Winterland received it's new look, there's also a new path connecting sections above the Arctic Bee's - Planning to add a rare spawn below ice roamers where a Mage will have to blink-in and magiport others
Items break now, so if you are Fishing/Mining, it should be part of the code logic
There's a new emotion, a single heart, currently a rare drop from Mining:
There's also a change to the tanking contribution calculation, so it's a good time to take another look at .pdps values
Spent some time re-visiting the code-syncing system, fixed a mac app store issue thanks to feedback, and there's a new warning if you introduce a 2 files with the same slot number - However I believe there's still a race condition-ish bug remaining that's wreaking havoc when it's triggered - There's a new article that's also integrated to the load/save interface: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/code/8-code-slots-and-files
Early Access: Week 114, 115 in Review
Not much done these 2 weeks, I hate to publish empty weekly reviews, but these 2 weeks were lost too, mainly spent time completing my home, spring cleaning/preparation etc.
Completed Mining this weekend, currently just in the existing mining tunnel, you can mine mainly for gem fragments - since it's a dangerous zone, it should be a small/fun coding challenge
Apart from mining, there are minor changes and bugfixes coming, the main one is heals not being reflected any more
And also Winterland is going to be revamped soon, nothing major, just a renovation :)
Early Access: Week 113 in Review
It's the Egg Hunting week :)
The fishing rod is craftable now, doesn't break yet, and mobbing is nerfed
And to go along with it, I managed to cram in a new feature that I've been meaning to add for a very very long time: Emotions!
Basically they are like cosmetics, but they make your character show an emotion, currently the first one is an animation where you drop an egg, but upcoming ones can be small gestures, sounds, animations etc.
They reside on `character.emx` You can `socket.emit("emotion",{name:"_name_"})` And they are documented at `G.emotions`
Early Access: Week 111, 112 in Review
Unproductive 2 weeks for the game, I was occupied with my personal life and at the same time unsure about what to work on next, lost my motivation
Documentation, Tutorial are #1 must-do's - yet working on them is so unfruitful, however, today I forced myself to work on re-visiting and documenting each function - also converting my random comments to JSDoc's - realistically there's no ETA, but it's a start
Met with a friend today who's making https://colonist.io/ - didn't know he was an avid mmorpg player, his ideas and experiences resonated with me a lot, also fortified existing feedback, thinking of increasing HP's of players 3-fold in the coming days
Maybe a potential next focus could be to complete the single character limited-time pvp world: https://steamcommunity.com/games/777150/announcements/detail/1723127556404218537
I wasn't very active on Discord this week, turned out to be a huge mistake, a special thanks to UhOhPolio for his bug report on Cute Bee spawn, luckily I didn't refactor `G.monsters.cbee` to `G.monsters.cutebee` as egehanhk pointed out, so those 2 bugs cancelled each other out and we avoided another endgame bug :)
Talking about mmorpgs and developing mmorpgs, my desire to open source early grows, but the main issue is that Python is dead, open sourcing before refactoring the Python backend to NodeJS will just cause frustrations while the main purpose of open sourcing is to (optimistically) help the mmorpg genre by accelerating experimentation of unique ideas - Developer(s) can quickly test their ideas before they potentially invest more on them
At the same time I'm working on my new project/game, it's a project that has 2 parts, so I ended up combining my collective approach to app/game development into a common framework, so If I refactor, I'll use the new JS-based libraries and framework for Adventure Land too, this will mean that a big portion of that new project will start open source as well - at this point I pause as I can't decide whether it's a good thing or bad thing, as bug finding and searching is a big part of Adventure Land gameplay for most, I'm afraid of making code public, but at the same time, making it open source will result in those bugs being found with certainty - anyway I'm just babbling
TL;DR: Not much these 2 weeks, just some ideas
Early Access: Week 110 in Review
Apart from small/moderate bugfixes, this week is dedicated to Fishing, it ended up being a merchant skill, it comes with a "prelock" attribute and a 48 minute cooldown, the cooldown is set when you join a server, so you have to stay on a server for 48 minutes straight to fish
There's a new "zones" attribute on G.maps - Planning Mining, Farming, Gardening, maybe collecting with similar dynamics
And in case you were wondering, as long as you are in the zone, facing the right way, and have exhausted the cooldown, it's just a matter of RNG and the drop table of that specific zone is in G.drops
I think the merchant can have all the skills with a high cooldown, but maybe other classes could each have one such skill with a shorter cooldown if it's well received
Early Access: Week 109 in Review
Overall a slow week for the game, but it was a nice week
Many many crypt and crypt-related bugfixes
Reduced tanking multiplier of party contribution 33%
New rare monster: Cute Bee and Golden Bat receives a similar explanation too
New Merchant Skill: Mass Production++
Early Access: Week 108 in Review
The Crypt is finally ready! And all the adversaries inside has been improved from earlier weeks as well
Keep in mind that everything related to The Crypt is unbalanced and subject to change, some of the items are rushed, feel free to (or please do) make suggestions on Discord to balance/refine them
New Merchant Skill: Mass Production Rushed this one in as well, hopefully no bugs
New Dynamic: Courage This one was being discussed for a while, after this update, Warriors are the Physical tanks, Priests are the Magical tanks, and Paladins are the Pure tanks, while Merchants are the most fearful of the bunch :)
There are 3 new properties: .courage, .mcourage, .pcourage and .fear - basically, .fear is the fear level
Keeping the week in review short as I'm quite exhausted, but really excited to keep on delivering new content along these lines
Early Access: Week 107 in Review
It was a very productive week and it feels great to introduce so many new mechanics / challenges, I hope the new dungeon, uncreatively called "The Crypt" will pose a serious coding challenge, even if the optimal strategy becomes pull+avoid+kill, it still requires a considerable amount of effort to tackle all the adversaries inside
Anger makes an enemy randomly charge a player, they are harder to tank and avoid The healer latches onto someone to heal, otherwise heals herself and the heal amount is hard to overdamage The auras are pretty self explanatory The new Zapper zaps everyone around 300 radius with 1200 instant pure damage rays when placed, so better take it down fast
Adversaries roam the crypt, so when they get together, I hope they can overwhelm even the most seasoned parties
The crypt key is a random drop from the cave
The interfaces received small improvements, there are various other small changes as well, a new tune for the crypt, and the cave's tune is also fixed next update
The big change this week is monsters targeting and focusing other monsters, so if your code doesn't handle such a scenario, better do some refactoring!
For the next week, going to add at least 2 drops each to adversaries, the new items didn't make it to this week
The unfinished zone in the Mansion is also going to become an instance/dungeon called "The Tomb" - there's a small event instance in Winterland as well, going to complete that too - and will likely add a unique dungeon to the Mainland, above the scorpions - not sure about the concept yet
Early Access: Week 105,106 in Review
A slow 2 weeks, started week 105 with food poisoning, then had some house related issues, overall lost a week but built a new mechanical keyboard in the downtime - it's a joy to type on
Started Week 106 a bit lost and demotivated, apart from the Lunar New Year item updates, there wasn't much changed game-wise - at the end, decided to just concentrate on some unfinished content and complete them
First one will be the cave dungeon with the 8 adversaries I shared earlier, second one could be the conversion of the mansion door to a special entry dungeon
There will likely be dungeon keys dropping from monsters (bats, rats) - and the instanced dungeon will open with these keys - this will also allow very high xp rates etc. - if nothing goes wrong, first version of this system should be live this week
Event: Lunar New Year + Weeks 103,104 in Review
The Lunar New Year event is live on Adventure Land - the highlight of the event is Dragold, there's a new item like the Dragon Armor, the OX Helmet - and an upcoming priest-only weapon
Jayson designed 6 adversaries for the instanced Cave dungeon, the dungeon should arrive within a month
I started a new project, going to work on it alongside with Adventure Land, these 2 weeks I've dedicated to that new project, it's going pretty well, good news for Adventure Land is that I've tackled all the NodeJS as a backend solution challenges - so when the time comes to open source Adventure Land, I'll probably spend around 2 weeks re-writing everything in NodeJS. Unlike the earlier speculation, it will have local emulation so players/developer will be able to test things fast locally
Since the community is so helpful, it seems like a good idea to open source before the hard to reach goal too, but honestly it's a pretty big step and I didn't completely think it through - security-wise it's a big risk to take
