, at the weekend I started this strict approach once again, and after a long while started making progress
The bad news is, there will be a 20 day full lockdown here, starting Wednesday night, so I'll lose at least 2 days this week while preparing - best case scenario the update could happen closer to weekend, feel free to suggest new items and new dynamics, the Mage goes through a Ice / Fire / Nature / Darkness change, basically there are 4 variations, and after each one is defeated, the one after that spawns, there's a new "respawn_as" property in G.monsters