It wouldn't be launch day in Early Access without our THIRD hotfix today ːsteamfacepalmː. We can't do 3 hotfixes a day (nor should we) but today is special, and we want to solve XAru's game freezing issue.

• Frostbite is causing problems so we have temporarily removed it from the game!

[/b] We did this by making it 20 AP therefore making it impossible to cast. Don't cast it, it'll crash yer game. More to come.

Fixed issue reported by xAru when Goblin casts stink cloud. It basically breaks the game and corrupts the save. This fix allows your save file to continue to work.

Based on feedback today, the Worg was nerfed a bit. Remember, you can always run! It's ok to save your skin! Worgs now only attack once a round and max damage is now just under 30 so you can survive 1 hit

[/list]

We'll test and investigate combat more tomorrow.

Thanks all of you for going on this adventure with us to make this game great!

Hey everyone!

Thanks so much for the strong support so early in our release! We've been getting great feedback in both Discord and on Steam, and we're already here with our first hotfix (well, second if you count the blunder of pushing an internal testing build live on release instead of the actual release build... whoops!).

Here are the fixes for this build:

• FIXED: Getting stuck in buildings
  
• FIXED: Daggerfall incorrectly bypassing armor
  
• FIXED: Running away from combat could potentially hard-lock you
  
• FIXED: Combat UI fixes
  
• FIXED: Quest log should properly show location of quest NPC's

Keep reporting any bugs you encounter, either via the forums here on Steam, in our Discord or via our in-game bug reporter (best solution so we can get logs of your build and the errors).

Again, thanks so much for both your support and for enjoying the game!

Come join us as we get ready to push the button to release the game to Early Access on Steam! We will be going live at 2:45pm Eastern, with the official "pushing of the release button" happening at 3pm Eastern:

https://www.twitch.tv/archmagerises/

Fan feedback has always been vital to our development process, and when it came to redesigning combat for Early Access release it was no different (check out this whole discussion on our forums here: Explanation of how Casting Works

We took that feedback and made a lot of changes to combat in for Early Access Release, so let’s dive right in!

INTRODUCING ARA

As we were playing the game, we realized that the current STAMINA system was broken. Players were entering fights at varying levels of stamina which completely dictates the difficulty of the combat encounter. At 100%, fights were typically trivial. At 10%, they were downright impossible.

We needed a solution that balances the scales more for each encounter, while simultaneously allowing players to think strategically about how to fight the battle.

To solve this, we introduced a new resource that replaces STAMINA in combat — ARA.

ARA is a replenish-able resource that recovers each round. For example, players will begin a combat encounter with a pool of 12 with the ability to recover up to 8 per round. This means you can cast more ARA-expensive spells at the top of the encounter, and then have to manage your usage throughout each round, similar to ACTION POINTS.

Your max & recoverable ARA will be upgradeable over time.



While this system won’t be perfect in the beginning, it will also allows us to more finely tune combat correctly, including being able to better balance spells.

We will still reflect combat’s effect on player stamina — as you encounter and combat enemies, those encounters will cost you STAMINA (after combat is completed), but your overworld STAMINA won’t affect your ability to defend yourself in combat. When that gets depleted, combat begins to take a toll on your WELLBEING (which will be a very central mechanic further in development).

REVISIONS TO ACTION POINTS (AP)

In our playthroughs, we realized that our AP system was slightly broken. The idea was supposed to be that you could bank any unused action points to be used on your next turn.

In reality, you could pass your turn infinitely and (assuming you survive each round) bank those unused points until you AP bar was all the way off the screen. This was not only a broken system, but it also made balancing spells more difficult.

Our solution to this was to increase the AP pool from 6 to 8, and cap the bankable points to 12. This will again allow us to better balance spells and attacks, and give players another tactical choice to make during combat.



SPELL POWER

When a player casts a spell, they are given the option to adjust how powerfully to cast it. While we really like this mechanic, it wasn’t worth it and lead to little thought when it came to combat — just hit the monster with exactly the power needed to kill the enemy. And with the current spell stats, everything had the exact same power curve, making Magic Missile overpowered and the best attacking spell.

In order to fix this problem, we have overhauled this system. Initially players will only have one power option for casting spells, but later you can learn higher education from the conclave to upcast or downcast a spells. Each spell will also have it’s own base stats and power curve, giving them more unique identities along the power-to-cost curve.

We’ve focused on tuning 10 core spells and removed all others.

No more throwing spells at the wall and seeing what sticks! Spells will be added one at a time as we are able to test and balance them.

REVAMPED ARMOR SYSTEM

Let’s face it. All of our mages are weak, with low health, and armor essentially did nothing to help that. As combat existed in the pre-release, you basically needed to cast a shield spell in round one if you expected an attack to occur which made ambushes a total nightmare.

We changed that by developing a new armor system. We took a lot of inspiration from discussion on the Steam Forums and a bit from Divinity 2. Now armor is a temporary health bar on its own. With armor equipped, you now get actual protection and you won’t take health damage until your armor has been reduced to 0.



Players now have access to 2 different types of armor: magical and physical. All attacks will now fall into one of those categories and deplete the corresponding armor. Soon clothes can be enchanted with magical or physical armor and it always replenishes after a fight. Spell shields will now provide one or the other, or possibly both.

Speaking of ambushes, now instead of all of the monsters attacking immediately (and likely killing the player), the player can go first but with reduced AP. You can think of it similar to a reaction in TTRPGs, giving you a chance to quickly react and maybe put up a shield.

ENEMIES

Nothing is more boring and tedious than exploring a dungeon and getting into a fight in every room against a single bandit. Plus, the enemies in our game were quite brainless, yet another reason combat encounters became very mechanical and not as much fun as they could be. The primary reason for that — we told them to go easy on you and they’ve been holding back all of their signature moves!

Well that ends in the new Early Access release build. Enemy units now have passive abilities that help give each unit a more distinct feel, plus they each have more moves that can combo and trigger off one another. Once you are in combat, enemies should now dynamically introduce new problems for you as the fight progresses.

And speaking of armor, enemies also have access to the same new armor system as you, creating situations where your go-to spell combos might not be as effective as you had hoped. You’ll need to think on your feet a lot more and get more creative in your attacks.



We also reduced frequency of attacks, but with our new changes, those fights will be a lot more dangerous and the number of foes in each encounter will increase.

To add to these changes, we’ve also introduced flanking — this means enemies in the left and rightmost squares adjacent to the player will deal extra damage. We hope this will introduce mid-fight issues where even a basic wolf might become deadly if not carefully managed. This should also vastly improve the usefulness of move and obstacle creation spells.

CONCLUSION

This wraps up all of the major changes coming to our combat system in the Early Access release. We’ll be continuing to fine-tune these systems as we get more feedback and progress through our roadmap.

Let us know which of these new systems you are looking forward to trying out the most, or find the most interesting!

Last week's build has an issue with being unable to defeat the guards in the Demo Quest final battle. They get to Zero HP but won't drop and combat won't end.
This hotfix fixes that issue.

This is the final update to the Demo and Game before release to Early Access April 23 2023.

Our improved QA process is working. We delayed this build from yesterday because we found serious issues. Then today we did a full test sweep and found several serious issues. We fixed them and had to work a little late, but here it is!

I'll say it like Apple does about their phones every product announcement "This is the best build of Archmage Rises to date."

1. Improved: You can manually save the game at any point (not combat) by pressing F5. Unfortunately it looked like the game crashed while it froze up and saved your game. We made it much nicer now with a popup and log entry, etc. It’s real pro now. Real pro.
   
2. Improved: save file upgraders work from 14.1.19 to 14.1.22, so you should be able to play your worlds and saves in this build.
   
3. Improved: Added Error Codes to the game. This allows us to know roughly where the problem is. You currently don’t see them, but when you submit errors through the game we get them and it automatically flags them for us in our Jira tool.
   
4. Fixed: a massive issue with monsters appearing on the map but you couldn’t interact with them. This was due to an icon duplication problem (complicated). The reason you couldn’t interact with them was because it wasn’t real, it was just an icon.
   
5. Trail rations no longer free! And there was much rejoicing! This was due to the pricing algorithm being based on how much wellbeing an item provides you. A food item or nights stay that boosts your wellbeing should be more valuable. Unfortunately negative wellbeing was tanking the value making it zero. The pricing is now only for +positive well being.
   
6. Improved: New UI slider for transferring quantities of things (gold gifting). Try to restrain your enthusiasm.
   
7. Improved: Increased NPCs knowing where someone or a town is from 33->50%
   
8. Improved: Increased "knowledgeable" NPCs (Innkeeper, Mayor, Merchant) knowing where something is to 75%
   
9. Removed: Bandits temporarily gone from the game. They're too buggy and ill tempered.
   
10. Improved: Resource placement logic and values. It was too rare to have resources (metal, stone, wood) and when you did get them, there was a TON of them (like 100+ metal) turning the game into Resource Hunter Rises. Now roughly 30% of tiles have between 1-3 resources BUT the amount of resources is 3-6. This will later be improved to be skilled base, allowing you to come back and revisit places with a higher skill level. Sort of like in ancient times they could only mine gold at the surface, but with better technique could go deeper and get more later.
    
11. Improved: [Dungeons] When at a staircase room, pressing Shift+W will let you go upstairs/downstairs without needing to click on the staircase. This is helpful in buggy situations where the staircase did not get placed or simply isn't there is no click event to be triggered
    
12. Improved: There were too many books being dropped in dungeons, switched it to 1 per library room.

• Fixed: Flow tiles (rivers, lava) no longer move around on the map because they are properly cached. Wow! That only took forever to fix!
  
• Fixed random number generation which could have led to super subtle hard to find bugs
  
• Fixed: Dungeon loot algorithm. One day we’ll get it right.
  
• Fixed: Combat issue when player destroyed some non-essential thing like a rock
  
• Fixed: Issue with saving and quitting while autosave is running
  
• Fixed: Goblins were apparently Humans! Put them back in their place.
  
• Fixed: Birthday wasn’t actually working on your.. um… birthday. Oops.
  
• Fixed: Ambush enemies wouldn’t die.
  
• Fixed: Super weird dungeon movement/teleporting when clicking on a door.
  
• Fixed: Quests with time limits weren’t loading correctly from save. Now they do!
  
• Fixed: Quests getting nulled out and showing a dummy quest of Life Aspiration. You should never see this again, and if you do it’s a big problem.
  
• Fixed: Town music and ambient sounds now transition properly between scenes and locations. No more cacophony hurting yer ears!
  
• Fixed: Removed ridiculous startup things in the player log, like “the battlefield has gained Fishing from unknown source”.
  
• Fixed: Various combat bugs. We’re working on a new combat system for Early Access so these are BandAids (TM).

• Demo Quest Final Battle Issues: Conclave ending works. Selfish ending works. Renegade option has issue when conclave ambush battle occurs the guards in it hit 0 HP and don't die. That's not new, but the work around of console command "win.combat" failed to end the combat
  
• Skills like Perception are definitely handed out too often and you can quickly boost your stealth skill into the stratosphere
  
• Fishing doesn't work
  
• Light spell icon gets lost loading a save game
  
• Player log text disappears on save/load
  
• Market - prices don’t change as you buy and sell
  
• Relationships decay very quickly making it almost pointless to try to maintain one. That’s pretty dumb, we still need to fix it.
  
• Clicking a weapon in inventory doesn’t equip it. BUT you just click a hand and it will show all equipable weapons, or drag it over.
  
• Dungeons aren’t spawning locked doors, making levers useless and no keys being placed to find. They’re supposed to be funner!
  
• Most spells need better tuning and balancing
  
• Building a tower is supposed to come with a default layout, but it is completely missing, meaning you have to build from scratch everything, placing doors and a bedroom, floors, etc. Quite tedious.
  
• NPCs don’t send letters to you. Even if you are friends. They just aren’t that into you.
  
• Can’t do the final battle twice in the same game session. Have to quit the game completely, then it will spawn second time. Sorry speedrunners!

Hey everyone!

We said it was coming and now it's finally here -- you can now actually get the artifact needed to complete the demo quest which was preventing you from progressing on the game.

As Maui said: "You're welcome!" (sorry Disney, please don't shut us down...)

Plus, we crushed a lot of other important pesky bugs:

1. Added: Ability to save games manually - Press F5 to quicksave at any time - this is for Kaylo7, Lord Blade, and others who were asking for multiple saves with such a buggy game
   
2. Added: New load save game screen. Shows valuable data like file save date/time, character name, world name, and total wealth (not just your current gold but TOTAL WEALTH)
   
3. Improved: The Worlds and Save Files list is now newest to oldest - eventually we come around to doing it right!
   
4. Fixed: Unable to get the artifact in the final room. We no longer put it in a chest, we just put it in your inventory. Even if your inventory is full you still get the artifact. Everyone will always get the artifact! Yay!
   
5. Fixed: Encounter system should no longer lock up now in a bad state, allowing the player to continue playing. This was the source of many many bugs
[/b]
6. Fixed: Quest phases breaking resulting in Soft Lock and unable to move on map
   
7. Fixed: Soft Lock which caused menus to disappear
   
8. Fixed: Game crashes after sea travel
   
9. Fixed: Money disappearing after you add it to tower treasury
   
10. Fixed: Error when casting magic on a town from the map (hex casting)
    
11. Fixed: Errors fighting guards defending a town after you attacked it with spells from the map (hex casting)
    
12. Fixed: Playing a second life skips character creation
    
13. Fixed: Equipping armor now works the same as equipping weapons
    
14. Fixed: World generation crash while generating history
    
15. Fixed: World Gen screen could be clicked through, triggering items on Main Menu screen and just making a big mess of the game
    
16. Fixed: Player note map icons were failing to load from a save file, they should show up now
    
17. Fixed: Settings menu button highlights were not working properly
    
18. Fixed: Selling draft animals now works. It actually checks for creature’s inventory instead of player’s animal count :facepalm
    
19. Fixed: Clicking leave in a building and being sent all the way out of town
    
20. Fixed: Issue with game locking up when saving generated world after world generation
    
21. Fixed: reduced town music volumes for better balance
    
22. Fixed: Bug notification pop-up not working
    
23. Fixed: Game crashing when settings file doesn’t exist
    
24. Fixed: Broken choice in caravan encounter
    
25. Fixed: some inventory item movement errors
    
26. Fixed: Killing an NPC in a building led to bad recursive errors
    
27. Fixed: Various errors loading save files
    
28. Added more error tracking for dungeon issues, hopefully this will help in the future.
    
29. Removed: Email section to bug reporter: with the time delay from reporting an issue to when we work on it, it just isn't of practical use

Known Issues:

• Conclave ending does not fire the final boss fight, however the quest is complete and players can freely do what they want
  
• The guards in the final battle won't die. We thought we fixed it, but testing has proven we haven't. If you encounter this here is a work around:
  Open the console with ~
  Type in Combat.Win
  You will win the combat and can continue on with your life.
  I realize that is a crappy solve to this bug, but that's the best we can do for today.

We've also conjured up our new Discord server here if you'd like to join us: https://discord.gg/DUE2NYPrcQ

And good news, we can officially announce our Early Access release date: Archmage Rises is officially going to Early Access on Monday April 17, 2023 (only a few weeks away)!

We'll have another build for you next week so keep those bug reports coming (or not, hopefully you won't experience too many more bugs 😅).

In the last week we've been able to make 46 lovely fixes. We intend to do updates on thursdays, but introduced 3 major bugs and needed to fix them today before getting the build out.

(I seem to have forgotten to increment the build number - whatever, i'm not going to make a new build just for that)

1. Added a new "There was an error" prompt to the game so you know if something potentially bad happened. See notes below.
   
2. Fixed massive issue with autosaving which broke the game (oops) and made bad saves (double oops)
   
3. Fixed saving of Quest data to save nonrepeatable quest triggers that have already been triggered: like fighting the goblins, or the renegade conversation
   
4. Fixed Frozen creatures freezing combat (ironic)
   
5. Fixed losing spell upgrades on loading the game
   
6. Fixed dungeon exit teleport
   
7. Fixed dungeon cannot interact with trapped items, some levers, and some objects
   
8. Fixed stuck in dungeon (light issue but no prompt said so)
   
9. Fixed crash following a monster to their lair
   
10. Fixed phantom towns, where once you got there there was no town (there is no spoon!)
    
11. Fixed bad town directions. No one found it realistic and funny. (Because it wasn't, it was a bug.)
    
12. Greatly improved player logging to help us see what happened before a bug
    
13. Fixed items having wrong icons (or changing icons) as you play
    
14. Fixed unable to sell items to market
    
15. Fixed unable to equip a helmet
    
16. Fixed dragging items to toolbar deleting it
    
17. Fixed dungeon generating only one room on second floor
    
18. Fixed disappearing text issue in menus
    
19. Updated demo quest text: it said someone was in a chapel but they were usually in in inn or wandering around town
    
20. Fixed an issue where household members being empty caused getting wealth level to fail, resulting in broken UI.
    
21. Fixed a bug where the guards in a boss fight were being generated with broken characters.
    
22. Fix bugs with Hex Map icons and loading into the Hex Map
    
23. Disabled Polymorph spell, it isn't implemented fully and created lots of problems
    
24. Fixed bugs with Hex Map display not loading properly if you start the game there (duplicate icons, missing player icon)
    
25. Fixes an issue that prevented quest npcs from being removed when they die.
    
26. Fixed mage tower inventory not saving, losing your gold. Your precious precious gold!
    
27. Fixed quests picking towns over 40 hexes away
    
28. Fixed when booking passage the destination town not having a port so you couldn't return
    
29. Fixed Wellbeing not showing decimal value
    
30. Removed armor and trait buffs from showing on the buff bar
    
31. Fixed buffs not showing after a load
    
32. Fixed saving for player notes in the Notes tab
    
33. Fixed duration on Drunk and Hangover buffs, now 24 HOURS not 24 DAYS
    
34. Fixed quest final quest non-interactable
    
35. Fixed potential issues with empty treasure chests
    
36. Combat: Added back row to valid places to use Force Push
    
37. Updated missing status icons like prone, stuck, and injuries like eye loss
    
38. Adjusted position of event log, so it's readable and text doesn't get cut off
    
39. Fixed item duplication error in enchanting window
    
40. Prevent ability to add same item to multiple inventory slots
    
41. Fixed autoeat attempting to eat the same food more times than the quantity of the food in the inventory.
    
42. Improved combat logic for determining turn end for the player and for enemies
    
43. Fixed error entering towns
    
44. Fixed torch initialize properly
    
45. Fixed various loading issues
    
46. Various combat fixes

With these above fixes we reached our goal of "Zero Critical Bugs". Sure more came in, but only 10ish, which is manageable.

I'm sure this new feature will annoy some players so I want to start off by saying you can turn it off in the options.

It is a systems based, data driven, simulator game. Meaning an error in town can affect behavior of levers in a dungeon. Crazy, I know. Unity by default hides errors from the player, which usually makes sense, but is brutal for this kind of game. So when we get a bug report about combat it could be due to an error in conversation with an NPC on the road. Really gnarly stuff to troubleshoot and slows us down.

Even worse, something terrible can happen which will invalidate your game, but you keep playing along for another 20+ minutes only to find out it crashes AND your save is corrupted.

We now inform you when an error occurs so you know if your game world state is potentially invalid. This at least saves you from putting more time into a game that may be corrupted.
Obviously this doesn't FIX the corruption issue, but at least lets you know something is wrong. You can then decide to play at your own risk.

Clicking the error allows you to immediately submit it with your player log and we can see what happened. We have enhanced our player logs to be much more verbose so in theory we can find issues faster and resolve them.

We have two classifications for bugs. Really bad ones will tell you you should probably not continue playing. Sorry. I don't know what else to do here.

Not so bad errors we warn you but tell you you can probably continue playing and it should be ok. Should being the operative word.

This is a necessary step to improving quality and reducing bug fix times. Some people will hate it and that's ok, you can turn it off in options and go right back to playing the game as it was before.

Possibly interesting note: When we playtest the game we always see the error prompts even if turned off in options. This means when non-programmer people test the game they can raise the issue immediately. This is how we were missing some issues. Hopefully we'll catch more now internally.

Reports came in last night of frozen enemies (by magic) in combat not ending the enemies phase. This soft locks the game.

We don't want to ruin anyone's weekend, so here is a fix!ːhappystar2022ː

Enjoy your weekend!

We're focused on bug fixing, prioritizing it over features right now, and we're almost at Zero Bugs (see below for explanation).

Today's beautiful menu of fixes include:

• Fixed losing all XP on loading the game ːsteamfacepalmː
  
• Greatly improved Save File Loading reliability
  
• Fixed sometimes can't fight enemies on the world map after completing quest
  
• Fixed sometimes resting at Inn crashed game
  
• Fixed sometimes reloading game loads empty dungeon and yer stuck
  
• Fixed dropping boots on the ground changed their icon to body armor in inventory
  
• Fixed resurgence of enemies not appearing in battle
  
• Fixed Net not working right - just took it out of the game for now. That counts as a fix, right?! ːtongueː
  
• Fixed 10 foot pole not detecting and triggering traps. Now it will save your hide. Please don't name or fall in love with your pole, it will break after use. I don't want you to be sad.
  
• Fixed hot bar keybinds Resetting after each encounter. Don't get too attached to it though because we have a new UI coming which doesn't have a hot bar anymore. That was so 2014.
  
• Fixed spells sometimes pull up an incorrect spell stamina window

In software development there is an important milestone where all serious* bugs are resolved. It doesn't necessarily mean more won't be reported, but finally at some point we got them all. It also means the dev team is ahead of the testing and bug reports. It means the software is quality and stable.
If you'd like to know more about Zero Bug and Bounce you can here:
https://www.lee-dohm.com/2013/08/14/what-does-zbb-mean/

* = we define serious as "reported by multiple users". Something like missing icons on buffs is typically not treated as serious (it is a graphical glitch)... it's embarrassing, it says we're a bunch of amateurs, but it isn't serious ːwinter2019happyyulː like a crash or feature not working.

We're pushing hard to get to Zero Serious Bugs by Monday. We had 32, three days, and average about 10 a day.
Yesterday we did 9
Today we did 9
We have 14 left
So Zero Bug Monday is looking realistic.

Once we get to Zero Bugs we can start working on features again and looking forward to the Early Access release. Team is excited to turn this corner!