Update 12: Lotsa Fundamentals
Hi everyone,
We’ve been busy behind the scenes over the last few months with a number of changes and additions that haven’t been featured much on the livestreams.
Much of this has been foundational work that’s focused on ensuring we can scale our features & content, while providing a stable development environment and player experience.
As part of this, we’ve moved our backend over to a new relational database structure and worked to clean-up and improve our backend code.
As you’ll see in the list below, getting this move finished has also allowed Ali to get back into the implementation of core gameplay systems/features.
You’ll see more of these added in the coming weeks and months, but there’s already quite a bit to keep us busy on the content implementation side of things.
Since some of you still insist on reading these updates on your phones I’ll keep the text brief from this point.
That said, images may still be best viewed on a monitor.
We’ll get a gallery up soon that extracts most of the images from this and previous updates into a single spot (for those of you that enjoy nosing through them for spoilers).
Enjoy!
Ability to “drag and drop” NPC Spawns and Command Waypoints within Unity
Day/Night Spawns have also been added.
Additional conditions that govern spawning are still to come; this is an area in which we’ll be going deep.
Tool work and refinement will be ongoing. We have a lot of additional functionality in the queue for future updates.
Faction Work
Faction framework implemented & “Consider” (Con) messages reflects faction status accurately.
This enables us to begin implementing factions (see table above) and ensure that NPCs are behaving properly towards both players and other NPCs.
All text shown here is placeholder and should not be considered final. :wink:
Merchants (and buying & selling) have been added
We also now have the ability to drop currency from NPCs and carry coins in inventory.
We can now destroy items. Not having this previously was just an oversight.
Bags have also been implemented (but expect these to be less plentiful than you’re used to).
Also: weight, inventory space, and food & water are all going to matter. More on that soon.
Stackable Items and Tradeskill Containers & Recipes
These, combined with the existing ability for NPCs to drop items (and now, functioning merchants), means that we’ve got solid fundamentals in place to play with while continuing to work through our philosophical approach to Tradeskills.
Lots more on this to come…
Skills and Spell Work
We’ve added a functioning Skills/Spell “book,” from which abilities can be loaded on to the hotbar.
These abilities can be obtained from Spell Scrolls, which are available as well.
As part of this (and the new DB changes), we’re performing an ongoing Abilities and Buffs pass.
We’ll be doing this as part of our playtests and class design process from this point forward.
Combat formula refinements are also underway, and will be ongoing.
Character Creation and Race/Class Data
Character creation supports all Races and Classes. As noted in the FAQ, these races, classes, and their names are liable to change throughout this process.
Hit us up on Discord or the livestreams to discuss your thoughts on these.
Unique Race/Class Starting Locations (within Night Harbor), Starting Items, and Initial Faction Levels have also been added.
As part of this, we’ve also added Readable Note Items.
Our class specific Mentors and Guild Masters look forward to getting to work!
Zoning works again!
Weather Effects (Sandstorm) Experimentation
Along with:
Geometry/texture cleanup and additions
Fog settings experimentation
Fixed torches and started adding color variants
Placeholder Animations
Our trusty Capsule now has hands and some placeholder animations!
As we’re ramping up the playtesting, we felt it would be good to have some simple feedback in place for combat.
We’ll see how much value we can get out of implementing a basic set of anims, sounds, and FX.
If this work, then we can maintain our approach of keeping the artwork dead-simple, while focusing on the systems, formulas, and feel of combat and base character progression.
We’ll continue to develop and iterate on the art style in the background, but that process is best served by a solid focus on game design and tech (systems, tools, and stability).