I’m a little tardy in writing this post because I’ve spent the last 2 days in meetings figuring out what we focus on next. Combat was all-hands-on-deck to get it out, then everyone and everything to patch it last week.

The Future is Bright

Combat represents a new foundation from which we can build. And build we shall. The rest of the game to be exact!

Rival Mages Update

Our next formal release I call Rival Mages to add the ability to fight mages, starting with rival mages. The new combat system makes this pretty easy to do.

Why are we doing this? There were a couple of outstanding tasks I want to address from when we did the mini-update or Rivals.

Hunt down your rival mages in the world and kill em.
- We’ll add in the ability to befriend them with benefits later, right now we’re getting the fighting part working.
Make rivals appropriately respond to you (instead of being clueless when you talk to them)
Add a showdown mage battle to the end of the Mabren’s Tower Quest
Add a better reward to the Mabren’s Tower for completing the quest
Add in a new NPC reaction system. This is prep for the next big update.

This update is only going to take a few weeks to make. Will surprise everyone with a date once it is done.

(Man! We really need to stop doing all these unplanned releases and get to work on the roadmap!)

Roadmap Update #3: Exploration

Almost a year ago I had to put together a roadmap so people could generally know what I’m trying to make with this game. One of the challenges of publishing a bullet pointed list of features is it doesn’t allow room to listen to the game and see if a feature is just a neat idea or really what the game needs.

So for exploration we’re going to focus on these core features:

Dynamic quests - having the game generate quests based on local data. Starting with two types:
1. Kill Named Monster quest
2. Find Named object quest
Create our first faction: The Conclave. A simple version of it.
1. Ability to climb up some ranks with some rewards
2. Hands out quests using the Dynamic Quest engine
Update the map generation
1. It’s way too mountain heavy in the middle
2. Have better more meaningful biomes
3. Better distribution of lairs for where the player starts
Improve interacting with Points of Interest on the map
1. Finding lairs
2. Seeing and encountering patrols
3. Finding resources
A new UI with new HUD
Get rid of dumb stuff that bothers us
1. All the stupid tracks everywhere
2. Stamina -> replace with Fatigue system
3. Nourishment bar -> replace with Hunger system
4. Pick axes being the only way to get a resource instead of something magical
5. Exploration rolls and the “Hex View” screen entirely, it’ll be replaced above with better points of interest

You will notice Weather and Seasons didn’t make that list. I’ve decided it isn’t important right now. The Conclave faction functionality will provide way more engagement than the seasons changing. Seasons isn’t necessarily cut, I’m just pushing it down the roadmap somewhere else.

Thursday Patch

Last week’s patch was massive. It was so massive we were testing late into Thursday night still trying to get it out, but found some serious problems. In total it contained some 40+ fixes, of which the release notes covered the highlights.

This week we are working on these issues:

Ability to use items you sold - hard crash
Weaponsmith dialogue breaking
Dialogue underline click handling issues
Quest giver changing based on conversation (Ashpeef)
Trap click options not working (Mumzhar)
Healer not treating injuries (You had one job!)
Healer not accepting relationship discounts
Innkeeper losing quest options
Weapon stats issues
Skeleton corpses not reforming twice