Jun 1, 2019

HammerHelm - Calandryll

I normally wouldn't show something this early in development and I may scrap it if I don't like it, but you all have been so great and supportive that I feel like I should let you in early on this one. A new combat system!

When I say "early", I mean really, really early. As in, I just started work on this last night. So it has a long ways to go before I'd put it in the game. The basic ideas are to make combat less predictable, while still allowing time for you to react, to create more meaningful choices in combat, to make combat more visually interesting, and most importantly, make combat more fun.

Lots of animated gifs incoming!!! ːsteamhappyː

Movement and Targeting
In this first gif you can see the "lock on" part of the system. Locking on to a monster changes its health bar to blue, letting you know you've locked on. When locked, your character will face the monster and strafing will allow you to circle the monster. Attacking a monster will automatically lock you on to it. If there are more than one monster you'll be able to cycle through them or break lock on all together to escape if you need to.

Dodge rolling breaks the lock on temporarily, allowing you to dodge to the left or right without continuing to face the monster - which would look really weird! When the dodge is ended, the system snaps you back to face the monster again so you can focus more on what the monster is doing and decide your next move.

Attacking
Attacking a monster is dynamic based on your positioning. If you're a bit far away, your character will perform a powerful attack that gets you in range quickly. If you're close, a more basic attack is selected. Note the monster reacts to getting hit and the slow-motion effect to emphasize successful hits. The reason I dodge roll back after my follow up attack is because Ratman are more likely to counter-attack after being hit. More on that later.

The monster's health bar doesn't drop because I don't have damage hooked up to this yet.

Blocking
In these next two gifs, you'll see that the monster's health bar doesn't blink before he attacks. Instead, his "wind up" before the attack is slower, giving you time to react.

Unlike in the current system, blocking requires timing. Starting your block too early or holding it and waiting for the monster to attack, will result in the monster's attack pushing past your block.

Your character plays animations for both a good block and a bad block.

Monster Dodging
Monsters aren't stupid (well ok, maybe a little!) and will attempt to block or dodge your attacks as well. In this gif, the Ratman jumps back and I miss, resulting in an attack without the slow-motion effect.

And More
This is what I have working so far. In addition to the above, monsters will also have different tendencies in combat. So Ratman might be more likely to dodge an attack and then immediately charge in with an attack of their own whereas Goblins might dodge, but then not counter right away. And Orcs may never dodge, preferring to stay stuck-in and keep the pressure on you.

Attacks (both yours and monsters') don't interrupt attacks. So timing is important if you want to avoid getting hit at the same time you hit the monster. This is where tendencies will matter. An Orc might attack with either one big attack or three smaller attacks in a row. Learning these tendencies will allow you to know when it's best to strike, dodge, or block.

I think the current combat system is fine, but I don't love it. So while I work on other stuff like more quests and finishing up the game world changes, I'll be working on this in the background. I think this new system will create a lot more variety in combat while keeping the system simple to learn and enjoyable to play Even in this very early state it already feels more fun to me, especially with removing the health bar blink and focusing on what the monster is doing instead.

My next goal with this is to finish up the prototype and then allow all of you to load into this test map and try it out! The test map would be a one-on-one fight similar to the gifs above that you could play to get a feel for the system and give me feedback and ideas if you want to. Then we can add and expand on it.

Oh and don't ask me how Brutes or Spellcasters factor into this. Haven't gotten that far... key word here is "early", remember? ːsteamhappyː

Jun 1, 2019

Patch Notes 1.10.66

Life Forge - Reborn ORPG - Life Forge

General

Houses can now hold a maximum of 250 None Daily Income Furniture,
House Deeds now show 'Max Daily Furniture' & 'Max Furniture' as a coded value,¹.¹
Furniture is unloaded correctly,
Invisible Furniture has been fixed,².¹
Corrected several grammar errors in House messages,
Removed all manually typed Furniture Limit sentences from House Deed Item Descriptions,
Furniture now shows when click-dragging in inventory,
All error messages are now White instead of Red (for visibility),
Pm's are now Pink in color,
Guild Chat is now Green in color,
PK color in Map Chat is now BrightRed in color,
Mounting in a Survival Map Type no longer tells you you're in combat,
Fixed Quest Indicators still showing for completed none repeatable Quests,
NPC Quest Indicators are now automatically applied,
NPC Quest Indicators now correctly remove when Quest they offer is completed,
Fixed an issue with Mount CoolDown Timer going crazy when the main server is rebooted,
Fixed an issue with players randomly leaving behind a clone of them selves,
Removed old code from Furniture Loading,
Can no longer /ignore Admins,
Corrected an error preventing /discord from working,

Houses

'Mansion' now has a House Image,
'Gandor House [S]' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 15, from 25,
'Gandor House [M]' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 25, from 45,
'Gandor House [L]' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 35, from 60,
'Ironstar Cave' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 30, from 50,
'Armistin Riverside' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 35, from 60,
'Armistin Oasis' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 30, from 55,
'Marken Forest' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 35, from 60,
'Marken Ruins' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 30, from 55,
'Draken Swamp'Maximum Daily Furniture is now 40, from 50,
'Firefly Forest' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 50, from 70,
'Charlin Cabin' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 40, from 60,
'Lovely Cabin' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 40, from 60,
'Haunted House' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 50, from 70,
'Mansion' Maximum Daily Furniture is now 50, from 75,
Quests
'Mine Leader' correctly has a Quest Indicator above him,
'Void Hunter' correctly has a Quest Indicator above him,

Spells/Items

'Lightening Bolt' correctly named 'Lightning Bolt',
Fixed grammar in 'Lightning Bolt',
Fixed grammar in 'Void Bag' Description,
Fixed grammar in 'Visor' Description,
Fixed 'someone's head' to 'Shaman's head',
'Smouldering' Weapons now have Weapon Arts,¹.²

Notes

¹.¹ These are seperate values, 'Max Daily Furniture' is any furniture that gives you a buff or item every day, 'Max Furniture' is everything that does not award you anything.
¹.² Each type has it's Class main Stat as Scaling, examples: 'Smouldering Sword' scales with STR, 'Smouldering Staff' scales with INT and 'Smouldering Bell' scales with WILL.
².¹ Any current invisible Furniture will still be invisible until it's fixed.

Facebook
https://www.facebook.com/LifeForgeRPG

Discord
https://discord.gg/purKsGt

Jun 1, 2019

May Progress Update! New Area! Community Monster Contest Winners!

Monster Sanctuary - Ntonisthier

Dear Project Backers,
as summer slowly settles in, it's time to show you what we've been working on in May with another monthly progress update.

2nd Round of Community Contest Winners

During the first weeks of May, the Monster Designer Backers were once again able to vote for the community Monsters that shall be featured in our game. Here are the winners of the 2nd round of our Community Monster Contest:
● 1st place: Kanko, the pipe fox Monster, by Zuty!
● 2nd place: Sycophantom, the phantasmal elephant Monster, by Missing Novice!
● And our Developers' Pick: Thanatos, the clown-masked reaper Monster, by The0neFreeMan! A close candidate that almost won the first two contests by vote and that already caught our eyes from the first contest. We like Thanatos' design, it reminds us of some of the enemies/villains of Snes RPGs, and it seems like a fitting enemy for the later areas that we've got planned for the game.

Again, we'd like to remind everyone that there are still three more contests left! A lot of Monsters this time just barely missed second place by votes, but there were also a lot of Monsters overall that we could have imagined to have in our game. Both times so far, it was a very difficult choice for us to make our Developers' Pick among so many creative Monster designs. Monster Designers can try again in our next contest that we will start some time around the Early Access release of the game (~late summer).
Together with the winners from the first Community Contest, that makes 7 community Monsters so far that will be featured in our game. If you would like to see the winners of the second round, you can view them in our Discord channel, which is open for all: Join our Discord

May Progress Update

With our Backer Beta testing phase officially concluded, we were able to fully focus on new content again:
● New area: Snowy Peaks. This area is linked to the beginning area, Mountain Path. The player will be able to enter Snowy Peaks as soon as they have gotten the Double Jump boots from Blue Caves and a Monster with the flying exploration skill (Vaero, Frosty, etc.) - meaning it's not required to explore Ancient Woods or Stronghold Dungeon first. This area will feature two large mountains that the player will be able to scale, as well as many crystalline caverns within the mountains, and an icy lake that is surrounded by myths and rumors. There will be many vertical rooms with lots of challenging jumps.

● Almost all of the rooms of Snowy Peaks have already been finished. The next test version of the game (Early Access test version) will feature two new areas: Snowy Peaks and another area that we will reveal in the future.

● New Monsters: Ice Blob, Caraglow, Aurumtail

● You may recognize Caraglow and Aurumtail from our first Community Monster contest: Caraglow was one of the winners by popularity vote, while Aurumtail was our Developers' pick. They are the first Community Monsters to be implemented into the game as new collectable Monsters. They will both be found in Snowy Peaks. Caraglow is a unique support Monster that can heal like no other Monster in the game, whereas Aurumtail will require you to build around its Mana-heavy skill kit to fully utilize him. Caraglow will be another Monster able to light up dark areas in the game, and Aurumtail will be the first Monster in the game that the player can mount to travel faster from one place to another.

● Ice Blob will be one of the common frost-themed Monsters of Snowy Peaks. It is somewhat similar to its green cousin from Mountain Path, but it has adapted to the icy climates of Snowy Peaks: It has wind- and water-element attacks, with several Chill (Debuff) synergies, and it is a very tanky Shielder as well.

● The minimap has been reworked. It now features icons for several important NPCs and places in the game (a highly requested feature), and it can now be scrolled - because the world just became too big to fit on the screen without scrolling.
● Adding new skills. Since we will be adding Tier 4 skills (Level 20+ required), we will need a lot of new Monster skills. Skill trees will also be bigger at Tier 4, meaning there will be more skills to choose from at Level 20.

That's it for May's progress update! What do you think of the residents of Snowy Peaks (that have been revealed so far)? Are you excited to explore the upcoming areas of Monster Sanctuary? Let us know in the comments!