Update 19: The March of Progress

Hello everyone!

Rather than a bunch of words this time around, how about we give you some bulleted lists and a lot of images?

Okay?

Let’s go!

Design

Modified our player starting stats and formulas to begin at a much lower number
- This reduced them down from a starting range of 70-90 points per attribute, down to 7-10
- We’ll continue to test the approach, with regards to feel & scaling
Created lore for “Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane,” a low level dungeon near Night Harbor
Implemented a first pass base population for Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane and the new Night Harbor newbie yard
Lore deep dive on the history of the Proof of Concept (POC) region
Refined POC region layout, zone names, and lore
Started adding playable placeholder zones for the remaining POC areas
Continued creating new mob types and mob ability loadouts

First Person View of Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane

Character Art

Reworked human geo and UVs to be more efficient
Additional iteration on Ogre player character geo
Smoothing out animation cycles to fix issues like knee and elbow popping
Lots of UV cleanup and standardization to help us with Player Customization and texture reuse
Reworked existing player textures into separate layers for each material type (plate, leather, mail, etc) to expand customization options

Environment Art

Continued the gray boxing, concepting, and build out of Night Harbor
- Bank
- Bathhouse
- Fisherman's Warf area
- Guildhall
- Governmental Building - Tier 1
- Inn
- Tier 3 buildings
Created gray box layout for Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane
Create the Login Screen Geo
Additional Concept Art

Tech Work

Created a Test Client that logs in 500 users and rotates them in place to load test user density in a small space
- We are zone based, but we still use some of the advantages modern zone-less/streaming games use
- For example, we gain some efficiencies by sectoring off actors that cannot possibly interact (due to distance and/or other factors)
- So 500 users spread out is easy for us; 500 users in one square meter is a workload
- Next target for efficiency tests is 1,000 users in one square meter
Support for UI & other sound implementation (with new sounds added)
First person camera view now supported for all races, with camera movement on sit/stand and melee combat strikes
Third person camera view adjusted to fit each race
"Death cam" - camera slowly pans over your corpse after you die, revealing the scene of your death
Added support for player surnames, and support for GMs to grant titles to players
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CICD) pipeline for automated linux server build and deployment to live server
Improvements to Win64 client build, and automated client build pipeline
New login screen scene tweaks and setup
Entering chat while running now automatically starts auto-run
Database migrations to increase the length of many of our identifiers so they can be specified with more intuitive naming
Fixed an issue where some dexterity values caused a combat calculation to divide by zero
Fixed an issue where offhand melee damage displayed the wrong weapon damage type

Other Stuff

We researched Print on Demand merch and integration of the shop into our website, but we’re not 100% happy with the results, so we’re going to push that for a bit.

We want to provide the best quality products, and really be proud of everything that has our name on it. Print on Demand is the easiest option for a small team like ours, because otherwise we have to front the production costs, handle fulfillment, etc…

But POD provides a quality that’s a bit below our goal of eventually creating the highest quality merch for our community.

So, we’ll keep evaluating our options, while iterating on product design.

Plus, it still feels a little weird to sell merch before the game is out.

So, with that said:

Are we being too picky?
Would you rather have something now and we can improve things as we go?
Is it lame to sell merch prior to the game being out?
Is it mean to include the teaser below? (oh, man… there’s a lot more than what’s shown in this image)

Hop into Discord and give us your thoughts and/or suggestions!

In closing

Thanks again for another fun month of streams and conversations!

Be sure to check our YouTube channel regularly for the latest streams from everyone on the team: https://www.youtube.com/c/MonstersMemories

Subscribe and share if you like what you see there.

Talk to you soon!