Update 2B: NEW Combat

We set a date! New Combat is coming Jan 19!

Behind the scenes it took three days of work and super long meetings to finally set a reasonable publish date. Mark kept reminding us “I’d love to get it out soon too! But we need time to play, test, and refine it before it goes out.” Finally I just asked for a date he’d be comfortable hitting. This is how we arrived at the 19th. The most tested and balanced work we’ve ever done. Will it be perfect? Nope! But it will be good.

Some details in the screenshot:

Spells are now data driven from tiny little JSON legos (combatons) all defining what the spell is and does: how it applies damage, does it apply a status effect and if so how?, how it affects neighboring spots. A standard spell has about 7 combatons, more complex ones could be 15.
The casting power bar is back, but now per school, representing player mastery in that spell school. It is unlocked through our new School Progression system (not a quest).
New monster race of Crocodons is coming as part of this combat update.
New cast box, method of casting, and targeting. The UX is improved
New tooltip system. We had to, as it is now all data driven from tiny little combatons.
Ara numbers are much larger. We’re still experimenting with the right numbers.

We will post info on Ice School later this week.

Combat is basically everyone’s focus.

Weekly Patch Priorities

I caught up reading the Steam forums last week since I was swamped doing reviews. It is important to me: If you take the time to say something about Archmage Rises, I will make the time to read it. Most of the time I will respond. Based on the feedback I saw these are priorities for this week:

Ashpeef has a crashing save file we are going to solve.
Phileosophos brought up an issue with NPC directions to things. People say ‘East’ but it is more South than East. Super misleading. We’re investigating
TakeMyLunch wants the ability to turn off the Rivals. We’re looking into a simple way to do this.

Currently Phil and D2 aren’t on the critical path for Combat, so we think we can do these. But it might change.