Burst now deals pure damage with a higher multiplier and controlled burst has almost no cooldown but wastes 80 mp at each use - The old initial supershot/burst cooldown is no more - back in the day, hp levels were low, since they are currently high, no need to prevent high burst scenarios
Internally unified most of the skill responses, they are pretty much ready to be Promise'd
The updated Spooky Forest is live, Spooky Town has 2 new entry points, thanks to the feedback from Discord, the Halloween bosses too can be dynamically observed to increase engagements
A very exciting change this week is the new name of our town - Mainland! - Congratulations and thanks to Torins for finding the new name, I mean - "main" + "-land" - it's a match made in heaven for a coding game
Another simple but notable improvements is rendering weapons on monsters, the Halloween bosses are the first 2, as suggested, going to make monsters drop the weapon they are equipping with a % - For the planned pirate ship, thinking of randomly equipping pirates with weapons
It was overall a productive week, the game is finally updated and the Halloween event is live, a lot of small changes and animations. However, I'm not sure what to work on next :) Last 2 days have been a bit aimless, thinking of adding the Mail system so we can have weekly leaderboards / rewards and so on, the Mail system would allow a game-wide backend logic to reward players with items
Other Changes:
- Trying to enter the bank now costs an additional 32 calls - Band of Fury and Star Killers can no longer be legacified
Event: Halloween!
Our Halloween event is live! Candies are global drops, you can easily track when the Pumpkin bosses are going to spawn and join the fight!
Along with the Halloween event, the Spooky Forest is updated, and there are 2 new entrances to Spooky Town
Candies drop a very rare new Ranger Bow too!
Early Access: Week 36 in Review
This week's highlight is the delayed attack/heal/skill landings, ie. hits - each projectile has it's own speed, some weapons have special projectiles, in time weapon speed (for initial take off) and dodging (for physical projectiles) will get into the mix too. You can now observe an incoming magic projectile and erect your reflective shield, it's pretty fun watching the projectile reflect back and forth when it happens :)
attack() and heal() functions now return the new "action" event, the "hit" event can be observed from Game Events, or as "hit"/"target_hit" from the Character Events
We have many new animations too, thanks to Jayson's efforts - so many new ideas
Got a new weapon for Halloween! Has 2 different versions, one regular version and a special Halloween version - the Halloween event should launch before next week's update (I hope :)
I feel like I lost this week with the flu, illnesses are the best excuses to procrastinate. This new attack and animation system makes me question the meaning of life, I continually ask myself whether it improves the game. I certainly hope it does in the end. I'll also note to myself that what the game really needs is the tutorial and guide improvements, and a Steam store overhaul/update afterwards. Every day and week I feel the guilt of not progressing faster, especially as the holiday season gets closer
Other Changes:
- Projectile info at: G.projectiles - Token exchanges no longer announce the item - Suppressed the orb announcements - Resort door in Tavern fixed (thanks to Bjarnu on Discord for the reminder) - A long standing 3-shot cooldown reporting bug fixed (thanks to Seth on Discord) - Added 50% Evasion to one of the Automatrons
Early Access: Week 35 in Review
New Animation Style: Character to Target Burst - Instead of the old lines, skills that affect other characters or monsters, will render connections representing the skill - the screenshot above is the new Controlled Mana Burst
New Animation: Force/Momentum Projectile's for Melee's - The animation challenge for melee characters is their high range, so for now, they'll throw these projectiles representing the momentum they generate
New Mage Skill: Reflective Shield
New Mage Skill: Entangle
New Mage Skill: Alchemy
Started re-attempting new player acquisition with Reddit and Adsense Ads, the Reddit one started serving at a very slow pace
Jayson prepared a multitude of new awesome projectiles and animations, a new heal animation and an accompanying projectile, new shield animations - Also completed the updated Spooky Forest
Thanks to Saiz's report on Discord, I discovered a bug in the referral system, the 200 shells rewards weren't being processed, after I re-dived into the system, decided to simplify how it works, since we switched to a DRM'ed account system now, there's no need to enforce the 72 level requirement for the reward, so I first reduced it to 48 levels, but then decided to remove it altogether, if you introduce a friend to Adventure Land, you'll instantly get 200 shells - as this change could potentially introduce loopholes, couldn't release the new stuff on Monday, hoping to release them in the coming days after more testing
Early Access: Week 34 in Review
Completed the first version of the projectile throwing attacks and the weapon animations, currently it's a rough prototype, in time going to refine each weapon types' animation
Ring of Armor and Ring of Resistance are now available from Mr. T now (thinking of renaming 'Mr. T' to 'Cole' by the way)
New skill images are ready too, going to integrate the new skills on Week 35
Jayson is working on some map improvements and new/better projectiles for different weapons
A big thanks to the Discord community for continually helping the development:
Thoughts:
This new animation system sparked a lot of new ideas related to weapon and attack speeds, some weapons could be slow to engage, some projectiles could be slow to reach their target (variable delay based on distance) - At one point, thinking of adding a delay logic to attacks (currently it's all instant) - but hopefully not on Week 35 - better concentrate on other aspects for a while
Other Changes:
(Both thanks to egehanhk on Discord) - Fixed a monster movement logic issue that made them disappear - Fixed Cupid Bow's Promise responses and ping calculations
This week was dedicated to the new in-game weapon renderings, and new attack animation trials. Currently the weapon rendering prototype is live. All classes except Rogue, in my opinion, looks good, the Rogue is very challenging, as the scale for weapons needs to be 50% - I'm hoping once our eyes get used to it, it will look natural, this is the reason for the current trial. A secondary alternative is adding smaller pixel representations of the weapons with the 100% pixel sizing - this is already a must for weapons like the Fiery Staff / Blade and the Frozen Claw, as their images have pixel art representing fire and ice (their final in-game versions will differ)
Ultimately, the weapons will animate during attacks, replacing the age-old attack lines - and +8 / +9 / +10 weapons will have special fx (depending on their grade / value and colorscheme)
Other Changes:
- Fixed the drop info for items like stat amulets - New setting to turn off the new weapon/attack system
Early Access: Week 31,32 in Review
As I was on holiday, couldn't progress too much in these 2 weeks - our pixel artist was also similarly unavailable, so the new skills and items haven't made it into the game yet
Managed to complete the prototype of the "All Merchants" interface, this allows you to quickly view the exact whereabouts and the trade inventory of all the merchants in the game with an open stand
Changelist:
- Fire Spirits now drop Essence of Fire's - Fixed the "grades" bug that was introduced with the new fractal tiered armors - "darkblessing" and "warcry" now indicate who the buff came from - Updated Ranger's class definition - New Code Article: CODE > LEARN > Advanced Topics > API Call System - New Game Event: "api_response"
Early Access: Week 30 in Review
Added a collect+exchange starter Orb, the Quiver is now obtainable this way too
Overall it was a slow week, added Ring of Armor, Ring of Resistance, Belt to the game, adapted 3 mage skills from Discord/#new_ideas to be added to the game, drafted one "Super Magical Ring" with an active ability (future drop), however our item pixel artist is away, the images didn't make it, I also got caught up in playing the game a bit myself, neglected progress a bit :)
Last week's item changes made "Star Killer's Pants" Mage/Priest-only, this upset players that invested a lot on high level items, this week the "Band of Fury" becomes class locked too, however, if you call "parent.socket.emit('legacify')" - It converts all affected items in your inventory to become "Legacy" prefixed items, thus keeping the original properties of the item (just unrestricted class for current items)
I'll be away from home for a week, taking my work system with me, so I'll keep an eye on game health, but I'll likely not be able to make significant progress
Also congratulations to Muffin from Discord for discovering an unannounced mechanic that could've been exploited, and reporting it right away
Bugfixes:
- Fixed the party/monsterhunt logic, the deleveling part was left unintegrated
- Patched (hopefully) another issue that caused monsters to just keep on walking indefinitely (new issue)
- Patched the "distance()" function to work with the proxied character object in Code
Early Access: Week 29 in Review
It was another productive week. Also I want to thank everyone who send motivating emails, messages on Discord, they really help
This week made the game more friendlier to newcomers, but at this point, I feel like I have to release the tutorial, even if it's not fully complete
With the new "All Items" and "All Monsters" sections, I feel like the Guide has become very useful, I find myself checking it all the time, started using the non-"Pro Mode"
Finally fully completed the "Information (i)" section, also made most of the item icons and references clickable, instead of rendering in-place of the old item, now these referenced items render as their own popups - It's not immediately noticeable, but the item sections have been enriched quite a bit
New damage type: Pure damage, Boo Boo's currently deal pure damage, going to reduce the variance of pure damage significantly, maybe make Fortitude apply against pure damage too
Idea for week 30: Fire/burn: 5% damage burn every second, Ice damage: Move+attack slow, Poison damage: Reduced healing, Lightning damage/struck: Damage while moving or attacking - Thinking of applying some of these ideas to monsters and skills, it'd make the Fiery weapons more useful, the % of burn chance will be low, but since the burn deals % damage, it will be significant - Going to re-visit Mana Burst too, add a % of lightning-struck state to it, possibly the full mana burst is going to cause it 100%
New Monsters: Fire Spirit and Poison Pom Pom - the new Pom Pom, "pppompom" poisons it's target with every attack, Porcupine moved to Desertland
Monsters with high attacks (currently >100) now attack and move a bit smarter, they keep on attacking even if they can't move and change course dynamically
Experimented with a roaming Dark Knight, definitely going to introduce the mechanic to the game, I might invest the time to add path finding monsters too, otherwise possible dungeon/raid like encounter scenarios end up being a bit dull
Jayson prepared many new armors, hats, hairdos, a guitar and a turtle shell as a backpack for testing. The cosmetics system feels more and more refined by the week. The only reason I haven't released the system yet is that I'm not sure whether a selective randomness is needed, for example, if your character is female, a hair bundle ideally should reward a female hair - however such a pre-selection might not always be preferable
The month-long update on Monday was very eventful, as #googledown prevented the deployment for 45 minutes - even still, love App Engine :)
Other Changes:
- New Stat: +Crit Damage%
- New Item: Legendary Compound Scroll
- Base Stat Orb's integrated
- Most items announced in earlier weeks released
Early Access: Week 28 in Review
Overall a very productive week, I really wanted to update the game on Monday, but with all the changes, likely the update is going to take some more time
Most important addition this week is the "Information (i)" section on all items, this section details everything that can be done with the item, from exchange to crafting and collecting, dismantling - which monsters drop the item, every way it can be obtained and so on
Added 6 new class specific sets to the Monster Token Shop, to balance the other items, added set bonuses to the Rugged/T3/T4 sets - pretty soon, the T3/T4 sets are most likely going to become class specific too, for a short period of time, it will likely be possible to morph existing items to another class (Rugged set has some light bonuses, while the T3/T4 sets have Fortitude-only set bonuses, subject to change)
At one point, I intend to re-visit weapons in a similar way, possibly add tiers to weapons, define the upper limits, so a stable economy around weapons could form
Both the token shop and the crafting/dismantling recipes are now paginated
For week 29, planning on improving the Guide with "All Items" / "All Monsters" sections too, basically the "All Items" section will be an easy way to browse all items, for newcomers to quickly assess how to find new gear and so on - For example, on the "Capes" section, click on a cape, see that it's acquired by exchanging leather, click on leather, see monsters that drop leather, click on one of them, automatically move to Winterland and so on
Changelist:
- G.drops to include drop data, instead of tracker-only access
- New sets at G.sets
