Progress
The playable area for the Riverside arena is finished! We’ll be continuing to sculpt the surrounding area in hopes of bringing it closer to an updated version of the Alpha map. Since Riverside is in the most open location of all the arenas, you’ll be able to see more of the world while you’re playing (meaning it needs the most terrain work). As a part of these improvements, we’ll be adding our stylized water shader to the river (we’re using a placeholder shader in the pictures below).
Red Letter Mode is far enough along that we’ve started doing some initial play testing and balancing! We’re pleasantly surprised with how quickly many of the core mechanics have come together. While we still need to add a few more features and tons of polish, the foundation is in good shape.
We’ve started the early stages of greyboxing for some ideas we’ve had for new arenas. This method is a great way for us to try out lots of different possibilities in a short period of time and see what we like best. We’re looking pretty seriously at one particular configuration that we’ve been excited to bring to the combat arenas for a while now! We’d like to include it in the Beta, but depending on how things go it might be something we add in after launch.
The code for our item effects has been expanded in a way that allows us to apply unique, flexible effects onto characters at any time. (Examples of effects: Healing, stat buffs/debuffs, inflicting or removing status conditions, changing the character’s speed.) Designers can easily tweak, balance, and even combine multiple effects to apply simultaneously to one item. They can activate immediately, over time, or trigger at set events in the game, such as upon swapping the character in, on taking damage, etc. This should add variety to the effects of cooked foods and held items, and may potentially even be used for passive and active abilities.
We’ve been working on improvements to how NPCs select a target when attacking. The code involved with this is now being run through a system that makes it much more efficient. This allowed us to add many more steps to the target selection process while still seeing performance gains compared to the way NPCs previously chose their targets.
Our development team added debugging tools for QA to use that resemble a "Minecraft-like creative mode," allowing them to increase their movement speed and control gravity levels to easily get around the map. This is similar to an old tool of ours, but the new version is way more stable and easy to control. With the old version, testers would sometimes go flying off the map unintentionally, which only became more and more obnoxious as more playable areas were added.
We fixed bugs related to NPCs not damaging the the player, abilities locking up, and ability projectiles having the wrong scale. One particularly nasty bug we tracked down was related to how we load assets in the build, which was causing almost all abilities to not work in builds, as well as other issues like the peeled Embear, etc.
LEXICON
The full lexicon can be found here.
Asset: Essentially any in-game object. Buildings, trees, leaves, etc.
Build: A playable version of the game. We create new builds multiple times per week to test new changes.
Greybox: A method used for designing large portions of map, dungeons, or other important areas. It involves constructing the general form of the thing in question using placeholder assets and shapes. It’s like a framework so when the correct assets are ready, they can be placed in the orientation that was already laid out. This allows for other developers to work on and around the Greybox before the final art is finished.
NPC: A non-player character.
QA: Quality assurance. The people who test the game and report bugs.
Red Letter mode: The codename for an unrevealed game mode to be included in the Combat Arena Beta.
Shader: An effect that changes how things visually appear in the game. Shaders can do many things to alter overall appearances.
Thanks for checking in on us! We’ll see you for our next newsletter on April 19.
