Holy Goblin Drums! Combat Rewrite is Almost Working

I was pleasantly surprised in a meeting last week to hear we can start James and Michel on designing spells for the new combat engine.

We’re nearing the finish line!

This requires some explanation:

There is a whole new combat engine, built from the ground up by Jonathan, Josh, Michel, and Tyler, designed to run tiny data lego components I call ‘Combat Atoms’. But now I’ll now call ‘Combatons’ cuz it sounds cool; like a G1 Transformer. 😊

Combatons are instructions to do things like:

Apply physical damage
Armor piercing damage
Adding burn damage over time
Increase miss chance
Freeze active character

Combatons can also have rules and equality checks to see when they fire. So we could have an effect that reduces HP for X turns, but only if HP is > 1. It won’t kill you, but will reduce you down.

Player actions, spells, and monster actions are simply combined Combatons. We make new spells or monsters by combining the combatons differently or with different seed values.

Getting the tooling, data structions, and system to work has been a herculean effort from Mark, James, and about half of our programming team for 6 months.

Why do this?

By having the programmers focus on making combatons and an engine to run them, now the work of making spells, items, and buffs can be done by designers.

The real benefit is in iteration. A designer can setup a spell, test it, change it, and repeat in seconds without involving a programmer.

Now the real work begins

James & Michel are creating spells today, and seeing how it works. We’ll keep adding combatons as needed until we have all that we need.

Don’t know how long this will take, we’re guessing this week will reveal a lot of how well it works.

Then another 2 or so weeks to really start building out the spells.

Our goal is to hit ~5 spells per school (5 schools) when we release this combat update.

No dates yet, I’m hoping end of Oct, but we’ll see what we see.

Combat is ~80% of our resources now: Jessi on UI, Michel, Josh, Tyler on programming, Mark & James on design

Priority Fixes

We appreciate everyone who goes to the trouble of logging bugs and posting issues we need to look at. This game is hard to make and knowing where to put the attention helps alot.

These are the issues we are prioritizing this week:

The slider quest is getting squashed by the new Mabren Tower quest and no longer appearing, meaning you cannot ‘upcast’ spells.
- In general this whole slider quest is going away in the Combat Rewrite because the ability to ‘upcast’ a spell is now handled per magic school and is something you unlock with experience.

A couple of people have posted about inability to find Art objects. We’re investigating.
Monster Tamer Bloba reports trouble trading and negotiating with the Merchant, wrecking the game.
Rival mages from school were sometimes choosing a non-magical career, like Fishmonger. Oops! We’re adding a new job to the game of House Mage which in the world of Vaelun is the next normal step.
There is a dumb bug where the player log repeatedly spouts: Skeleton Corpse is immune to Undead.

Zach and Thomas are heading up this effort.

Patch is coming out Thursday.