- Fixed a problem with books not being studyable. We fixed this previously, but if your save file contained bad data you still couldn't study the books. Now we ignore the corrupt data so studying should work.
- Frostbite AP is now 1 and you can use it again, but there is a known issue: sometimes the frozen image doesn't appear. Will investigate that tomorrow.
Archmage Rises
Hotfix 0.0.5 Live!
Build 0.0.4 Live!
So EA version is 0.0.x, Update 1 will be 0.1.x, Update 12 will be 0.12.x
I have been doing my best to read the forums and sift through the bug reports. Thanks for all the great feedback everyone, we need and want your help to reach the quest goal of making this game great!
- Fixed hang/stuck/crash in dungeons due to how book loot was generated
- Fixed building and menu issue causing people to get stuck
- Fixed lightning bolt spell crashing combat
- Fixed enemy armor bars not decreasing (the damage was working but the bars wouldn't shrink)
- Fixed cannot cast if at 0 stamina - you only need Ara to cast
- Fixed player armor bar at 0 showing as full (divide by zero issue)
- Fixed innkeeper herb quest couldn't be accepted
- Removed Error notification pop-up. It helped us during the demo period but is just annoying people now
- Run away AP is now 4 from 6
- Fixed innkeeper quest text overflow
- Fixed error in help and added World page
- Fixed tutorial appearing at wrong time in character creation
Patch 0.13 Live
Fixes
- Fixed getting stuck in buildings, making them inescapable
- Fixed major issues with Goblins, their data was corrupt so they weren't working correctly
- Fixed combat buffs: Frozen, IceBlock, and the spell Frostbite. We took out frostbite last night, now you can use it again.
- Fixed an issue with spell books being null in dungeon generation and for studying - this is part of the reason people getting stuck in dungeons
- Made worg even easier, edited out lick wounds ability, and removed option of 2 appearing
- Healer now heals all injuries, reduced injury chance
- Fixed player resource generation in combat
- Improved magic missile by hopefully just the right amount
- Changed Character Creation encounter rewards to be balanced across all fifteen instead of within the three categories.
- Stopped showing everyone married to everyone else in town. While hilarious, the panel wasn't working right. Now it doesn't let you continue inspecting people you don't know.
- Improved legibility of market trading
- Fixed dynamic quest text overflows
- Removed mentions of slider from tutorials
Thank you for going on this adventure with us to make this game great!
Hotfix 0.12
Fixes
- Fixed issue reported by xAru when Goblin casts stink cloud. It basically breaks the game and corrupts the save. This fix allows your save file to continue to work.
- Based on feedback today, the Worg was nerfed a bit. Remember, you can always run! It's ok to save your skin! Worgs now only attack once a round and max damage is now just under 30 so you can survive 1 hit
<*> Frostbite is causing problems so we have temporarily removed it from the game! We did this by making it 20 AP therefore making it impossible to cast. Don't cast it, it'll crash yer game. More to come.
We'll test and investigate combat more tomorrow.
Thanks all of you for going on this adventure with us to make this game great!
Hotfix v0.11 Is Live!
Thanks so much for the strong support so early in our release! We've been getting great feedback in both Discord and on Steam, and we're already here with our first hotfix (well, second if you count the blunder of pushing an internal testing build live on release instead of the actual release build... whoops!).
Here are the fixes for this build:
- FIXED: Getting stuck in buildings
- FIXED: Daggerfall incorrectly bypassing armor
- FIXED: Running away from combat could potentially hard-lock you
- FIXED: Combat UI fixes
- FIXED: Quest log should properly show location of quest NPC's
Keep reporting any bugs you encounter, either via the forums here on Steam, in our Discord or via our in-game bug reporter (best solution so we can get logs of your build and the errors).
Again, thanks so much for both your support and for enjoying the game!
Early Access Release Livestream @ 2:45PM Eastern
https://www.twitch.tv/archmagerises/
Combat Overhaul: Introducing Ara!
We took that feedback and made a lot of changes to combat in for Early Access Release, so let’s dive right in!
INTRODUCING ARA
As we were playing the game, we realized that the current STAMINA system was broken. Players were entering fights at varying levels of stamina which completely dictates the difficulty of the combat encounter. At 100%, fights were typically trivial. At 10%, they were downright impossible.
We needed a solution that balances the scales more for each encounter, while simultaneously allowing players to think strategically about how to fight the battle.
To solve this, we introduced a new resource that replaces STAMINA in combat — ARA.
ARA is a replenish-able resource that recovers each round. For example, players will begin a combat encounter with a pool of 12 with the ability to recover up to 8 per round. This means you can cast more ARA-expensive spells at the top of the encounter, and then have to manage your usage throughout each round, similar to ACTION POINTS.
Your max & recoverable ARA will be upgradeable over time.
While this system won’t be perfect in the beginning, it will also allows us to more finely tune combat correctly, including being able to better balance spells.
We will still reflect combat’s effect on player stamina — as you encounter and combat enemies, those encounters will cost you STAMINA (after combat is completed), but your overworld STAMINA won’t affect your ability to defend yourself in combat. When that gets depleted, combat begins to take a toll on your WELLBEING (which will be a very central mechanic further in development).
REVISIONS TO ACTION POINTS (AP)
In our playthroughs, we realized that our AP system was slightly broken. The idea was supposed to be that you could bank any unused action points to be used on your next turn.
In reality, you could pass your turn infinitely and (assuming you survive each round) bank those unused points until you AP bar was all the way off the screen. This was not only a broken system, but it also made balancing spells more difficult.
Our solution to this was to increase the AP pool from 6 to 8, and cap the bankable points to 12. This will again allow us to better balance spells and attacks, and give players another tactical choice to make during combat.
SPELL POWER
When a player casts a spell, they are given the option to adjust how powerfully to cast it. While we really like this mechanic, it wasn’t worth it and lead to little thought when it came to combat — just hit the monster with exactly the power needed to kill the enemy. And with the current spell stats, everything had the exact same power curve, making Magic Missile overpowered and the best attacking spell.
In order to fix this problem, we have overhauled this system. Initially players will only have one power option for casting spells, but later you can learn higher education from the conclave to upcast or downcast a spells. Each spell will also have it’s own base stats and power curve, giving them more unique identities along the power-to-cost curve.
We’ve focused on tuning 10 core spells and removed all others.
No more throwing spells at the wall and seeing what sticks! Spells will be added one at a time as we are able to test and balance them.
REVAMPED ARMOR SYSTEM
Let’s face it. All of our mages are weak, with low health, and armor essentially did nothing to help that. As combat existed in the pre-release, you basically needed to cast a shield spell in round one if you expected an attack to occur which made ambushes a total nightmare.
We changed that by developing a new armor system. We took a lot of inspiration from discussion on the Steam Forums and Divinity 2. Now armor is a temporary health bar on its own. With armor equipped, you now get actual protection and you won’t take health damage until your armor has been reduced to 0.
Players now have access to 2 different types of armor: magical and physical. All attacks will now fall into one of those categories and deplete the corresponding armor. Soon clothes can be enchanted with magical or physical armor and it always replenishes after a fight. Spell shields will now provide one or the other, or possibly both.
Speaking of ambushes, now instead of all of the monsters attacking immediately (and likely killing the player), the player can go first but with reduced AP. You can think of it similar to a reaction in TTRPGs, giving you a chance to quickly react and maybe put up a shield.
ENEMIES
Nothing is more boring and tedious than exploring a dungeon and getting into a fight in every room against a single bandit. Plus, the enemies in our game were quite brainless, yet another reason combat encounters became very mechanical and not as much fun as they could be. The primary reason for that — we told them to go easy on you and they’ve been holding back all of their signature moves!
Well that ends in the new Early Access release build. Enemy units now have passive abilities that help give each unit a more distinct feel, plus they each have more moves that can combo and trigger off one another. Once you are in combat, enemies should now dynamically introduce new problems for you as the fight progresses.
And speaking of armor, enemies also have access to the same new armor system as you, creating situations where your go-to spell combos might not be as effective as you had hoped. You’ll need to think on your feet a lot more and get more creative in your attacks.
We also reduced frequency of attacks, but with our new changes, those fights will be a lot more dangerous and the number of foes in each encounter will increase.
To add to these changes, we’ve also introduced flanking — this means enemies in the left and rightmost squares adjacent to the player will deal extra damage. We hope this will introduce mid-fight issues where even a basic wolf might become deadly if not carefully managed. This should also vastly improve the usefulness of move and obstacle creation spells.
CONCLUSION
This wraps up all of the major changes coming to our combat system in the Early Access release. We’ll be continuing to fine-tune these systems as we get more feedback and progress through our roadmap.
Let us know which of these new systems you are looking forward to trying out the most, or find the most interesting!
Hotfix 14.1.23 Live!
This hotfix fixes that issue.
This is the final update to the Demo and Game before release to Early Access April 23 2023.
Build 14.1.22 Live!
I'll say it like Apple does about their phones every product announcement "This is the best build of Archmage Rises to date."
Improvements
- Improved: You can manually save the game at any point (not combat) by pressing F5. Unfortunately it looked like the game crashed while it froze up and saved your game. We made it much nicer now with a popup and log entry, etc. It’s real pro now. Real pro.
- Improved: save file upgraders work from 14.1.19 to 14.1.22, so you should be able to play your worlds and saves in this build.
- Improved: Added Error Codes to the game. This allows us to know roughly where the problem is. You currently don’t see them, but when you submit errors through the game we get them and it automatically flags them for us in our Jira tool.
- Fixed: a massive issue with monsters appearing on the map but you couldn’t interact with them. This was due to an icon duplication problem (complicated). The reason you couldn’t interact with them was because it wasn’t real, it was just an icon.
- Trail rations no longer free! And there was much rejoicing! This was due to the pricing algorithm being based on how much wellbeing an item provides you. A food item or nights stay that boosts your wellbeing should be more valuable. Unfortunately negative wellbeing was tanking the value making it zero. The pricing is now only for +positive well being.
- Improved: New UI slider for transferring quantities of things (gold gifting). Try to restrain your enthusiasm.
- Improved: Increased NPCs knowing where someone or a town is from 33->50%
- Improved: Increased "knowledgeable" NPCs (Innkeeper, Mayor, Merchant) knowing where something is to 75%
- Removed: Bandits temporarily gone from the game. They're too buggy and ill tempered.
- Improved: Resource placement logic and values. It was too rare to have resources (metal, stone, wood) and when you did get them, there was a TON of them (like 100+ metal) turning the game into Resource Hunter Rises. Now roughly 30% of tiles have between 1-3 resources BUT the amount of resources is 3-6. This will later be improved to be skilled base, allowing you to come back and revisit places with a higher skill level. Sort of like in ancient times they could only mine gold at the surface, but with better technique could go deeper and get more later.
- Improved: [Dungeons] When at a staircase room, pressing Shift+W will let you go upstairs/downstairs without needing to click on the staircase. This is helpful in buggy situations where the staircase did not get placed or simply isn't there is no click event to be triggered
- Improved: There were too many books being dropped in dungeons, switched it to 1 per library room.
Fixed
- Fixed: Flow tiles (rivers, lava) no longer move around on the map because they are properly cached. Wow! That only took forever to fix!
- Fixed random number generation which could have led to super subtle hard to find bugs
- Fixed: Dungeon loot algorithm. One day we’ll get it right.
- Fixed: Combat issue when player destroyed some non-essential thing like a rock
- Fixed: Issue with saving and quitting while autosave is running
- Fixed: Goblins were apparently Humans! Put them back in their place.
- Fixed: Birthday wasn’t actually working on your.. um… birthday. Oops.
- Fixed: Ambush enemies wouldn’t die.
- Fixed: Super weird dungeon movement/teleporting when clicking on a door.
- Fixed: Quests with time limits weren’t loading correctly from save. Now they do!
- Fixed: Quests getting nulled out and showing a dummy quest of Life Aspiration. You should never see this again, and if you do it’s a big problem.
- Fixed: Town music and ambient sounds now transition properly between scenes and locations. No more cacophony hurting yer ears!
- Fixed: Removed ridiculous startup things in the player log, like “the battlefield has gained Fishing from unknown source”.
- Fixed: Various combat bugs. We’re working on a new combat system for Early Access so these are BandAids (TM).
Known Issues
- Demo Quest Final Battle Issues: Conclave ending works. Selfish ending works. Renegade option has issue when conclave ambush battle occurs the guards in it hit 0 HP and don't die. That's not new, but the work around of console command "win.combat" failed to end the combat
- Skills like Perception are definitely handed out too often and you can quickly boost your stealth skill into the stratosphere
- Fishing doesn't work
- Light spell icon gets lost loading a save game
- Player log text disappears on save/load
- Market - prices don’t change as you buy and sell
- Relationships decay very quickly making it almost pointless to try to maintain one. That’s pretty dumb, we still need to fix it.
- Clicking a weapon in inventory doesn’t equip it. BUT you just click a hand and it will show all equipable weapons, or drag it over.
- Dungeons aren’t spawning locked doors, making levers useless and no keys being placed to find. They’re supposed to be funner!
- Most spells need better tuning and balancing
- Building a tower is supposed to come with a default layout, but it is completely missing, meaning you have to build from scratch everything, placing doors and a bedroom, floors, etc. Quite tedious.
- NPCs don’t send letters to you. Even if you are friends. They just aren’t that into you.
- Can’t do the final battle twice in the same game session. Have to quit the game completely, then it will spawn second time. Sorry speedrunners!
Build 14.1.21 Is Live! + New Discord Server and Early Access Release Date
We said it was coming and now it's finally here -- you can now actually get the artifact needed to complete the demo quest which was preventing you from progressing on the game.
As Maui said: "You're welcome!" (sorry Disney, please don't shut us down...)
Plus, we crushed a lot of other important pesky bugs:
- Fixed: Quest phases breaking resulting in Soft Lock and unable to move on map
- Fixed: Soft Lock which caused menus to disappear
- Fixed: Game crashes after sea travel
- Fixed: Money disappearing after you add it to tower treasury
- Fixed: Error when casting magic on a town from the map (hex casting)
- Fixed: Errors fighting guards defending a town after you attacked it with spells from the map (hex casting)
- Fixed: Playing a second life skips character creation
- Fixed: Equipping armor now works the same as equipping weapons
- Fixed: World generation crash while generating history
- Fixed: World Gen screen could be clicked through, triggering items on Main Menu screen and just making a big mess of the game
- Fixed: Player note map icons were failing to load from a save file, they should show up now
- Fixed: Settings menu button highlights were not working properly
- Fixed: Selling draft animals now works. It actually checks for creature’s inventory instead of player’s animal count :facepalm
- Fixed: Clicking leave in a building and being sent all the way out of town
- Fixed: Issue with game locking up when saving generated world after world generation
- Fixed: reduced town music volumes for better balance
- Fixed: Bug notification pop-up not working
- Fixed: Game crashing when settings file doesn’t exist
- Fixed: Broken choice in caravan encounter
- Fixed: some inventory item movement errors
- Fixed: Killing an NPC in a building led to bad recursive errors
- Fixed: Various errors loading save files
- Added more error tracking for dungeon issues, hopefully this will help in the future.
- Removed: Email section to bug reporter: with the time delay from reporting an issue to when we work on it, it just isn't of practical use
<*> Added: Ability to save games manually - Press F5 to quicksave at any time - this is for Kaylo7, Lord Blade, and others who were asking for multiple saves with such a buggy game
<*> Added: New load save game screen. Shows valuable data like file save date/time, character name, world name, and total wealth (not just your current gold but TOTAL WEALTH)
<*> Improved: The Worlds and Save Files list is now newest to oldest - eventually we come around to doing it right!
<*> Fixed: Unable to get the artifact in the final room. We no longer put it in a chest, we just put it in your inventory. Even if your inventory is full you still get the artifact. Everyone will always get the artifact! Yay!
<*> Fixed: Encounter system should no longer lock up now in a bad state, allowing the player to continue playing. This was the source of many many bugs
Known Issues:
- Conclave ending does not fire the final boss fight, however the quest is complete and players can freely do what they want
- The guards in the final battle won't die. We thought we fixed it, but testing has proven we haven't. If you encounter this here is a work around:
Open the console with ~
Type in Combat.Win
You will win the combat and can continue on with your life.
I realize that is a crappy solve to this bug, but that's the best we can do for today.
We've also conjured up our new Discord server here if you'd like to join us: https://discord.gg/DUE2NYPrcQ
And good news, we can officially announce our Early Access release date: Archmage Rises is officially going to Early Access on Monday April 17, 2023 (only a few weeks away)!
We'll have another build for you next week so keep those bug reports coming (or not, hopefully you won't experience too many more bugs 😅).