Fixed bug causing some Bosses, such as Orion and Emberwing or Temple Guardian, to appear invisible and not move, meaning players were relying on attack visuals to defeat them.
This week in AdventureQuest 3D players can purchase the Starlight Paladin class skin. Harness the power of Starlight and wield it as a weapon to shatter your foes or a bulwark to protect your allies! The Starlight Paladin class skin can be purchased from Artix in Battleon at in the Shadow of the Wind Village. The class skin features a star-themed twist on the classic Paladin’s skills and matches the Blinding Starlight of Destiny and this month’s promo item, The Starlight Longsword, perfectly!
Return to the Deep
This week will also bring additional drops to the Deep Grotto dungeon. All of the bosses within the dungeon now have a chance to drop pieces of the Clawgrah set. This rare set features devastating claws as weapons that will allow you to rip and tear through any of your foes!
Spellforged Icons
We’re also updating the icons of the game and introducing some brand-new ones. Spellforged will have a unique color and gem on their icon to indicate they have a Spellforged effect on them. This will allow players to look at their inventory and know right away which gear has effects and which doesn’t.
Balance Changes
We’ve made some changes to Oracle’s cross-skill as it’s kind of the best cross-skill in the game right now and lets you just live through everything. We’ve increased its cooldown and will be monitoring the effects of these changes.
Oracle Class:
Cosmic Reverberation: Cooldown increased from 12 Seconds to 20
Misc Changes
Lumenion has had issues dealing with ranged classes such as the Pirate where he can’t retaliate. Changes have been made to address that.
Enemies within the Deep Grotto have been further tweaked to smooth out the experience.
New Promo Items: Starlight Longsword
Our July promo item is the Empowered Starlight Longsword! To get this starstruck blade, just purchase any package in the upgrade shop, now with 50% extra Dragon Crystals on select packages. For those that get one of the Guardian upgrade packages, you will also get the Starlight Longsword at no extra cost.
Battle on, Clarion, Artix, and the AdventureQuest 3D Team
Having formed a rough understanding of what the game should look like, I began the prototyping stage. It took me less than a week working on evenings to make the first playable version of the game, and it included the following features:
field generation. It incorporated Scrabble letter set distribution with its time-proven balance.
tracking the completed words downward in columns and from left to right in rows. Several problems arose immediately:
firstly, randomly generated field contained finished words, so the game was playing itself without any help from the player;
secondly, multiple intersecting words could appear (the question was, which word should the game choose and count?).
moving letters across the field. It seemed simple but happened to be challenging as the initially conceived tile-matching mechanics implied swaps of adjacent elements. In our case, it greatly complicated the long words composing process, when someone was trying to do it by moving letters from one edge of the field to another one.
checking the field for the appearance of new words after each move. In addition to the above problems, there was another one: the letters the player preserves for future could be destroyed while several other moves were made.
completed words destruction.
addition of new letters in place of the destroyed ones. And again, we face the problem regarding the game playing itself.
a scoring system for the letters destroyed. Grateful acknowledgements to Scrabble for the scoring system proven over time.
local leaderboards.
But despite all problems and flaws in initial design, the prototype was playable and the gaming process could bring some satisfaction. But the problems were real and I had to be solved! Some of them were purely technical and turned into bugs, while others required a bit of work on the design.
At first glance, the problem regarding intersecting words did not seem to be a problem at all: chose the one that brings greater score, and you're good to go. But from a tactical perspective, the player may preserve some letters for the next move by destroying irrelevant ones within less high-scored words. To address this, I have introduced an additional step that allows the player to resolve disputed situations at their discretion, with the ability to disable this step in the settings.
The issue regarding moving letters across the field seemed more serious because the tile-matching mechanics did not work properly in our case! Surely, some kind of time-stop mode prohibiting the game from reading the words until all shifts of the current move are done, could have been introduced. But then it would be easier to abandon the idea of shifts and make new words by clicking the letters across the field. Apparently, our concept, at the very least, required the ability to drag the letters from one side of the filed to another one. It does not resolve the problem completely, but reduces the number of moves needed to compose a long word. When implementing the concept, I have tested the waters and came to the conclusion that by dragging letters from one edge of the field to another one, we also move all other letters on the way (they are moved as if we moved them one by one). That is, with the right skill and strategy, we can change the entire field in one move. And this solves our problem completely! Of course, there's much less of tile-matching mechanics left, but a bunch of other, more tactical elements, appear.
But in a word game, the gameplay is only half the battle. The core of the game is words, so we need a dictionary to work with. It was pretty easy to find the database to run some tests. However, it contained a lot of words that do not fit the category of common nouns in their singular nominative case. Additionally, it contained duplicate words and symbols from different languages left after digitization. Perhaps, today one can use ChatGPT to form the dictionary that meets such requirements, but back then, all the questions had to be solved manually. One of the tasks was to make the game that supports multiple languages, but unfortunately, my knowledge in this area was not extensive. So, at the outset, I needed to add at least two languages: Russian and English, and provide the ability to add new languages in future. To form a Russian dictionary, I looked towards two dictionaries – The Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language and The Ozhegov's Russian Language Dictionary. But there is almost a hundred years' difference between them, and the Dahl's Dictionary contains too many outdated words. Therefore, I limited myself to the Ozhegov's Dictionary. One more reason to limit myself was the necessity to select words manually, filtering out definitions and etc., and leaving only nouns that meet the requirements. My friends helped me with this work in their spare time. When dealing with one's native language, it's easier to detect common nouns in their singular nominative case. However, the situation with my English dictionary was worse. I have found an English dictionary similar to the Ozhegov's one, with plenty of words and descriptions, but it contained too many unfamiliar words, and it was exhausting to search for their translation in online services.
Time passed, and the work had to be done... The progress was slow and the task began to become tedious. What had to be done? That’s the point – we should let machines work for us! And yet back then ChatGPT was just a prototype, our fairly routine task had a certain sequence, which meant it could be automated! Dictionary parsing follows a simple cycle:
take a text line,
split it into words,
remove the words that have lready been added to the dictionary,
remove the words that have already been deemed unsuitable,
the remaining words are either added to the dictionary or marked as unsuitable,
take the next text line.
It doesn't seem like something very complicated, but when it comes to analyzing several thousands of words, it appears to be a torment. So, I have written a program that executes this cycle. Therefore, human interaction has been reduced to sorting the words from the screen into two categories - into the dictionary or into the bin. It seemed to be better and faster, but defining the words’ category was still time-consuming. And this could not have been automated; because the final choice was still up to the human. To ease the workload even more, I have added hyperlinks to the program, so I could find translations and word meanings in case the word turned out to be unfamiliar. These hyperlinks simply opened the necessary link in a search engine or translator, but there was no need to copy/paste /type the text manually each time I bumped into a new word. The work moved from a dead center and gained momentum! It was still time consuming, but it didn’t seem so unfeasible anymore - in a couple of weeks (not a big deal, yeah?) a small English dictionary was completed! And not only one, but two of them (I mean Russian and English). But I didn’t feel like incorporating some other languages thus far.
When forming a dictionary, I find this prosses to provide similar experiences to those experienced when playing games, and gained some practical utility as it helped me in learning and understanding the language. And the thought occurred to me: What if I add a small educational element to the game? Players may experience the same desire to find out the meaning or translation of the word they have formed. Since sometimes you remember a word you heard somewhere, but you have never searched for its meaning. And I want to be clear here: I failed to eliminate automatic destruction of completed words. Unfortunately, people haven't learned to read minds yet, and the field is checked for composed words after each move. I didn't opt to add a full-fledged educational mode allowing to see the translation of a word into a target language and its definition directly in the game, because I am not my worst enemy. But it was easy to incorporate hyperlinks - the mechanism I used in a program forming a dictionary. Apparently, the result couldn't be called a full-fledged educational mode, but it eliminated the need to open the browser and manually type the word. Automation it was! The option to choose the target language and the preferable translator, as well as the search engine, was added to the game settings. And this is how a couple of dozen lines of code have opened the door to the world of educational games.
Then it was time to beef up the project a bit!
Firstly, we need to reward the player. Besides, we have already introduced a scoring system and the leaderboards. A quick brainstorming session resulted in a simple list of bonuses: for composing long words, for the number of words destroyed per turn, for the whole row or the whole column destruction, for destroying some part of the field (20%, 40%, ect.), for the whole field destruction. Ultimately, all of them were introduced into the game, because the more, the merrier: the player should be appreciated, inspired and praised.
Secondly, we should provide the player an opportunity to suffer. We have already incorporated a basic mechanics that worked well, and so it was time to add some modifiers that would make the gameplay harder. So, in addition to the existing "meditative" mode, where nothing restricts or spurs the player, we have added two other modes: step-by-step mode and limited time mode. The names of the modes are self-explanatory: they harness simple mechanics of limitations to enhance the gameplay variety. But this variety appeared to be unclaimed within the players, because they didn’t want to be additionally stressed in a game that by default demands from them to search for the words in a pile of letters and move the latter across the entire field, considering the best trajectory! Limited time mode designed to fuel tension didn't work it well either. So, unfortunately, both additional modes have not gained much popularity within the players. But if the player wanted to suffer, the game would provide this opportunity to him!
Thirdly, the player needs a set of tasks that form the game progression. But without understanding, whether the player is learning a language or just playing for fun, it's hard to assess his progress correctly, if at all possible. That brought an idea to add some other modes that would introduce an element of progression. I wanted to make the player learn something new (if he wanted it) and monitor his progress (welcome back to the educational mode). At first, I thought about Morse code learning mode, but I had to put this idea off as drawing dots and dashes in small square tiles designed for letters would not be an easy task, and the result would not be aesthetics. But the idea was so captivating, albeit deviating from the original concept of "advanced tile-matching word game" to an educational project, that it was soon followed by two other ideas: to incorporate Braille learning mode that focuses on a tactile writing system used by people who are visually impaired and Sign language learning mode that is mainly used by hearing impaired people. At first, both modes completely replicated the functionality of the standard one, with letters substituted (as if another natural language was introduced). But if you are unfamiliar with the language, it's impossible to make up the words in it. And so, it was time to recall why had I started all this? Because I wanted progression! And both systems fit this aim perfectly, with the letters being opened gradually after several mini-quests on making the words containing the last opened letter of chosen mode are completed. Again, it can’t be called a full-fledged educational mode, but when new letters are opened, new neural paths are formed. So, it's a win, yet it is small one.
And then, with the game having gained the weight, it was time to define its appearance.
Hello Everyone! We're finally introducing our new project called Dawn Of Fear! - One survival horror project which the player Experience an intense survival horror journey as a investigative agent in a dark and cursed village. The quest for a leader has never been so hindered.
5 MINUTES OF GAMEPLAY
The game is still in work in progress, so a lot of things will be changed.
GAME HIGHLIGHTS
- First Person Action Shooter.
In this possessed village, there are a lot of cult followers, so stay safe!
- Huge Variety of Enemies.
From normal possessed villagers to some side bosses to the main enemies.
- Open world exploration with side puzzles (For each chapter)
For each chapter, the game will contain at least one open world scene including: - Side Bosses - Treasures - Optional Loot
RELEASING PLANS
We plan to release the game with 1 chapter only. The other chapters will be available by DLC, so expect the price to be low for each part.
We'll discuss later about events so tune in our X/discord server here:
MAP EDITOR V.1 Tighter Movement based off feedback General bug fixes Bridge Map - Faster FPS General UI fixes/enhancments Map Rotation - Press "M" at End Game Score (TDM Only ATM) to open "Host" controls You will be able to switch maps using the Host controls now and take the party with you
MAP EDITOR:
To share your map:
Method 1: Goto games Steam Local Directory - Type or Find using "Slot_01.sav" - Open File Location Example: Saved\SaveGames
Copy Save Slots 1-3 (depending on which slot is your custom map) Upload to a cloud service or email to friend Have your friend place the save file in the same directory & overwrite it
Method 2: In Editor, place the Tiles the same as your friends or screenshot and send to other users They will then do the same Tile formations on their side & Save to the same Slot number
** It is important to replace the same Slot_0*.sav in order to play the same map online
This is a work in progress Editor. More options to come
Fixed the weird things seen on oboeshoestwos video. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to make Telluria known. We are a very small team and we work hard for this dream project. The story is solid, the gameplay will be. Thanks again.
So here is our second weekly update of July and it was a creature update so here are a few things that we have got up to-!
Today is another creature -themed developer update. This week's update is a little shorter all things considered that our sound team is assisting our programmers to implement new sounds into the test build, and SadEch is on her long waited vacation to release some steam.
To share some of our progress: we are currently due to releasing one of our largest updates to our test build yet, so the the test build server is going to be offline for a few days until we have perfected and given it more polish. We are going to be squishing some bugs and troubleshooting on our own end before we release our hungry Patreons to do a bigger wave of bug hunting.
NEW CREATURE CONCEPT: The Forest Grazer!
The Forest Grazer a temperate forest subspecies of Woodcracker, it is a large-medium herbivore and second smallest of the Woodcracker -subspecies. It lives only in temperate forests, feeding on ferns, moss, mushrooms and smaller bushes, such as blueberry bushes, which have softer branches. They are not able to chew on wood in a way that their Redwood cousins can. It's beak and teeth are unable to crack hard wood, that's why Forest Grazers are chewing in a way that is similar to the moose.
Forest Gazer are a relatively intelligent animal. They thrive in moderate temperatures, but won't die in cooler or warmer areas. It can be a good mount for human players, able to carry heavy load for a long distances. This subspecies is the most moderate of all Woodcracker -subspecies, it is neither the strongest, nor the weakest. It is way faster than bigger members of Woodcracker family, but much slower than desert variant.
They are one of the loudest subspecies, with their skin above beak (bright red/pink part) being able to inflate and deflate a little bit, adding interesting tunes to their calls. It can be compared to humpback whale songs.
COMPLETED: Celevrix Dragon 3D Model Sheet~
Our leading concept artist Vitarius has completed another 3D model sheet, this time it is for another dragon, our special rolly boy Celevrix. This marks the 12 our of 15 dragon model sheets completed, meaning there is 3 more left to add into the 3D queue!
"What is a model sheet?" We create something we call a 3D model sheet, this is to create multiple perspectives of the creature to give correct body proportions and guidelines for our 3D artists (people who create the actual models) to better understand the creature and how it might move. This speeds up the development of the creature greatly and of course, gives our artists less headache.
Wraith's 3D Model in High Quality!
Our beloved Flow has has completed the polish of the textures of our fearsome AI creature: Wraith! This monstrosity is for the time being going to be set aside as our skin team is still prioritising and assisting in the development of the new skin customisation for the test build. As you will soon see below!
There is a turnaround however i cannot post it here so head over to our discord to take a look-!!
NEW IMPLEMENTED Kirin Skins!
Our skin team has been busy with some skinning. Our leading skin artist @SinfulVox has been finishing up two (2) brand new skins. These will be customisable in the test build and later tech demo. Which one is your favourite?
The Royal purple skin, inspires a little bit of that of a darkened sky with vague lightning pattern.
From the little bit of a more exotic stand: the Ignis skin mimics that of a molten magma, with a dark obsidian-ish skin with lava bursting through from beneath.
Speaking of the upcoming skin customisation, here is a small teaser of us developers performing a small test on closed branch. Disclaimer that the bright colours will not be staying, we have not yet restricted the colour picking to more less saturated and natural-ish themes. However, there will be quite the range of colours to choose from. Below we have used Icy Crown for the testing. Vulgan and Kirin will be following suit very soon!
DUSTRIUS 3D MODEL IN PROGRESS!
We have begun the creation of our 6th dragon. Yes, you heard it correctly, SIXTH dragon has entered the 3D modelling stage. Flow has been granted a go-ahead to begin base sculpt of our beloved rocket punching herbivore, Dustrius!
Disclaimer this is a VERY EARLY sculpting stage! No details have been added yet.
So that's everything this week , we will be doing these every Tuesday from now on , but if you want them early head over to our discord-!
An update, less than a month after the previous one, what happened?! :D I took some time to work on a few highly requested QoL features and thought it would be a good idea to release them as soon as they are ready and not in a few months with the next big update.
Safe Mode
The most requested feature since the initial release is finally there! When the safe mode is enabled you can't do any illegal action. No risk to steal an item or assault a villager if you misclick! There is a little icon on the right on your toolbar that shows your current state.
You can toggle it by pressing "Left Alt" on your keyboard or "A" on your controller.
Quest Abandonment
Some of you abandon by accident the main quest or initiation quests and there were no way to start them again. Those quests can no longer be abandoned.
For the other quests, there is now a confirmation window to make sure you don't abandon them by accident.
Map Tooltip
There was some confusion between the name of places and the name of basements. I modified the quest texts in the previous update to mitigate this issue. In this update, I modified the map tooltip to show the name of the place below the name of the basement for more clarity.
Other Changes
Bugfix: Pointer position was incorrectly placed when navigating in the UI with the controller
Bugfix: Some texts were not properly formatted in the quest journal
Improvement: Names of villagers should no longer be too similar
Improvement: Better path following algorithms
What's Next?
I continue the work on the World Generation update! See the previous post for more info on it.
If you face any issue or have any feedback, feel free to come on the Steam forum, the Discord server or send me an email.
