Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox
I'm back, baby!
So after my HUGE cross-country move to an entirely new area (and biome - it's freezing here) I finally have internet set back up and will be trying to get back into the swing of things. Thanks for your patience.
As you can imagine, there's a lot going on for me - mostly sorting out an income stream - I'd love to say that Malevolence nets me all the money I need, but it's actually painfully far from it, so I've gotta sort out my real job first.
But, I finally have internet, which is a huge plus - it took AGES to get it happening out here in the deeply rural area I've moved to, but ironically I get three times faster internet speed than I ever did living in the city!
I'll be doing my best to catch up on forum things, but I just wanted to say a HUGE thank you to the team for keeping things so active here while I've been away, and for keeping on top of questions while I've been away.
Largely, as you can imagine, my priority here is going to be getting back into development - since I'm sure you guys mainly want me doing that more than anything, and that's mainly what I intend to do.
But I'm glad to be back!
Working on a fix
Hopefully will be fixed soon, along with a couple of other more incidental issues that have been going on.
Big thanks to those who have let us know! For those new to the game, I'm a lone developer working on this, so I very much appreciate your patience!
Forum Outage
Thanks for your patience!
EDIT: And it's back up! Thanks for those who let me know!
Minor Update
If you're one of the people who was having problems with dungeons killing you on entry or perhaps having the game shut down when entering temples, and the problem is now fixed, please let me know in the comments!
New Let's Play Series
So if you're curious about how the game plays, or perhaps considering picking up a copy for yourself, check out his videos to get a glimpse into the infinite world of Ahkranox!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgbUS8sA82w
Post-Release
WOW the release response has been amazing. You all rock so much!
Many new players and many old players are enjoying 1.0, but it looks like I'll be rolling out an update very soon.
It's been brought to my attention that a couple of players - not many, but some - are experiencing issues where they die upon entering a dungeon. This is just an update to let you know that I'm currently working out why it's happening, and once I do, I'll roll out an update with a fix.
Also, with the potion crafting at temples, the option was actually left in there accidentally for the 1.0 release. It was something that was, frankly, dragging back the release of 1.0, and was never a feature of the original design document. Rather it was a suggestion by the fan-base in the early days, and it had sat on the to-do list for FAR too long due to the complexity involved in adding it (it's quite an intricate system, even in its current rough state), so it was moved to the expansion in order to speed the release of 1.0 (you all had waited long enough for that), since SO MANY community suggestions had been implemented over the years that a line had to be drawn in the sand somewhere.
Unfortunately it seems, though, that I forgot to take the message out before the 1.0 release :( that's entirely on me. Sorry about that.
But I'll get this death issue sorted asap and roll out the update that should sort it out! A big thanks to user Minoas who has been providing additional info to me!
For anyone interested, you can watch what I'm working on in real-time using the public Trello - https://trello.com/b/1IWRTz5R
Release of v1.0
I bet you never thought you'd see this announcement, hey... I know many have thought this was vapourware, but the truth is - while I haven't always been the best at keeping people updated - I have never stopped working on this game for all these years, as all of the long-time players will attest to. As a sole developer it has been a monster - a much larger monster than I ever anticipated - and it developed such a tight-knit and dedicated community over on the official forum that various suggestions, ideas and input from you guys led to this game turning into a HUGE project for any team, let alone one individual guy working on it alone for so long.
I know not everyone believed we'd get here, and based on the stories I've heard of other devs who have walked away from their projects I frankly don't blame anyone for thinking that - but I was never going to. I've had so much amazing support and encouragement and belief from my players that it's really kept me going. This ended up being a ten-year project, and boy what a decade it's been.
It's not perfect (what game is, really), but it's fun, it's massive and - as the more dedicated players will tell you - it has many, many, many hours of fun to be had in the world of Ahkranox, with a lot of replayability.
To the old players, I say thank you. Names like Hyfrydle, Tnoyce, ShoHashi, DarkByNight, Aleopheus, Smeggit, Scorpius, Kneecleaver, SubsistCyber, Shephard, Stefacle...... So many more, and I apologise if I forgot (I'm half asleep as I type this) you guys have all been absolutely incredible and I've made so many great friends in you all. And my test team, made up of many of those names, have been an absolute pillar that held me up all those years. There's no way in this life I'll ever be able to repay them enough.
To the new players, I say welcome. This project is a labour of extreme love, and despite being imperfect is a testament to dedication to wanting an idea to exist. Be patient with it if you've not played old-world RPGs before. This game is designed to not be like your modern games. It's a throwback to a time where games were far more unforgiving. I highly recommend watching ShoHashi's Lets Play series on YouTube as it is the best depiction of the game that I could have ever asked for.
But really the main message is, have fun with it. There is an INCREDIBLE community built around this game (on the official forum) and they will be very, very willing to help out anyone who needs it, from gameplay strategy to getting the video settings working (which can, for some people, be a little bit fiddly due to Windows recent updates)
But I hope you enjoy. I, for one, am not stopping here. There will still be updates for this base game, but I have also been preparing the expansion, of which the alpha build is with my test team. No rest for the wicked!
Otherwise, I'll see you in Ahkranox :)
Server Transfer Announcement
I'm aiming to have minimal - if any - downtime, but I figured I'd let you know that it's coming soon, just in case at some point you experience connectivity issues with either the game, the website or the forum!
In terms of the update, the test team have been working away amazingly making sure it's all ok now since just after Christmas, and they're almost done, so it won't be far off!
New Update - 0.15.483
So what is behind this update? You won't notice much in the way of visual changes, but you'll notice a big difference in performance and load times. As you may know, I'm doing a bit of polishing work on the visuals of the game, but while I was working on those changes I started seeing a lot of room for improvement in the loading routines and realised that those needed some serious work before I tackled anything visual. Those of you who are fans of the game will know that Malevolence is deeply procedural, and so the load routines aren't like those of a normal game - quite a lot of calculation and processing goes into loading each environment, which is what takes the time and makes it slower to load than other games - but despite that complexity it could be faster, and many of you have been going and making snacks between load times and using the time in other ways, but I wanted to get that time down.
Now don't get too excited. All of those calculations still have to be made during the load sequences for Malevolence, but they should now be noticeably faster, and performance should have a noticeable shift towards being better. Mainly a lot of groundwork has been set to bring the game up to a better standard for future work.
While optimisation was the main goal of this update, it did require HUGE swathes of code to be totally re-written, which brought into the light a lot of bugs, which myself and the test team have tackled and squashed. So overall the game is much more stable.
Apologies for the time this one took. Aside from my dog passing in the middle of the update, which was not good, the optimisation routines needed total re-writes to get them faster and more efficient. Many late nights poring over literally thousands of lines of code. Lots of fun, though. I do enjoy making the game better.
Next up will be a bit of a graphical overhaul to make things look prettier - particularly shaderless mode, which is kinda ugly at the moment (in towns and countryside at least - pretty happy with dungeons) and then it's back to the relentless bug-squashing march to the finish line.
If you'd like a full list of what I've done, you can find it here on the dev log blog:
http://msoaupdates.blogspot.com/2018/08/major-update-015483-august-23rd-2018.html
But otherwise I'm going to take my customary week away from the code before diving back in. Enjoy!
Just remembered I haven't updated you all in a while!
I've been back on the horse for quite a while now and work has been plugging along on the game. All the optimisation work is done now, but it led to a slew of really hairy crash-to-desktop style bugs which the AMAZINGLY patient test team have been helping me nut out. We're getting close, though, so the optimised update should be with you fairly soon all going well.
The optimisation results are quite good, too. It IS heavily system dependent, but in some instances I've knocked load times down by half or less, others not so much, others even more. My favourite is moving between dungeon floors on shaderless mode. The load music barely has time to kick in before the new floor is loaded on my PC. Very exciting stuff.
Anyway, back to it! Sorry I forgot to update you for a while there! Been back to my "working really late into the night" schedule and I was too buried in code haha
And on a personal note, thank you so much for all the beautiful support messages I got about my poor Evie passing away. It hit me harder than anything has before, and getting so many lovely messages about your own experiences really helped me feel less alone during what was an incredibly difficult time. You're all amazing and I love you.