Factions: Origins of Malu
Targets and Tribulations - Jan 17th, 2016
Over the next couple of months, we will working hard to transform the MMO version of Origins of Malu to an exciting F2P sandbox. This will involve improvement in many different areas. We will also continue to push out small patches as well to restore the systems to their proper glory!
[B]Jan 19th, 2016 minor patch and Current State[/B]
[LIST]
<*>AI is currently being fixed as combat is wonky right now and not where we want it, though we have many different systems in place we are resolving issues from a previous migration
<*>Art is being updated and don't except any miracles here but we do have series of improvements planned that will start to be implemented right away
<*>New character will now start with 2000 credits rather 100 credits
<*>The tier one player housing system pieces from the merchants have been reduced in price to 1 credit per piece
<*>Spawning has come a long way and we will continue to improve it that's to the hard work and is starting to take shape. This is one of the larger issues as when you land you need to kill in order to gain skill XP and also sell the loot to earn some money.
<*>The economy is basic right now
<*>You can build almost anywhere in the world soon we will post some more detailed information on the building systems
<*>We are close to getting there how ever it will take some time and some serious work.
<*>All races have access to tier 1 abilities
<*>Base stats and Armor are currently working
<*>Weapons are equitable however some stat bugs
<*>Weather systems are currently working however there are some minor transition issues
<*>Points of interest exist but there are scatter far and few in a very very large world
[/LIST]
[B]Expectations[/B]
[LIST]
<*>I (TK) have a habit of being to overly optimistic we are still a very small development team with limited resources, we will be recruiting and we have a couple other streams of business development going on under the hood but we want and have to do this our way. So we will do our best to keep in touch and be honest about were we are at.
<*>We will be doing wipes but we will try our best to announce when we do them
[/LIST]
[B]The Next two weeks - Feb 6th, 2016[/B]
[LIST]
<*>We will enhance and resolve a lot of the combat issues
[LIST]
<*>Speed of combat
<*>Physics of projectiles
[/LIST]
<*>General balance will be focused on between abilities, a lot of the abilities and general balancing this will include:
[LIST]
<*>NPC health pools
<*>Character health pools
<*>Distance of spells and firing lock ons
[/LIST]
<*>We will start to prepare for F2P release which is a target we are exploring to when is the most realistic
<*>We are developing more quests and encounters, one of our goals is state to implement some base story arcs that we have had planned for years now to be honest pretty pumped about this!
<*>Jumping out of the water will be fixed
<*>AI will be stronger
<*>Some GUI fixes
<*>Price normalization for items in the world
<*>Account registration site (account.originsofmalu.com) we get some much needed love and attention
[/LIST]
[B]The Two weeks after that - Feb 20th, 2016[/B]
[LIST]
<*>We will start to work on resource gathering and crafting systems, we have no ETA on this however getting our planned systems in at a basic level is important
<*>We will continue to add content to the game
<*>We will be polishing the game play
<*>More to be announced
[/LIST]
We will work to update this list as much as we can and we are working on bringing new people into our team streamline and increase our development throughput.
Cheers,
TK
Revenge of Backend - Origins of Malu is slowly coming back alive
Well shhhhheeeettt ;)
It has been a busy holidays and as we look forward to the new year things will be busy and our aim is to improve upon our efforts of the previous year. So grab some popcorn and sit back and enjoy.
The Sandbox MMO
We are going to launch our Big world MMO as pure free to play on steam, this will be happening in a staged manner over the next couple months. We have to fix up the world and solve some of the issues that we have left our. We will be updating our Trello site and for the people who have invested into our early access please feel free to add your own issues and experiences here: https://trello.com/b/ndD1aCG6/early-access-roadmap
We will drop the price of our early access when we have things sorted out, so until then the folks who bought early will get a special treat and some nice rewards. We will announce these soon we are just finalizing some details and to be very honest we have been setting things up and getting the machine in a proper state
Long story short, give a week or two and things should be running smoothly and we can get back to features on the MMO.
The Mobile Game
- Everything we have developed in UE4 is going mobile, we are putting together a top down story based action shooter, we are in the design phase and more information will be announced soon.
- We have mostly an independent teams working on the mobile and MMO, due to a couple factions, for the most part we are not splitting our reasons unwisely
- Targeted platforms are for IOS and Android and we have begun testing on devices to ensure we have get a smooth frame rate and early testing has been very positive
Forums killed the site
- We are working on the new forums, it will take some time but slowly should improve to where it used to be.
- The updates are going to come here first and then aggregated out other sources
- Give us some time with this as stabilizing the MMO is our first priority
The other goings
- We have been and continue to work with investors to find a solution to our labor pool and resources, we have other plans but we are moving forward as we are going at this alone.
- We have been working with groups and different companies for the last couple of months which is has been partially the reason for our silence.
Happy new years,
TK
Something old, something new and some crazy pills
So here is a little history lesson of how we ended up here....
History
- We started development in HE (A long time ago)
- We realized as great as HE was, it did not fall in lines with the goals we had so we moved to Big World
- We spent a long time developing and then War Gaming purchased BW and the future became unclear (There are a lot of reasons and history here to which we will not go into)
- We lost a tonne of resources and we were left with a skeleton team and we needed a smaller scope and a more indie main stream engine
- We decided to map the PVP battleground idea and then with funding move to the PVP battleground to a MMO direction slowly
- We were wrong…
- We jumped to trying to make a the MMO with Unreal 4 to try to fix this and we have had some reasonable success but it will take alot more work.
- We have been and still are working with investors for funding but we have realized we can not wait and be dependent on the outcome as to properly make UE4 a MMO engine will require more resources then we have and more time.
- So our timelines have been slow and we have been working hard to try to bring the MMO as fast as we can on a limited budget (To be frank, we have barely sold any copies because we froze all our promo when we realized we were wrong.)
That you should catch up in point form, I have excluded all the wasted money and drama and pain and constant fight up hill.
We have our Big world MMO still which still exists and has the following complete:
- Player housing (Fully working)
- Loot
- The full world of Malu (Swamps / Wastes / Plains / Deep Forests / Etc)
- All creature’s in
- Progression
- Etc lots more
When is this happening
- We are in the process of configuring the engine for steam, this should be live to people who purchased early access with a week or two, no longer.
- There OSX and Linux versions are a little far off in the future, if you purchased early and can not refund, we will setup a section in members only in the next couple of days and make sure to make it right.
- For the people who purchased this up to this announcement (We have a Top Down Mobile action game in development that they will receive for free)
We are going to update it with our new art but let’s be honest we are choosing to go with game play over graphics, so people may not be happy but the game will be a lot closer and a lot more depth right away to enjoy. We will be updating the graphics but we will be limited.
So,
- The Steam store page will be update this week to reflect the engine change.
- Once things are stable with the new engine, we will change our pricing model as we are going to go F2P, (Don't worry no pay to win)
- Proper forums will be popping back up again very soon as well
- We are also have a mobile game (Top down action) in the pipeline that will be available to all who purchased early access (More details coming in the next month or two)
The situation is very fluid and this only a portion of the news.
So again, hopefully if things go right by Friday 18th, 2015 you will be back in Malu, The full world of Malu.
if you have questions, feel free to ask on the discussion group, we may be slow to respond as we are working almost 20 hours a day right now.
Cheers,
Tk
December Status of Development Origins of Malu
Thank you for your continued support,
TK
** Changed the date to Sunday, as we are working on the announcement
Early November Update - 2015
We have a large update coming in about (1) month. This will be a rather large update. We are super busy in the background preparing and look forward to sharing soon.
A couple preview highlights:
- Content comes along
- Further GUI fixes (Major Overhaul, almost done now)
- Skill Progression system
- Better housing and placing systems
- Massive back end changes
- large announcement concerning our status
- New Store page ( content / screenshots / videos )
So we know its been quiet but you will love this patch as we inch closer to our final goal!
Cheers,
TK
Upcoming Patch Notes - Oct 7, 2015
This is not a full list as the list spans hundreds of lines of small changes and enhancements and clean up.
- Fixed spam array warnings
- Error checking added to GUI’s
- Clean up of quest icons not affected by lighting
- Stopped Twitching effect when sprinting on 0 energy
- Fixed GUI tracked quest issue
- Toljon Male – Melee updates
- Energy Loot drop fixes
- Consumable explode hit particles added
- fixed damage number events for beam effects
- Adjustments to how the character loads into the world (note this is a issue in progress)
- Fixed bug for inventory window with key press
- Fixed moving backwards rotation
- Added the Jolah dragon staff
- Intractable where floating sometimes, this has been fixed
- Combat idles and Toljon Blade directions have been fixed
- Particles for clear mind added
- Character network improvements
- Fixed capsules on intractable objects
- Crosshair adjustments
- Speed of projectiles adjustments
- Fixed projectiles homing issues in terms of distance
- Fixed an issue with the inventory thinking that the merchant window is open
- Fixed the quantity popup window not closing when the main window is closed
- Added adjustments to particle materials
- Fixed water bottle quest
- Range added to loot
- Can no longer target NPC actors
- Fixed layering issue with quest windows
- Jolah female animations update
- Testing Merchants – Coming soon
- Major wastes changes and adjustments
- Character sheets and paper dolls are currently only prototype and very not presentable but changes are coming and GUI’s should be sorted out very soon.
- Added wind particle barrier
- Adjustments to damage co-efficient as stats are coming in soon
- Crafting window work
- VR testing
- Much more, we will get some one to help us document and communicate these patch notes very soon.
We are currently working on new features and content and it continues to come alive more everyday. We are very busy with some large developments that will change things drastically if they come to pass. It is really what we have been working towards for 5 years and we are oooooh too close.
There will be another large content patch at the end of the this month but we have some small patches planned as well. I understand this is kinda of vague but we have to be right now. We very excited to bring Malu to you and once again for the folks who have stuck with us, we will be announcing the rewards very soon we just need to work with value on a couple of these goodies.
Stay classy.
TK
Mid September 2015 - State of Development
I think it is about time we drop another update to the folks out there who have been following this little project. We are going to release another rather large patch here targeted for September 25th, 2015.
So whats new?
- Further refinement of mounts (well one currently available mount
- Many bug fixes across the board (We will be sure to update the patch notes when we push the build
- We are doing some adjustments on the backend server infrastructure and we are excited this will bring some performance and stability enhancements.
- Adjustments and enhancements to the player building system - This system is very much experimental right now.
- A lot of new GUI's across the board, they may not be fine tuned by that time but will be shortly after.
- Weapons (Caster based), Melee weapons are close behind but require some more work
- More content continuing to open up and we prepare for the upcoming escape zeta.
- Character stats / Equipment Stats
- More gear
- We have upgrade our core engine to the newest version of there platform
- Initial testing with VR and its looking sweet, one thing to note VR is not planned for later in the Early Access pipeline but we did have a little time to test it and start thinking about it
- If things go well a OSX and Linux client may come in that time frame ;)
This is just a small list of list of things coming but we are working hard in the background.
Thinking ahead
- We have been working on some partnerships over the last couple of months that may possible make all our goals and hopes come true. Stay tuned as it is too early to tell but we are VERY VERY excited about it.
- We plan on updating the Steam store page over the next 2 weeks tor reflect what is current so look forward to some new screenshots and promo items.
- We are working on a FREE..... demo for our game for the folks to get a perspective on the game before they buy, we are almost there. There will be a twist though and I think people will enjoy this, and in the end it will benefit the people who purchased game already first. (More details to come but its going to be cool)
- After we have made it these milestones we will open our keys to the press again and streamers for reviews and what not as we are approaching where we should have been..
- One more note, we have started to work on basic crafting and we will be posting some press on that fairly soon as well.
Thanks for sticking with us, this are going to get rather fun around here soon as every day we are getting close to a full game here. I appreciate that you have been waiting and to remind the folks from my last update, the people who bought it in Early are in for some lifetime rewards as we know this has not been a smooth process.
So in closing, thank you keep checking back!
Keep a cool tool,
TK
August 25th - 2015 Patch Notes
We have been very busy on the backend and working hard to bring out more features and continue to polish the game. We are getting closer but we are far from done yet. The good thing is over the next couple weeks you should see a lot of changes coming and new features to prototype and test out. The below is not the full patch notes but a summary of the larger items. We are solving some of the server issues we have been seeing and over the next couple days things should stabilize.
Game General Notes
- Many performance enhancements
- Quality settings is currently being refactored and is in testing
- Steam is integrated now; your account is now attached to your steam account there is no longer the option to create an account. This will change later on as we add other platforms but for now steam is the only way.
- GUI’s are underdevelopment and subject to a massive overhaul
- Paper doll is currently missing and will added when the new system in brought in
- Housing is in a very prototype stage and very experimental and is also currently has not interface. This system will expand and is no where near close to its final implementation but we figured we would let you play with it.
- Basic quest system is currently implemented as well, same as above experimental and subject to massive changes
- Loot is currently in and once again is experimental and subject to change
- We have added a mini cave area into the mountains
- There may or may not be a mount quest in there…. Currently only working for the Jolah Male
- Inventory adjustments
- Improved flora system
- Increased base energy
- Increased base health
- NPC Dialogues starting to make their way in
- New particle effects for many spells
We will be adding our plans for the next couple weeks to our public Trello page for Early Access.
Coming soon – TBA
- Mac and Linux client, its coming and won’t be long now
- Improved quest system
- Improved mini-map
- World map Implementation
- Ability system and ability progression
- Prototype crafting system
- So much more.
More to come and a lot more on story coming as well.
Cheers,
TK
August 22nd Patch Notes
Busy day here, yup so here is where we are at today. We are setting things up for the next patch, the servers will be down one more day. We have a couple last minute issues that we found that impacting gameplay, We should have this sorted out by tomorrow.
Cheers,
TK
Servers will be down most of the day, August 22nd, 2015
Cheers,
TK