October Development Update

Greetings Wizards,

In preparation for the Rogue Wizards alpha we’ve spent most of October getting some of those core services in the game that are needed for a public test like crash reporting, in game feedback, and the uploading of save games and screenshots to our bug tracking server. Later this month we’ll start letting the first group of players try out the early alpha version and will continue to let more and more people play in batches during the months ahead.

We’ve also got some concept for the backer Wizard Tower to vote on. Head over to the forum post to vote for your favorite version of the tower.

We also wanted to give you a sneak peak of the Cavern environment we’ve been building, we’re not quite done with it yet but are liking how different it feels from the other environments already.

Cavern Environment Work in Progress

Much time was spent in October getting the first Rift of Fire looking special with the boss “Gaderian” fully animated walking around his arena. Gaderian can only do basic melee attack for now but we’ll really be pushing on his boss battle and powers in a few months.

Council Member Guderian in the Rift of Fire

Development Highlights

Here’s the development highlights and details from the past month. Want to talk about these changes or other aspects of the game, then visit us in the online forums.

Major Features and Changes:

– Crash reporting now working with screenshots, save game files and logs on all platforms
– Hooked up Unity analytics and some simple events in preparation for alpha
– Council member boss “elemental rift” levels now have a swirling background effect present at all times
– Blink now has a much larger range, but will only take the player to previously known locations
– Cosmic rift background now scales tiles and alphas the actors during the reveal/hide effect
– Gaderian Boss is now colored and functional in his boss arena. He only has melee attacks still tho.
– Guild wizard bosses now have a death ceremony with dialog and effects
– Counter damage is now visualized with in world text and only occurs with close range melee damage
– The lance now gives up to three free forward attacks when you move
– Items now sell for even less gold to merchants
– Champions now have more health
– Setup proper music for Cavern environment
– Set unique music for Rift of Fire

Art:

– Guild Wizard bosses animated
– Experimental work on volcano background

Code and Framework:

– Reworked the item compare summary UI to just show iconic colored better or worse arrows instead of damage/defense delta numbers
– After reading new quest dialog at the tavern, the tavern interact UI is automatically opened.
– The Rift of Fire quest can now actually be completed
– You get booty after killing Gaderian as well as the 3rd journal scroll
– Color sets have been moved from LevelSpec to LevelChain prefabs
– Deleted unnecessary experimental environment in Assets/Environment/Themes/Lava
– QuestKillPrototype now has a BossPrefab to use for an explicit boss, if null a normal enemy will be turned into a champion
– Created level framework for all 6 boss rifts
– Set all necessary level and quest prototype stuff for all 6 boss rifts to actually work with just placeholder normal enemies
– Added “Vortex Color” to the color sets … the boss rifts are colored using that color
– Fixed crash in some Usable components that need to cache component values via Awake() rather than Start() in the case they are accessed before they become active in the scene and Start() is called
– Added 10 location names for cavern quests
– Tweaked level up particle texture
– The tavern UI now reads “Merrol’s” tavern instead of the old Styssa
– Blackout zones around gateways now also prevent deco population as they already did with enemy population
– Added a few color sets for the cavern environment
– Increased the level required for access all elemental story dungeons
– Reworked the storyline logic so that only one story state will advance at a time, and if the player currently fulfills a prerequisite for a later state, it will not be activated until the states before it have been completed
– Increased max value for attribute points available property incase players horde them
– Followers are ignored by taps/clicks when they are part of your party, but they are still considered for mouse over events so they can be seen in the targeting/combat display
– Added sanity check to cell update and removed redundant call to SetActive() to try and catch a hidden cell that is active bug
– Sized hud modifier icon for experience boost
– Thiefling can now only steal from players since NPCs have no logic to pickup an item they lost and re-equip it
– Fixed knockback not working from a melee skill (golems) if no damage was done … now knockback tries to occur as long as the target did not die and did not block
– The lance weapon now gives up to 3 extra attacks during forward movement at any or all of the 3 tiles in front of the player instead of just the 1 tile that was straight ahead
– Increased gold multipliers for item qualities
– Slightly tuned affix gold values
– Counter damage is now visualized with in world text
– Counter damage now plays a unique damage sound effect when damage occurs
– Counter damage now only occurs when taking melee damage at close range
– Fixed color of enchanted items so it’s orange again
– Enchantment shrines can now enchant non-magic items (making them magic, yay!)
– Changed how actor tooltip delays are implemented, inventory prototypes can now opt-in for the delay with a checkbox so that we have a delay only for the general, storage, and vendor inventories … all other actor tooltips are fast with no delay.

Conclusion

This update outlines significant progress being made towards the Rogue Wizards alpha rollout and highlights important features and changes introduced in October.