We're still working through issues that have arisen in the Legacy update. These are the things we are able to fix so far.
Fixed
In the Mabren's Tower major quest, upon finding the etchings the game thought it was locked in combat preventing the use of items like torches or tents. Now fixed.
NPC Dialogue: Fixed scroll window would not reset to the top
If you are a real jerk and get tossed overboard from a ship, it will no longer soft-lock the game. :-) you'll be sent to the nearest healer GTA style
Sleeping in camp now has the appropriate screen fade
Fixed inventory error that could occur from auto-eating
Made food "everfresh" property actually function so that it won't go stale
Inn dine-in food should no longer go bad and give players nausea
Inventories will properly pull food when auto-eating
You can now eat as long as the food doesn't put you over the max fullness
Hunger notice only appears when actually hungry
Cleaned the UI in several instances where the X button was not top right
Character Sheet: Relationships: Added tooltips for the sort options
Knowledge Picker: Added tooltips to the sort options
Fixed an issue where town music wouldn't play after character creation
Known issue:
We have hunger and starving debuffs disabled for now until we rework the nourishment system for Update #3 Exploration.
Weekly Developer Update: Sept 26
Legacy Update 2a Out Now!
We got the Legacy mini-update out yesterday by end of day!
Thanks to those who tried out the beta branch on the weekend to uncover issues like these. It was corrupting save files and glad it didn’t get out into the wild!
Priority Fixes
We’re watching closely any issues coming out of Legacy. Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.
After reaching a certain point in the Tower Quest the game gets locked into thinking it is in combat, preventing the use of items like torches and tents. Saving the game, quitting, and returning will let you continue but obviously this needs to be fully fixed.
Some other minor things, like audio issues, still need to be cleaned up.
Patch is coming out Thursday.
Update 2b: Combat Rewrite
We’ve been working on this since March and I’m trying to figure out what it will take to get it out in October.
On the one hand, I don’t want to rush it. What you are playing now is my half-baked rushing to get it out for Early Access launch.
On the other hand, it has dragged on forever and maybe an 80% version is good enough. We don’t need to invent a sentient AI when it can only move between 15 grid spaces. :-p
Combat is now our primary focus with 4 of our 5 full time programmers working on it: Tyler, Jonathan, Josh, Michel. Mark is designing and directing it, with James assisting. Jessi is reworking UI.
Update #3: Exploration
We are in the very preliminary stages of designing out what will be included in this update.
Some of the things we are looking at:
Totally revamping resources: how they are found and harvested
Elimination of Stamina, addition of Fatigue system
More places to interact with on the map
Weather & Seasons that matter
Updated UI
Other stuff we read on the forums from you guys!
Other
Nolan is working on world building with the Great Mages
Sadly, Rubi is no longer working full time at Defiance. She is moving to contract as she has wanted to make a video game with her (now) husband for about 18 months and decided now is the time to do it. She’s off on her honeymoon for the next month and upon returning will start her game and work as a contractor. What she saw in me that convinces her making your own game is a good idea, I’ll never know! But we wish her well. And secretly joke she’ll make Archmage 2 before we finish Archmage 1 :-)
Mini-Update #2a: Legacy Now Released!
The whole premise of this game is: You have one life to live? What will you do with it? I love sandbox games. But I also want to feel clear progress towards a goal.
Mini-update 2a
What is a mini update? Well it's a significant update that I kinda didn't plan to do. I thought we could wait on some of these features, but it turns out we need to do it now to prepare for future features. Plus, it enhances the play experience right now.
New Major Quest: Mabren's Tower
We have enhanced our quest tools and technology and so are proud to announce the culmination of what Nolan and team can do with a new major quest: Mabren's Tower.
The quest is a race against a rival to make a major discovery. We think it will show off some of the power of our tech and we hope you enjoy it!
Legacy: One New Stat to Rule Them All!
“All that matters are the things that remain.” The simulator tracks a lot of things about the player and the world. We're distilling all this data into one stat easily compared against rivals and historical mages in the world.
The core design of the game is along three core paths: Renown, Wealth, and Power. We are now displaying these as stats in game and on your save files. Legacy is derived from how well you perform in the three paths. Each is weighted differently and we will likely change the weighting as we go along. The design allows you to pursue all three, or just focus on one. It's your choice how you spend your life.
You can directly increase your Legacy with new items and actions. These are in addition to the 3 new stats. Things like:
Purchasing property for a Mage Tower
Displaying rare items like Art or Books in your mage tower
Clearing out a Monster Lair
Eradicating a Monster Race
New Stat: Renown
Renown represents your popularity and respect in the world. Renown is based on a new Town stat Esteem. Esteem measures citizen's thoughts towards you. It currently doesn't affect NPC dialogue text, but it will in the future. Completing quests for townsfolk will build your reptuation the fastest, but establishing long term relationships will as well. It takes a lot more deeds to get noticed in a city than in a hamlet.
Esteem can and will gate certain features in a town. What people think of you matters.
New Stat: Wealth
Wealth is made up of two stats:
Prestige - Prestige is wealth people can see. It's on display for all to see.
Net Worth - the more you invest in the world, the higher your net worth and so your Wealth stat will grow. Grow your legacy by hording and investing every gold coin like Scrooge McDuck!
New Stat: Power
Power is how learned you are at life, magic, and manipulating the forces of the universe. Every point of Spell School XP earned contributes to your Power stat. Every point in skills (like Athletics, Persuasion, Scholarship) contributes to your power.
XP spent learning new spells and upgrades still counts, don't save em!
Rivals
These are NPCs competing with you in the world in Renown, Wealth, and Power.
You meet three NPCs in school during character creation and they are set loose in the world along with you at the same time, becoming your Rivals.
We are starting with the basics with them for now, they are not fully featured yet, but we will continue to build from here.
We simulate rivals in the background. Every month you will get an updated notification of how your rivals are doing.
If you don't care for this, there is an option to turn off the notification. Happily ignore them.
You can also view the last information you got about rivals on the new character sheet tab:
Eventually we’ll add a way to get more frequent updates by talking to NPCs or having spies watch them, etc.
You can find and meet your Rivals in game, just like any other NPC. You cannot kill them yet. We're working on that.
Greatest of All Time (GOAT)
The world of Vaelun has many historically significant mages spread across different eras. We've assembled a list of the top 20 famous (or infamous) mages from which to compare yourself. Each one of these mages has a back story and in future updates you will be able to hunt down their unique artifacts. Again, this is stubbing in something that will be filled out more.
A new tab on the character sheet shows the rank of the mages and where you stand:
More Updates
Dates now show the age from the 5 eras
Added more historical figures to the Conversation Picker
Relationship gains are slower with people you barely know, and then speed up for people you start to know well
Major fixes to buying and selling. Eliminated a duplication item bug.
Fixed selling things back to vendor for more than purchased. Items are now 50% of base value when sold back.
Backwards Compatibility
The new features will just start working on an old save file. It's a little better from a new fresh start, but you are not forced to do so.
The new major quest will begin immediately in a preexisting world. You can ignore it if you'd like.
Items which now bestow prestige or legacy stats, previously collected ones won't have it but new ones that are supposed to will.
An old save won't have rivals from school, but we will generate you 3 new ones and the system will start from there.
I hope you enjoy playing as much as we have enjoyed making this for you. Thank you for spending your time in Vaelun with us!
Patch 0.2.8 is Live!
Every week the game gets better. Here's what is better this week!
Player Requested Enhancements
When using a tower portal the list of destinations includes the name of the nearest town. Name your towers something interesting now!
The relationship discount for town vendors is now capped at 25%. It was ridiculous getting 85% off just because they liked you. Medieval margins weren't that high folks!
Removed damage from miscasting spells in combat. It is enough that the spell didn't work and you lose resources, it doesn't need to kill you too!
Fixes
Fixed an issue with buffs that was causing game loading failures
Skill bars on the character sheet now properly show progress to next skill point!
Fixed cases in which Dungeon keys failed on their assigned doors
Resources will no longer generate beneath towns. This was messing with getting directions to resources.
Fixed a combat issue where a spell could double-cast
Fixed text not scaling on World Settings screen
Fixed text wrapping issue on transfer/gifting slider
Known Issues
We introduced a weird UI issue on the character sheet equipping last week. It will be fixed on Monday when the Legacy Update comes out
A lot more fixes are coming in the Legacy Update next week Monday.
Weekly Developer Update: Sept 18
First: Oops!
Last week we put out a patch 0.2.7 on Friday. It was also our first week doing Mac releases in a long while. When we published the Mac build through the Steam back end, we accidentally blew away the PC patch which reverted people to 0.2.6 over the weekend.
Only triple facepalm can communicate how I feel.
Good news is we saw exactly what we did wrong and it won’t happen again.
Priority Fixes
For this week's patch we're focusing on:
Reports of crashing when loading a save game. We are looking through the error logs right now to try and figure it out. This has been dragging on because we haven’t been able to reproduce it yet. Appreciate all those reporting it, eventually we’ll find the commonality and fix it!
Adding Town Name at the end of tower when teleporting. This is much requested.
The Skill progress bars to actually work!
Patch is coming out Thursday.
Legacy is coming in Sep 25!
It’s mostly working, so we have announced the details of it and the release date of next week Monday!
It’s all hands on deck testing and polishing this mini-update to get it out in time: Zach, Tyler, Jessi, Phil, Mark, Nolan, Thomas.
Combat Rewrite
New combat with better design, balance, and more spells, will be releasing sometime after Legacy update.
Josh and Jonathan are leading the programming, with Michel, James, and Mark assisting.
Rubi, working on the VFX, is off this week because… (see below)
The combat rewrite includes many adjacent updates including spell progression. Here is a WIP mockup of the new Spell Research tab.
Double Weddings
Our tiny team of 11 has two weddings and they are this coming Sat Sep 23! I don’t know how they both chose the same day, but both Rubi (VFX) and Zach (programming) are getting married. No, not to each other, to different people in different states.
Rubi will be off for a month while Zach is back to work next week.
Thank you for your time and attention to our little game. We are 11 people passionate about independent game development who hope Unity doesn’t end up crushing us! :-p
How To Unlock The Spell Power Slider
I've had a few questions in the forums, the Discord server, on YouTube, etc, asking how to unlock the spell slider, which allows you to adjust the power of your spells by consuming more Ara to increase the potency of your spells, or decrease the Ara consumed to conserve Ara if a lower strength spell will suffice.
We've published a quick walkthrough on our wiki, but for those of you who are also visual learners like me, we've just released a new visual guide for you:
If there's any other visual guides we can make for you (or you think will be helpful for others), feel free to let me know in the comments below!
Patch 0.2.7 is Live!
We’re happy to bring you another weekly patch of goodies.
Player Requested Enhancements
Added a menu command to town/tower to travel between the two places instantly.
Added an instant road being built between your tower and town, so on the map it now takes 1hr not 17hr to climb uphill to your destination.
Added search with filtering as you type to Knowledge Picker. It was an interesting CS problem to get it to underline substrings. Appreciate the challenge!
Quick casting when in a trap encounter now awards spell XP just like in combat
Fixes
Corrected remaining issues with dungeon door key generation. If you have a save game with an already generated dungeon with a messed up key, it probably won't fix that. But new dungeons will generate correctly.
Fixed dungeon map displaying wrong level when loading save game.
Removed weird floaty 240 gold text from game start
Roads no longer appear in open water. The bridge building engineers in the open seas have been sacked!
Tracks can no longer appear in open water. That was ridiculous!
UI overlap of ship captain, mounts, and followers has been fixed. We kinda forgot about all the stuff that can be up there.
Known Issues:
We spent several days trying to recreate and resolve loading/saving crashing issues. We rewrote the async functions but to no avail.
Legacy Mini-Update Details
What is the Point To Playing Archmage Rises?
In 1995 I was 17 and snuck into my first R rated movie. My 18 year old friend bought me a ticket so we could see Braveheart. From that day until now, I am awestruck by the amazing line “Every man dies, not every man really lives.”
I love sandbox games. But I also want to feel clear progress towards a goal. The whole premise of this game is: You have one life to live? What will you do with it?
The features in this update were planned on our roadmap to come closer to 1.0. Yet, in playing the game, reading reviews and forums, I decided we need to pull some of it forward. First, to prepare for some of the other things we are building, and second to provide a better experience NOW.
Monday, September 25 11am EST
Christmas is coming early boys and girls! You will be able to enjoy this content Sep 25.
Legacy: One New Stat to Rule Them All!
“All that matters are the things that remain.” The simulator tracks a lot of things about the player and the world. We're distilling all this data into one stat easily compared against rivals and historical mages in the world.
The core design of the game is along three core paths: Renown, Wealth, and Power. We are now displaying these as stats. Your Legacy stat is derived from how well you perform in the three paths. Each is weighted differently and we will likely change the weighting as we go along. The design allows you to pursue all three, or just focus on one. It's your choice how you spend your life.
You can directly increase your Legacy with new items and actions. These are in addition to the 3 new stats. Things like:
Purchasing property for a Mage Tower
Displaying rare items like Art or Books in your mage tower
Clearing out a Monster Lair
Eradicating a Monster Race
New Stat: Renown
Renown represents your popularity and respect in the world. Renown is based on a new Town stat Esteem, which shows what the general sentiment of the citizens is towards you. It takes a lot more deeds to get noticed in a city than in a hamlet.
Esteem can and will gate certain features in a town. What people think of you matters.
New Stat: Wealth
Wealth is made up of two stats:
Prestige - Prestige is financial stature in the world. In our world the super sports cars, mega-yacht, priceless paintings, and jewlery. Prestige is wealth people can see. It's the reason rich people have cars where the doors swing upwards (Russ Hanneman, Silicon Valley) ːlaughing_yetiː
Net Worth - the more you invest in the world, the higher your net worth and so your Wealth stat will grow. Grow your legacy by hording and investing every gold coin like Scrooge McDuck!
New Stat: Power
Power is how learned you are at life, magic, and manipulating the forces of the universe. Every point of Spell School XP earned contributes to your Power stat. Every point in skills (like Athletics, Persuasion, Scholarship) contributes to your power.
XP spent learning new spells and upgrades still counts, don't save em!
Rivals
These are NPCs competing with you in the world in Renown, Wealth, and Power.
You meet three NPCs in school during character creation and they are set loose in the world along with you at the same time, becoming your Rivals.
We are starting with the basics with them for now, they are not fully featured yet, but we will build from here.
We simulate rivals in the background. Every 3 months you will get an updated notification of how your rivals are doing.
If you don't care for this, there is an option to turn off the notification. Happily ignore them.
You can also view the last information you got about rivals on the new character sheet tab:
Eventually we’ll add a way to get more frequent updates by talking to NPCs or having spies watch them, etc.
You can find and meet your Rivals in game, just like any other NPC.
Greatest of All Time (GOAT)
The world of Vaelun has many historically significant mages spread across different eras. We've assembled a list of the top 20 famous (or infamous) mages from which to compare yourself. Each one of these mages has a back story and in future updates you will be able to hunt down their unique artifacts.
A new tab on the character sheet shows the rank of the mages and where you stand:
New Major Quest: Mabren's Tower
Nolan and team have been hard at work adding new features to our quest tech and tools. We're very proud to announce the culmination of all this work a new major quest: Mabren's Tower.
The quest is a race against a rival to make a major discovery. We think it will show off some of the power of our tech and we hope you enjoy it!
Backwards Compatibility
Now that I've wrapped my head around the fact we are making a 50hr per run rogue game, you should see how important preserving your play progress is in this update.
The new features will just start working on an old save file. It's a little better from a new fresh start, but you are not forced to do so.
For any items already accumulated they won't have bonuses to prestige or legacy. But new ones that are supposed to, will.
An old save won't have rivals from school, but we will generate you 3 new ones and the system will start from there.
The new major quest will be findable in a preexisting world. It's just a little easier and more natural in a new life.
Finally, we will be utilizing the beta branch to test out the new update before it goes live Sep 25. More on that when we approach the release date.
I hope you enjoy playing as much as we have enjoyed making this for you. Thank you for spending your time in Vaelun with us!
Weekly Developer Update: Legacy
Hello fellow mages!
Before we jump into this week's developer update, I want to talk a little bit about what these developer updates are. For several weeks/months, LordYabo has been posting weekly developer updates in the Steam forums which talk about what our priorities are for the week to keep players looped in on our development process.
From the feedback we've received, these dev updates have been really impactful and informative, and so it's become a very important part of our routine each week. But not everyone reads the forums and might be missing out on some info they'd like to keep up with, so we've decided to post those as announcements as well so that everyone who wants to stay informed can stay informed!
Today's post is a rehash of what we've already posted in the forums yesterday, so if you've read that already, feel free to "move along" as the stormtroopers on Tatooine would say ːsteammockingː
Now, onto the update!
Development Priorities this Week (Sep 11 '23)
It's a new week and the first week of switching up the programmers responsibilities. We're too tiny of a company for 'reorg for reorg sake' :winter2019joyfultearsdog: But by switching around who is doing what we can increase wellbeing for team members, that's a win. So here we go!
Priority Fixes
For this week's patch we're focusing on:
Dungeon Keys are spawning incorrectly and possibly leading to crashes
Dungeon levels being weird on save and reload
Looking further into dungeon crashing on older/integrated GPUs
Adding a way to go quickly from town to tower, tower to town
Patch is planned to come out Thursday.
Legacy - The Purpose of the Game
Legacy is coming in Sep!
This is an unplanned mini-feature, not on the roadmap and not the same scale as the major updates. We're adding it to the game based on trend of feedback. We met, and even with the reorg, Zach and Tyler can get it done soon.
PS: A big thanks to Avalon, one of our passionate community members, who "mage-ified" some of the team members (shown in the thumbnail art of this post), and has been sharing his custom portrait avatars for players to use on our Discord Server. If you'd like to take a look at his work and use any of the custom images he's provided so far, you can find them in the share-your-creations channel on our Discord server.
We will plan to publish a detailed write up of the features and exact date of release on or before Thursday of this week.
Combat Rewrite
Today the new "landing team" of Josh and Jonathan started on Combat and continuing on with it. Rubi is continuing with VFX for the new spells coming in it. If you didn't see it yet, couple of days ago we posted video samples of her latest work:
New combat with better design, balance, and more spells, will be releasing sometime after Legacy update.
One more thing...
As of yesterday, we finally support Mac!
It's been a long time coming... we used to support Mac, then Apple changed the requirements for publishing & releasing Mac builds, and we've been sporadically working on it in the background and finally got it all together and working today, including cloud save and custom portraits!
Thank you for your time and attention to our little game. We know you have a lot of choices in which games you play. Thanks for playing and supporting ours. :happy_yeti:
Mac is Now Officially Supported!
We've been asked this question several times in the past and, while it's been a long time coming, now we're happy to say that we officially support Mac!
Thanks so much for all of your patience, and for my fellow Mac users out there, let the games begin!
