ageofaincrad

Patreon Devlog #3: October 2021

Published: October 13th 2021, 10:55:28 pm

Hello Patrons!

Thank you for helping us out throughout last month as always. September was difficult and busy in more ways than one, but as always we made enormous progress.

While we’re still at the intro, we need to change the rules of our raffles a tiny bit. Patreon notified us that running raffles is against their terms of service. They consider it gambling and that’s banned around here, so we have to swap the rules around.

Starting this month (OCTOBER), the winner will not be eligible at random, but every Patron will be guaranteed a custom art piece as long as they donated a total worth of the Legend rank ($50)!

Pure Legend rank Patrons will take priority lane though!

The only down-side here is that we can’t guarantee when exactly that will happen - it will depend on when in time you subscribed to our Patreon, as well as where on the list you are. We’ll be going by priority based on who became a Patreon first and following it one-by-one, swapping to the higher tier ranks when someone pops in there. If you are a Patreon at the Master (25$) rank for 2 months in a row for example, you automatically get eligible for custom art as well. 5 months for 10$ each? Qualifies as well.

Patrons can skip their turn or push it off for a different month if they like as well - we can push you down the ladder whenever you’d like and someone else can take your place for that month.

Naturally, we’re aware that after some time we could get to a point where we can’t offer that reward anymore due to the sheer amount of Patrons and the time it would take to pump out the art. If that happens, we will offer different rewards - most likely directly related to the game at that point. All Patrons, new and old, will get to put their hands on those rewards!

Come what may, we’ll make it worth your generosity. While we’re still small, we’ll be continuing as per usual! Regarding last month’s contest, we’d like to congratulate Patron Steak for his win. Below you can see what the art looked like.

As for this month, our lucky winner is Zai! We will contact you soon for details on your art piece. You’re also free to jump the gun and message us on Discord or Patreon first. We already gave you a slight ping in the Discord as well :)

With the intro out of the way, let's tackle this month's update!

Visuals:

The wolves are 95% done! Some animations remain to be done, but they aren't crucial so we have shifted to work on the next custom mob/pet hybrid.

This one will be a **massive** secret and surprise to most people, so while we will show you some silhouettes down the line (mostly here on Patreon) nobody else will get to see them before you find them in-game. It's our team mascot and we're quite proud of it. After existing as a concept for years we'll finally be able to give it a voice and animations. Quite a milestone, dare we say.

Showcase: Wolves (October 2021) - YouTube

The rocks we showcased a while ago have been finished, but we went a step further. Our lead artist has also been set up with full access to the game repository and engine, so she's also helping out with level design now. Instead of pre-made meshes, she now implements custom models for everything directly into the game. This means more performance, faster iteration times, way better fitting models more than anything. 

She already re-did all the cliffs manually and it looks really breathtaking. Take a look:

UI and Game Features:

We finally got around to take care of swapping the fonts - we unified visuals for fonts in the entire game for the UI that will carry us throughout the upcoming demo.

Mailboxes can now be accessed via actual in-game mailboxes, not just UI buttons. The plan is to let you read mail everywhere, but only pick up packages/currency at courier-stores. This might change if players deem it annoying, but we'll leave it up to your feedback.

Player-driven stores have been added. If you want to make some money, you can set up shop anywhere and sell whatever you want. Especially useful for people with specializations - not everyone is patient enough to deal with crafting, so you can sell your crafted weapons at exorbitant prices. All the prices are up to you of course, so squeeze people as much as you can.

Initial logic for letting NPCs sell stuff for you (as in, employ an NPC to sell your stuff and mail you the money afterwards) is implemented, but we need a lot of testing to fine tune this.

Also as always, lots of animation behavior improvements for players and mobs.

Mobs:

1. Added 2 big wolf bosses. Rashun and his Deranged friend got a make-over.
2. Added 2 additional mounts, for a total of 4.
3. Added a dog variant based on the wolves.
4. Added new wolf variations, putting us at a total of 10 separate woofer entities.
5. Various visual improvements to the textures of existing mobs.

In the game currently we have:

- NPC Dog;
- Another NPC Dog;
- Nightmare Wolf (Quest related);
- Greenwood Wolves (Male and Female);
- Redwood Wolves (Male and Female);
- BOSS: Rashun - Corrupt variant;
- Corrupt Wolves;
- BOSS: Deranged Wolf;
- Hungry Wolves;
- Greenwood Pet Wolves (Male and Female);
- Redwood Pet Wolves (Male and Female);
- Greenwood Mount Wolves (Male and Female);
- Redwood Mount Wolves (Male and Female);

We consider the wolves more or less done right now. We still need a few animations for them, mostly idle variations and for quests, but it's otherwise finished.

Quite a bit of material to work with. That’s also just our in-house mobs. Former game clients had a lot of wildlife like birds, squirrels, fish and rabbits everywhere. We decided to remove them and just focus on showing our own work for now though.

Combat:

The Boss behavior for Rashun and the Deranged wolf (a specific side-boss) has been adjusted, similarly with the smaller wolf variants. The bosses have received additional skills that summon wolves with a howl and apply status effects under a certain level.

More mechanics and behavior will be worked on more deeply once we get the custom AI solutions integrated.

Lots of smaller bugs with the current AI behavior has been ironed out. A few bugs still remain (like wolves clipping while running, really hard to fix for the time being but still on the map).

As for Player-related combat, 4 full combat styles have been set up with timings, sound effects, visual effects and general values. They are currently being reviewed by the internal tester to squeeze some more improvements out of it.

The styles are as follows: Hand-to-Hand combat (using Knuckles/Gauntlets), Rapier (Rapier), Katana (Katana, Nodachi), Greatsword (Greatsword).

Hand-to-Hand Combat Early Prototype (October 2021) - YouTube

Greatsword Combat Early Prototype (October 2021) - YouTube

Katana Combat Early Prototype (October 2021) - YouTube

Rapier Early Prototype (October 2021) - YouTube

Please excuse the background noise - forgot to turn the Microphone off while recording and it was too late to re-do all the videos.

The Greatsword looks the least impressive for now, but the logic is in. Each combat style comes with 10-11 abilities and can be leveled up to 20 during the demo. THIS IS NOT BALANCED YET! We have not started working on the values as this requires a lot of math which is not our focus as of yet. The focus was on timings, feeling and visuals for the time being.

Keep in mind these are early versions. Down the line the leg movement will be separated from the arm motions and we'll be unlocking movement while casting most abilities, allowing you to freely maneuver while combat. This sadly involves a lot of animator refactoring, which we decided against for the time being for the sake of the demo.

What's left before we can start balancing? Visual effects. Each combat style will have different visuals and colors attached to it, right now all styles leave the same trails and visual effects behind - which we're not happy with.

Skills:

Added basic Herbalism, but due to the nature of HOW basic it is currently, we will not go in-depth on it. Once improvements are done, we’ll talk about it next month before the demo.

Apart from that, a new Skill called Synthesis has been implemented. It will allow you to synthesize shards and crystals with other shards (and crystals!).

For the demo, you'll be able to synthesize them together to create mounts or teleportation crystals. It's more of a showcase for now, mounts will be later on separated into the breeding skill.

If you wonder what the usefulness of that skill is, teleportation crystals will be a big part of traveling initially and having a bunch with you will be quite helpful. The main way to create them will be crafting, so they will come in handy.

Questing:

Main Storyline quests have all been tested and confirmed working. Next and final check-up will be doing one last full-run of all the quests in the line once we finish rebuilding our dungeons.

Multiple Side-quests have been added. We have repeatable hunt quests, NPC-story driven quests, some quests where you need to interact with things. You know, the fun kind!

We want to both test and showcase various implementations we have right now with this.

Something we haven't been able to figure out yet is "daily" quests and letting you accept/finish a quest in a given time cycle. We'll have to work on that in the coming months still, but for now not a priority - repeatable ones will do the trick for now.

Q&A!

We received a total of 15 questions this time.

Each being the same question, yet again.

“wen deom?”

The demo is still perfectly on track. The main engine dev is going to no-life for 2 weeks straight thanks to getting vacation at the beginning of November. The time will be taken to quickly squeeze in as much remaining content and fixes as possible as well as add all the content our artist makes. The demo is currently marked for mid-November, latest end of November, unless something goes awry. We'll be notifying everyone as time goes on.

Things that are still to be done:
- A few more quests and testing currently implemented ones;
- Improve Herbalism;
- The secret mob (model, visual variants, animations, engine setup, pet and enemy setup);
- Vegetation rework (some flowers, wheat, tree retextures and bushes);
- Level design finishing touches (adding props and cliffs here and there);
- Combat improvements (unlocking movement during most abilities, right now controls auto-disable which feels really stiff);
- Combat balancing (this might not make the cut, lots of math and the game is constantly changing in that regard);
- UI Improvements for dealing with combat pets;
- Revisiting crafting (blacksmithing mostly) and adding recipes, a recipe store-front;
- Dedicated Synthesis teacher;
- Improvements to aura combat abilities;
- Setting up weapon visuals and crafting recipes to upgrade them into stronger variants;
- Sound modifications;
- Music zone mapping for the demo areas;
- New music implementations;
- Further mob AI improvements;

Endword:

Apart from all the above updates, the Roadmap has also been updated again for October 2021. Take a look here: http://roadmap.age-of-aincrad.com/

Thank you for yet another month of supporting us. We’re getting really close to the demo release and hope you’re as excited to check it out as we are making it. We’ll do our best to make you all proud.

Till next time!