Update 16: End of Year Progress
Hey everyone!
2021 has been an absolutely crazy year for Monsters & Memories! Thank you so much for following our game and believing in our vision. We hope to do you proud in 2022 and beyond!
New Team Members
Harrison - Environment Art
Connor - Character Art
John - Programming
Gary - Programming
Alexander - Concept Art
In case you missed it, we brought on Harrison in October, and Connor in November. Harrison has been working on our Environment Art, while Connor has been working on 3D Character Models for our NPCs.
Also joining in November were Gary and John, both who join us as Programmers, both with backgrounds in Game Programming.
During December, Alexander joined the team. He is a fantasy illustrator, concept artist, and game artist. His work will help us continue to drive our art direction and world building in preparation for additional asset creation.
You can learn more about our new additions and the rest of the team here.
Programming Update
Our 3 man programming team of Ali, Gary, and John have spent the past month working hard on a Polish Pass Milestone, fixing countless issues and implementing many features. They hit the ground running, with Ali getting them quickly up to speed, while collaborating with Nick on the bugs and features.
When we first posted our Roadmap, we included a list of all functionality implemented to date. With a ton more functionality being implemented into the game over the past few months, we felt it was necessary to update this list.
Here are some of those new features:
Ability Book Update including Pages and Organization
Allow clicking off buffs
Auto Eat and Drink
Bankers and Banking
Boats (AI Controlled)
Breath Bar/Drowning
Chat Filter System
Doors/Locked Doors/Keys
Fall Damage/Death
Hotbar to drag Items (including clickies) and Abilities to and use
Locking and Unlocking UI
Melee Hit Stun, Spin Stun, and Hit From Behind Penalty
Merchants won’t sell to those with very bad faction/reputation level
Moving UI Elements
NPC Flee
NPC Spell Casting
Pet System and Charming
Player Corpses, Naked Corpse Runs
Right Click Looting
Several new regular user and GM commands
Status Effects and the changing of Health Bar colors when afflicted by them
Tab Targeting improvements
Tons of Ability and Buff functionality
Trainers
As you can see, we’ve been busy! We’re hoping to get a video together showing all of these features in the New Year!
Design/QA Update
I (Nick) have been continuing to work on Design Implementation, with an emphasis on Abilities, Buffs, and Encounters.
I’ve spent a lot of my time working closely with Ali to get our game’s “feel” just right. I am constantly testing all aspects of gameplay to help guide Programming, and to also iterate on my own designs.
I have also filled in where I can to implement Content, such as most of the Item, Mob, and NPC creation to date. Much of my Design work also serves the purpose of testing functionality and gameplay, as my other responsibility has been writing bug reports and feature requests, and regressing issues.
In addition to those responsibilities, I built out our Fallen Watch/Ancient Crypt “test dungeon.” I started this dungeon from the very small base of our original Mini Crypt zone which Ali built at the beginning of our first Proof of Concept. I then added several new rooms, hallways, mobs, named spawns, items, and quests to the dungeon.
Shawn then took my version of the dungeon and expanded it even further, which now encompasses several distinct areas that players can camp. It’s been a lot of fun crawling and camping with the team!
Soon, Ali plans to set it up so that we can, only for the purpose of testing, dynamically change NPC level ranges in the same zone. This will allow for us to use the same dungeon to test group gameplay at all the different level ranges, to make sure there is no breakdown in combat formulas at higher levels, and the combat continues to feel as we expect it to.
3D Art Update
Connor and Harrison have been continuing to work through their art disciplines on various works.
Connor is continuing to create 3D NPC Models, most recently creating our Beetle. The bats, rats, and snakes he created for us first were shown in Update 15. He has also been helping to jump start our animation work.
Harrison has been testing the size and scale of our environment, and putting together a modular kit that our design team can use to quickly build up in-game areas. He has also started work on updates to the city of Night Harbor, as shown in the second shot below.
A new Night Harbor shot based on some new concepts (see more in the Concept Update below):
As an aside, Connor, Harrison, and Alexander have also joined the MnM stream team! If you’d like to get alerts when they are live, you can check out the #notifications-setup channel on our Discord server. You can check out their streams here:
Connor - https://twitch.tv/ZukanSculpts
Harrison - https://twitch.tv/PadasTheRanger
Alexander - https://twitch.tv/TheGoblinWorks
Just after our last update, we tossed the robed human model into the engine to take a quick peek. Keep in mind that it's not been animated or tweaked yet in any way, but we thought it would be cool to take a gander at!
Concept Update
Alexander has been hard at work providing wonderful concepts to help illustrate our player races, classes, and the city of Night Harbor.
Here is the first pass of the races of Monsters & Memories:
And some early concepts of Night Harbor:
New YouTube Channel and Discord/Mailing List Update
We’ve just started adding our Twitch VODs to YouTube. This includes VODs from all of our different contributors’ streams.
Head over to our YouTube channel (via this link) and hit subscribe! It’ll not only help us gain exposure, but also ensure that you don’t miss anything that might not appear on Twitch.
As a side note, we’ve been promising you lore, but we want to make the first reveal as nice as possible. So, if you like lore, keep an eye out for our next update, which will be the first update of 2022.
If you’re reading this and you’re not on our mailing list, please sign up here so you don’t miss it. We’re aiming to start 2022 with 1,000 subscribers, and we’re almost there!
Also, please join our Discord! We just surpassed the 500 member mark!
Conclusion
We hope you enjoyed our final update of 2021! We want to again say thank you for being such great fans this past year as we ramped up our development.
We are super excited for what 2022 and beyond will bring for this community. Stay tuned and we hope you enjoy the ride as much as we do!
