Fixed dynamic greeting bug when speaking with Shipwrights, Ship Captains and Harbormasters
Fixed an issue with selecting dialogue options with keyboard shortcuts while services and subject pop-up windows are open
Fixed an issue with creatures not showing up in the subject pop-up
Fixed an issue with notifications (for example, letters from the Chapterhead) being hidden behind US in resolutions higher than 1080p
Fixed a bug introduced in the first Rivals release where custom portraits could not be displayed or changed
Fixed a bug where town tooltips were displaying during combat with a Rival
Fixed a bug preventing the spell power slider tutorial from popping up
Fixed 2 incorrect animation triggers on specific earth mage abilities
IMPROVED:
Knocking on doors now actually sound like knocking on doors instead of bashing them down
Made the spell power slider easier to adjust
Rivals Beta Released!
RIVALS COMBAT BETA NOW AVAILABLE!
It’s finally here! You can now find and fight your rivals. They won’t go down easy though and will put up a good fight, with mages from each school of magic bringing it’s own unique challenges and strategies to the battlefield. We released the beta on Friday of last week, and so far early feedback from the weekend has been positive.
Here are a few of the new things that come with this update:
New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
New option to attack your rival when you meet them
Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
New combat arena - Town Street
New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
Plus other improvements and bug fixes
You can now try out the new Rivals update by switching to the Beta branch in Steam. We’ll be Beta testing it for at least the next week or two for some extra polishing and optimizing before we release it to the main Steam branch.
Emily and Alex, our new hires from last week (with some support from Phil), will be taking on the Rivals beta through to it's official public release. If you try it out, let us know what you think, we’d love to get your feedback on it!
EXPLORATION:
Mark and the rest of the team are continuing to plow forward on the next big Exploration update. For those of you who ready our last weekly dev update, this list hasn’t changed much, but we’re continuing to make progress on all of these areas:
Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters. Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System Zach - Dynamic Quests Jessi, Phil, Jonathan, Andrey - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul + Controller Support
OTHER NEWS:
By request of some in our Steam and Discord communities, we’re working on putting together a “Known Issues” list that will be publicly available on both the Discord server and the Wiki (which we can hopefully now put a little more attention too now that we’ve got some additional help).
Just a reminder, if you do try out the new Rivals beta, let us know what you think!
Rivals Combat (Build 0.2.200) is now live on the Beta channel
It's been a while coming, but now you can finally fight your rivals! Prepare for a brand new challenge, as your rivals not only bring magical attacks your way, but they also bring some interesting defensive challenges for you to face.
NEW:
New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
New option to attack your rival when you meet them
Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
New combat arena - Town Street
Added new magic XP book reward to Innkeeper starter town quest
New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
IMPROVED:
Prompt to abandon a quest when talking to a quest giver now shows the name of the quest
Added AP cost to button tooltip on weapons
Additional "do not know" NPC responses
FIXED:
Fixed VFX glitch when casting Fireball
Fixed a bug with enemy difficult scaling
Fixed some gender-related text generation bugs
Fixed some minor combat background formatting issues
Fixed a bug where abandoning the tower quest wouldn't remove the prompt to abandon the tower quest
There are likely more fixes and additions not listed here that I may be missing :)
Also, there are a few bugs remaining that we need to fix, but we have already made you wait long enough, so we decided to release this beta build with these issues outstanding so we don't keep you waiting any longer. These aren't game breaking bugs and we'll get these fixed up asap.
KNOWN ISSUES:
While NPCs will not reveal the location of your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest prematurely, it's still possible to potentially encounter this rival by chance and kill them prior to completing the Tower quest. This should end the quest, but currently does not. We'll fix this soon.
If you kill a rival and then find them on the Relationship screen, it currently does not indicate that they were killed. This will be fixed soon as well.
When visiting a Shipwright, there is a text bug related to displaying his current activity when greeting you.
Thanks for testing out this beta and we hope you enjoy it! As always, we'd love to hear about any bugs you come across that we may have missed and would love to get your feedback on the new rival combat. Enjoy!
Weekly Dev Priorities: Apr 29, 2024
We are winding down on the final touches to the Rivals combat update, and ramping up on what is shaping up to be our biggest update ever!
Here’s what folks are working on this coming week (and beyond):
RIVALS WRAP-UP:
We are so very close to putting a lid on the Rivals combat update, at least as far as being able to push the update to the Beta branch. Last week after testing, Thomas and Phil were both pleased with how it all plays in general, with just a few more important bug fixes to squash.
Once we finish those, we’ll release it to the Beta branch for another round of testing where players can try it out, we can find any other bugs that may have slipped through the cracks, and do some more final tune-ups (if needed) before finally releasing it to the main public branch.
Phil will be heading the charge on this with the assistance of D2. Alex will also join the fray later this week (more on that later).
EXPLORATION:
Mark and the rest of the team are full steam ahead on what is currently known as the “Exploration” update, which essentially (as of now anyway) will be our biggest update/release between now and our 1.0 launch!
This is what we’re focusing on this week:
Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.
Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System
Zach - Dynamic Quests
Jonathan, Jessi, Phil - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul
We’re all very excited with how exploration will be improved in this coming update, which will (at least in Phil’s perspective) make the game feel a lot more like a TTRPG-like experience. BTW, an easy way to get Phil’s stamp of approval internally is to compare how the feature/idea we are working on is like D&D and he’s pretty much on board 😆. For those of you who might be worried about the game losing that feel, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve got several torch bearer’s within the team carrying that torch for you!
OTHER NEWS:
We’ve got 3 new team members joining us this week! Starting on Wednesday, joining us on our quest are:
Emily: project management and helping us all stay on task and hitting our goals
Alex: QA testing and running our regular patch updates
Andrey: For the summer he’ll be joining us as a developer before returning to his teaching work
Next week our new artist Lucas will be joining us as well. Would love for you to give them a warm welcome!
Weekly Dev Update: April 22, 2024
Recipe for Success
The last several weeks have been planning and transition. We’re bringing on four new team members in just over a week, so getting everyone aligned and on the same page as far as game vision has been pivotal.
Mark Webster is a 15+ year veteran game designer (GoW:Ragnarök, God of War 2018, Guitar Hero, Skylanders) and Lead Designer on Archmage Rises since last fall. Last week he laid out for the team how and why we are tackling development in a Play Experience way.
I recorded this meeting for the new employees starting in May. But afterwards, I felt it was so good and explanatory that I am taking a chance: I’m sharing this internal meeting with you, our faithful fellow adventurer.
This is the first slide, which I forgot to record.
Notes:
What we’re working on is Update #3 Exploration, but it is so comprehensive of an update that it is most of the major parts of the game. It is going to take us a while, many months.
We will continue to make patches every other week as long as we need to, while we are doing the above.
Mark mentions something about ‘Adventure Books’ and ‘Seasons of Life’. These are concepts around structuring the overall ‘life’ of a player character still very much still in design discussion. I’ll have more to say when we figure out what it means!
Rivals
All five mage types are working: Fire, Ice, Arcane, Earth, Storm
Phil and I are doing one last round of experience testing before we release to the beta branch. Think it is this week.
Build 0.2.108 is now live!
FIXED:
Fix for game launch black screen bug caused due to an empty or malformed Settings.json file Fixed some bugs that were causing some players to get stuck in/at the end of combat Fixes for some starter town quests Various NPC conversation and keyword highlighting bug fixes and optimizations
IMPROVED:
Added Day/Night cycle to Mage Tower Added the ability to ask NPCs about monsters
Weekly Dev Priorities: Apr 15, 2024
Less pontificating this week than the previous two weeks updates! More details about the game dev.
Mini-Update Rival Combat
Rivals is a small update adding the ability to fight specific named mages in the game. These mages specialize in one of the schools and present a unique challenge to the player.
Great news! We think Rivals will be ready to hit the Beta branch either this week or next week.
This one has taken a while to pull together for the reason I wrote about last week: Finding the music. Being more intentional about the experience, the feels, rather than just the lyrics and the feature.
I’m not pretending it’ll be the best thing you’ve ever played, but it should feel like ‘Hey, they put some work into this.’ If it does, then this is a good microcosm of the larger ‘find the fun’ initiative we’re going into
There are a number of fixes and Quality of Life improvements baked into this version
Exploration
Exploration is our next major update to the game. It will greatly enhance the overworld experience, map exploration, UI experience, dynamically generated quests based on NPC motives, and player progression.
Jessi, Phil, and our Super-Senior programmer Jonathan are all working on the new UI. The new UI is being architected well (as opposed to what we’ve had to date… which is not). The new architecture will allow something good for you and something good for us
The new architecture supports custom keybindings and controller play - eventually this game is going onto the Switch and other platforms, but I personally like playing PC games with a controller and we’re allowing it
The new architecture allows for automated testing scripts. This will help improve quality and make our new QA Alex’s life much easier!
Mark is working hard on ‘finding the fun’ (the music) in the new Regions concept for the map
Zach has the dynamic quests working well, but needs to rearchitect some of the branching dialogue tech. My goal is to make a crappy video of dynamic quests working in game next week. It is really really cool!
Nolan and I are discussing the Relationships aspect of the game. We’ve been mulling over ‘What does friendship look like in Archmage Rises?’ To make these NPCs feel good we’re going to use more of the techniques you see in novels and games from the likes of Bioware, Larian, and Obsidian.
This Week’s Patch
Fixed an issue with game start ups due to corrupted setting files
Working on a bug causing some players to experience combat freezing
Improvements + fixes to the Topic Picker, including the ability to ask about monsters. If the NPC knows they will tell you where they are. Invaluable for quests!
Other Studio News
Josh has decided to move on. Our time with him was beneficial and appreciated, we thank him for his efforts, and wish him well for whatever is next.
It just so happens I’ve been in discussions with a programmer for a year. He is looking for something immediate. We’re able to bring him in right away to help.
Curious, do you like the more ‘game details’ posts like this? or the more ‘thought piece’ like the last 2 weeks? Give us a shout and let me know.
Weekly Dev Update: How We're Developing The Game Now
How Do you Make a Good Game?
One evening a week I teach a game dev class at a university in Vancouver, BC. Hopefully not fulfilling the phrase ‘Those who can’t, teach!’.
I ask my students: How do you make a Game?
I surprise them by telling them it’s a simple 2 step process. Here is my teaching slide:
Works for books, music, painting, sculpture, and even articles!
Step 1. ✅
Step 2. Working on it! Opinions will differ on how far along we are.
I use Redfall as an example for the primary reason games fail on release: they weren’t able to finish Step 2. They needed more time (which usually means budget) to complete Step 2. If you ever play a game that dissatisfies, it’s because step 2 was cut short. Several reasons cut step 2 short, but this is not a class, it’s a news update, so let’s get back on track!
While writing this, I happened to catch a post by new player Mordred who decided to jump in and play. He lost 4.5hrs into the immersion of the game.
We have something. Some of it is engaging/compelling. Some of it is real crap. We need to make it a lot better.
Language note: When I say below “we need to make it fun” I’m not discounting the parts people are enjoying, nor am I trying to persuade anyone having fun that they really aren’t. I mean “it isn’t fun enough”. Meaning it can be much more engaging.
So how do we do this?
Games Ain’t Software
I have 15+ years in Enterprise software, mostly web and mobile platforms.
In software, we have a set of features we must have. Usually, these are dictated by higher ups like the CEO for specific business purposes or to address specific operational pain points. From there, it is up to the team to determine the rest of the system features.
Point being, you make a feature list up front, budget accordingly, and prioritize. This can be done waterfall-ish where the finish line is all decided up front, or agile where a Product Owner decides which ideas become features worth doing as the team builds.
Software just has to work. It is mostly binary: Can I do the thing - send the cost sheet - or can’t I?
There is something to be said about UX and how wonderful or terrible the user’s experience is with executing the feature.
Yet not once, in any of my field tests, did I run up to a user and ask, “Are you having a good time?! Do you want to click that button again?!?”
The system did the thing it was supposed to, we move on to finishing all the features.
This doesn’t seem like the right path…
The Way We Got Here, Doesn’t Get Us There
We have some assets to our advantage:
An idea that seems worth pursuing.
A player community 10,000+ strong, growing every day.
A moldable base clay of basic features (map, combat, towns, quests, simulator) which can be shaped and formed the way we want
But when I playtest the game it isn’t fun enough.
This leads to a key question. One of upmost strategic importance:
Add more features, hoping it becomes more fun? - Or- Find the fun with what you have?
In software development we talk about tech debt - tech that isn’t quite the way it should be, but you keep putting off dealing with it until some later time. Building on top of this foundation usually just multiples the tech debt.
It sounds ridiculous to say, but I wasn’t terribly interested in how fun the game was, I wanted to get through all the features. I made my list of features, set the roadmap, and started plowing through like it was a software project.
Oops.
Now I have a pile of Fun Debt to work through.
For a solution, let’s look outside of software/games.
How Is a Song Written?
Confession: I’ve never written a song. Not even accidentally!
But I am a curious student of the process. I watch music documentaries of acts as varied as U2, Queen, Rush, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Taylor Swift. I read Rick Rubin’s (co-founder of Def Jam) book on creativity. I’ll even admit to watching every episode of the TV show Nashville! (That’s 40hrs of my life I’ll never get back!)
My interest is wrapped up in my niece as a budding musician. I’ve been able to go to the studio with her a few times and coach her a bit in her career. Recently she wrote a song with hit-band Maroon 5.
Not once* have I seen a great musician first write out all the lyrics of a song: course, verse, & bridge. Then try to set music to it.
It starts with the music. A melody, a hook, a few bars from the aether. The musician listens to it, plays around with it, and builds on it. Music and lyric come together, each supporting the other.
In games, if lyrics are the features, then music is the fun. When a game is well made, it truly sings!
The Musical Melody Approach to Game Dev
We need to take the musicians approach by listening. Where is the game’s melody flat? Screeching? Too loud? Too soft? Then adding to it only what makes it sound/play better. To ensure lyric and music, feature and fun, are supporting each other in harmony every step of the way.
As I wrote last week, we (team, new studio) are committed to making this game great. You deserve a great game.
Now is the time to do this. The game is mostly stable (we’re working on that combat first round issue). We’re working on a new UI which includes controller support (oops let that slip).
Now is the time to unite the clans!!!
Unnecessary Braveheart reference, but I love it!
We are working hard on designing the structure of the game, the game loops, how time passes, how you interact with the map, how you get into combat.
We don’t need more features to make this fun. We need to form the disparate notes and words into a beautiful melody.
Once we have that core, we can add features as long as they don’t upset the balance of the music.
So we need a new roadmap, but I don’t even know what it will look like until we get the core loop right.
This new ‘beautiful melody’ fun version of the game is Update #3 - but it is so much more than just changing how resources are found and harvested. It’s turning the pieces of game we have into a game.
For the time being we’ve taken the roadmap off the Steam page game description.
Finally, About The Price Increase
We’ve said for a while now the game price will increase as we reach certain milestones. The roadmap has shown this for 6+ months. We intended to increase the price with the launch of Rivals Combat, but that has been delayed a few times pending improvements. There are Steam rules on when the price can be changed, last week was a window where we could so we increased from $10->$15 USD. This is just one step along our road to $40 USD.
I totally understand how a price increase on the heels of announcing a new studio acquiring us, looks like the new studio is making changes already. It is not. Just a coincidence. In fact, the VC person doesn’t even know I changed the game price.
Build 0.2.107 is now live!
FIXED:
Fixed issue with being able to infinitely haggle with a ship captain
Fixed some bad text in the Mage Tower Games Room
Fixed an issue with becoming nauseated from eating
Fixed an issue where food was being consumed even when unnecessary
Fixed typos in NPC directions
Fixed some unnecessary capitalizations
Fixed a bug in the relationship screen regarding sorting. Now "sort by relationship" actually sorts by relationship
Relationship window properly shows relationship bar for the character portrait when the selected character on the left is an NPC
Fixed a bug where a corrupted Settings file would cause the game not to open properly
IMPROVED
Limited eating foodstuff (which is essentially ingredients and not actual food) to only be consumed if you are actually hungry
Eating foodstuffs now curbs hunger
Nausea from eating foodstuffs now only applies if you are actually able to consume it
Skipping cutscenes (sleeping, etc) is now back!
Future of the Game (It's Good!)
Last week I alluded to Something Really Big happening this week. It’s here!
1. We’re Being Acquired*
There is a new game studio starting up which really likes who we are (character & culture), what we’re doing (the game Archmage Rises), and how we are doing it (process & culture).
I know! I’m as shocked as you are! 😝
Rather than starting from scratch, they would rather build from the Team & Tech here at Defiance and take it to the next level.
They are impressed with and believe there is “gaming gold” in Archmage Rises. So much so, that they are willing to expand the team and pay what it costs to finish it well (within reason).
Then the plan is to take that base (tech/design) and bring the “live a life” simulator to other genres, titles, and platforms.
I will be co-Studio Head along with Mark of the new studio. I’ve been self employed for 20 years so this new position opens a new chapter of my life, one I am excited to embark on. If Sid is right that games are about “interesting choices” then I think I can say life is about “interesting challenges”. I think being co-head with Mark will work well and is worth figuring out. It worked for Naughty Dog to have co-presidents!
(*for tax & legal reasons it’s not 100% accurate to say we are being acquired but it gets the correct idea across.)
2. How We Got Here
I have spent 33% of my adult life and most of my finances making Archmage Rises. I’ve poured some $1.1m USD into make the game. Perhaps fulfilling the saying “a fool and his money are easily parted”.
Words fail to capture the real struggle of watching the bank account shrink every 2 weeks as payroll processed. All while my wife gently asks, “This is going to work, right?”
It’s easy to make fun of Curt Schilling for losing a fortune on making a WoW-killer at 38 Studios but I know how it must of felt.
In light of this, you can imagine how painful it is to throw out work. The decision to rewrite Combat was super super painful.
On occasion someone has posted on the forums that I’m a scammer working some elaborate con spending $1m to cheat them of their $30 or $10. I chuckle at these as I add “World’s Worst Con Artist” to my resume. 😝
We launched to Early Access because I was running out of money. There was no way to get to 1.0 on what I had. The initial sales of Archmage were good, we got 4-5 months of payroll. We’re currently in the top 10% revenue games on Steam.
But it isn’t enough.
In the years I’ve been making this game, Early Access has changed from something kickstarter-ish ‘build the game with backers’ to just a glorified paid beta.
I think it was reasonable to expect sales to go up with each content update. They haven’t.
Enter Mark Webster.
Mark is a game designer with 15+ years of AAA, previously working with Activision on Skylanders, Guitar Hero, and Sony Santa Monica on God of War 2018 and God of War Ragnarok.
Mark and I have been fast friends since meeting at a games conference in 2019.
After Ragnarok he was independently consulting on game design and offered to help out on Archmage. At first he was helping out on some features and general guidance, but he couldn’t get the game out of his head. Even when he wasn’t working on it, he was thinking about it. I’ll summarize it as “the magic” bit him. We struck an arrangement where he could work fulltime with us on the game and become the lead designer.
But this was always just for a season. What he really wanted to do was start his own studio with a Venture Capitalist (VC). They had been talking for years and was just waiting for the right time to start.
It was back in Jan, with the game industry facing massive layoffs, when he approached me about continuing to work together. A partnership at the new studio. Over the 9 months Mark has been digging into Archmage Rises he’s seen something really special here. Sure there are plenty of things wrong and undone, but there is gold here. And if we do it right, it’s not just a game, it’s a product line.
So that’s the question put to me:
“Hey Thomas, what if we acquire Defiance, help finish the game, and make more games?”
“Uh, let me think about it… YES!”
“OK, what do you need to finish it?”
That is a very hard question to answer!!!
To answer it, I have to know how much effort it will take to get to 1.0. The specific disciplines, for how long.
This was a LOT of work to figure out over Jan-Mar, which is why you may have seen me say on the Steam Forums that I have a better idea on when the whole game will be done than any specific feature. Because that is all I was doing: planning, gantt-ing, budgeting.
3. What’s Next For the Game
George Broussard proved one can make a video game forever. He spent 14 years making Duke Nukem Forever without releasing. I’m make no judgements, I’m not too far behind him!
The new studio looked at Archmage’s Road Map and said “It sounds real great, but probably unrealistic to do it all for 1.0.”
This is what we will do:
I remain Creative Director on Archmage Rises - I’m in charge of the vision of the game, the experience we’re trying to hit, how it feels to play
Mark takes over as Lead Designer - This is his specialty. He will take my vision and design the game to hit the experiences we’re going for
The team will expand so we can do it better and faster: Senior lead artist, more senior programmers, production support, Illustrator, Animator, VFX, more game designers, content creators, proper QA. We’re going from 11 to 20 people on the team! Right at a time when lots of experienced people are available.
We will release 1.0 Spring 2025. To do so, we have to be feature complete around October of this year so we have enough time to polish.
This represents a willingness to invest about another $1m USD
I’m excited. I need to be told I can’t work on this game forever… by someone other than my wife! 🤦♂️
I’m going through the roadmap identifying features into Four Buckets:
Core experience, have to ship with it - Obviously I/you feel like everything fits this, but with a budget and timeline to hit not everything can be here.
What can be delayed to free update post release - I’ve made a lot of promises over the years and its important I keep them. This gives me a way to keep it - no additional cost to players. I’m real impressed with how Stardew Valley did this with something as large as Multiplayer!
Should be moved to DLC - I hope I don’t have to use this bucket, but its an option. I understand people will be upset if I move something from expected 1.0 feature to a DLC feature. I keep you in mind the whole time.
Cut - I’m using this bucket as a last resort. I’m not sure which upsets people more: moving a feature to DLC or just cutting it altogether.
I want to be super clear: I’m the one, the guy who read Raistlin’s origin story in Margaret Wies’ The Soulforge and thought “I’d like to make a game about Raistlin” who is making the calls here. The same person on the forums reading and responding to all your questions.
I alluded to this previously in my updates that the Roadmap needs to change and will soon.
This is game dev. Usually it is done behind close doors with no one seeing that you intended to have something like pets in the game, but had to cut it in order to ship.
Well, we’re doing our game dev publicly and so all I can hope for is your patience and understanding as we do our jobs to the best of our abilities. I will continue with the spirit of what Archmage Rises is. While some features may evolve or get dropped, the goal of creating a TTRPG-like mage simulator still remains the same.
Finally, we’re going to change our dev approach. I’ll write more about this next week.
4. Next Update
RIVALS Rivals is coming. I keep writing this every dev update and it is still true. I play tested it last week, but there were some problems and it just didn’t feel right yet. We’re working on it some more this week and I’ll have an update next week.
PATCHES We’re going to move to bi-weekly patches. This alleviates some effort.
EXPLORATION UPDATE Exploration is the next major update and will completely change the game to be a game. This is our primary focus and so saving some time on bunching up patches every week helps.
We’re working on the structure of the game (meta), the game loops from the hour, day, week, to years.
We’re working on the dynamically generated quests for unlimited replayability in the same world.
We’re working on making NPCs have real personality.
We’re working on lore books to get more world building and lore into the game
We’re working on the new UI
It’s going to be a few months to pull this together, but once we do the game will feel good with a proper beginning, middle, and end.
