Archmage Rises - the play-how-you-want mage simulator - now available on Early Access

[Jarmaro]

I have been busy with life recently, sorry for no updates (for anyoen that cares, lol).

Important news:
1. Legacy update. The devs are working on making the game goal-oriented, at least to some degree. New statistics, rival characters and numbers to follow your character's journey and measure their impact on the world. Not terribly gameplay enchancing, but I believe it will add a lot to the game as it is.

Legacy

Legacy Mini-Update Details

What is the Point To Playing Archmage Rises?
In 1995 I was 17 and snuck into my first R rated movie. My 18 year old friend bought me a ticket so we could see Braveheart. From that day until now, I am awestruck by the amazing line
“Every man dies, not every man really lives.”

I love sandbox games. But I also want to feel clear progress towards a goal. The whole premise of this game is:
You have one life to live? What will you do with it?

The features in this update were planned on our roadmap to come closer to 1.0. Yet, in playing the game, reading reviews and forums, I decided we need to pull some of it forward. First, to prepare for some of the other things we are building, and second to provide a better experience NOW.

Monday, September 25 11am EST
Christmas is coming early boys and girls! You will be able to enjoy this content Sep 25.

Legacy: One New Stat to Rule Them All!
“All that matters are the things that remain.”
The simulator tracks a lot of things about the player and the world. We're distilling all this data into one stat easily compared against rivals and historical mages in the world.

The core design of the game is along
three core paths: Renown, Wealth, and Power
. We are now displaying these as stats. Your Legacy stat is derived from how well you perform in the three paths. Each is weighted differently and we will likely change the weighting as we go along. The design allows you to pursue all three, or just focus on one. It's your choice how you spend your life.

You can directly increase your Legacy with new items and actions. These are in addition to the 3 new stats. Things like:

• Purchasing property for a Mage Tower
• Displaying rare items like Art or Books in your mage tower
• Clearing out a Monster Lair
• Eradicating a Monster Race

New Stat: Renown
Renown represents your popularity and respect in the world.
Renown is based on a new Town stat
Esteem
, which shows what the general sentiment of the citizens is towards you. It takes a lot more deeds to get noticed in a city than in a hamlet.

Esteem can and will gate certain features in a town. What people think of you matters.

New Stat: Wealth
Wealth is made up of two stats:

Prestige
- Prestige is financial stature in the world. In our world the super sports cars, mega-yacht, priceless paintings, and jewlery. Prestige is wealth people can see. It's the reason rich people have cars where the doors swing upwards (Russ Hanneman, Silicon Valley)

Net Worth
- the more you invest in the world, the higher your net worth and so your Wealth stat will grow. Grow your legacy by hording and investing every gold coin like Scrooge McDuck!

New Stat: Power
Power is how learned you are at life, magic, and manipulating the forces of the universe.
Every point of Spell School XP earned contributes to your Power stat.
Every point in skills (like Athletics, Persuasion, Scholarship) contributes to your power.

XP spent learning new spells and upgrades still counts, don't save em!

Rivals
These are NPCs competing with you in the world in Renown, Wealth, and Power.

You meet three NPCs in school during character creation and they are set loose in the world along with you at the same time, becoming your Rivals.

We are starting with the basics with them for now, they are not fully featured yet, but we will build from here.

We simulate rivals in the background. Every 3 months you will get an updated notification of how your rivals are doing.

If you don't care for this, there is an option to turn off the notification. Happily ignore them.

You can also view the last information you got about rivals on the new character sheet tab:

Eventually we’ll add a way to get more frequent updates by talking to NPCs or having spies watch them, etc.

You can find and meet your Rivals in game, just like any other NPC.

Greatest of All Time (GOAT)
The world of Vaelun has many historically significant mages spread across different eras. We've assembled a list of the top 20 famous (or infamous) mages from which to compare yourself. Each one of these mages has a back story and in future updates you will be able to hunt down their unique artifacts.

A new tab on the character sheet shows the rank of the mages and where you stand:

New Major Quest: Mabren's Tower
Nolan and team have been hard at work adding new features to our quest tech and tools. We're very proud to announce the culmination of all this work a new major quest: Mabren's Tower.

The quest is a race against a rival to make a major discovery. We think it will show off some of the power of our tech and we hope you enjoy it!

Backwards Compatibility
Now that I've wrapped my head around the fact we are making a 50hr per run rogue game, you should see how important preserving your play progress is in this update.

The new features will just start working on an old save file. It's a little better from a new fresh start, but you are not forced to do so.

• For any items already accumulated they won't have bonuses to prestige or legacy. But new ones that are supposed to, will.
• An old save won't have rivals from school, but we will generate you 3 new ones and the system will start from there.
• The new major quest will be findable in a preexisting world. It's just a little easier and more natural in a new life.

Finally, we will be utilizing the beta branch to test out the new update before it goes live Sep 25. More on that when we approach the release date.

I hope you enjoy playing as much as we have enjoyed making this for you. Thank you for spending your time in Vaelun with us!

2. New update incoming, with the first implementation of Legacy and sneakpeek at the UI post combat rewrite. Looks good to me. Definitely not as amateurish as before.

New Update

Weekly Developer Update: Sept 18

First: Oops!
Last week we put out a patch 0.2.7 on Friday. It was also our first week doing Mac releases in a long while. When we published the Mac build through the Steam back end, we accidentally blew away the PC patch which reverted people to 0.2.6 over the weekend.

Only triple facepalm can communicate how I feel.

Good news is we saw exactly what we did wrong and it won’t happen again.

Priority Fixes
For this week's patch we're focusing on:

1. Reports of crashing when loading a save game. We are looking through the error logs right now to try and figure it out. This has been dragging on because we haven’t been able to reproduce it yet. Appreciate all those reporting it, eventually we’ll find the commonality and fix it!
2. Adding Town Name at the end of tower when teleporting. This is much requested.
3. The Skill progress bars to actually work!

Patch is coming out Thursday.

Legacy is coming in Sep 25!
It’s mostly working, so we have announced the details of it and the release date of next week Monday!

See the features coming in this post

It’s all hands on deck testing and polishing this mini-update to get it out in time: Zach, Tyler, Jessi, Phil, Mark, Nolan, Thomas.

Combat Rewrite
New combat with better design, balance, and more spells, will be releasing sometime after Legacy update.

Josh and Jonathan are leading the programming, with Michel, James, and Mark assisting.

Rubi, working on the VFX, is off this week because… (see below)

The combat rewrite includes many adjacent updates including spell progression. Here is a WIP mockup of the new Spell Research tab.

Double Weddings
Our tiny team of 11 has two weddings and they are this coming Sat Sep 23! I don’t know how they both chose the same day, but both Rubi (VFX) and Zach (programming) are getting married. No, not to each other, to different people in different states.

Rubi will be off for a month while Zach is back to work next week.

Thank you for your time and attention to our little game. We are 11 people passionate about independent game development who hope Unity doesn’t end up crushing us! :-p

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.archmagerises.com/news/2023/9/25/mini-update-2a-legacy-now-released

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.archmagerises.com/news/2023/10/16/9zfsl78i1460yjxpvhuc64grhgii51

 

[Jarmaro]

I haven't posted in a while, but Archmage Rises keeps getting updated, in smaller or bigger ways. Recently, the main developer has been posting on the topic of their random quest generation and the work they've been doing on it. Interesting stuff, especially because I don't think many games to date has gone so far into that direction.

Dynamic Quest Generation #1: Inspiration & First Steps
Dynamic Quest Gen #2: Basic Story Outlines
Dynamic Quests #3: Making Quest Tasks Make Sense

I'm impressed by the amount of passion and hard work that goes into making the quest generator something substantial. All I can say I have my hopes up to see it work well, either in the next year or a few down the line.

 

[Infinitron]

Updated trailer:

 

[Jarmaro]

Weekly Dev Update: Nov 27, 2023

Update 2B: Combat Rewrite

It’s snowing outside, so this Elmore Dragonlance pic inspired by Dragons of Winter Night felt right.

Combat has been in development for 6+ months. 90% of our resources are focused on it: Mark, Josh, Michel, Tyler, Zach, Jonathan, Jessi, Nolan, and Rubi.

Combat is coming along and the team is greatly encouraged. It’s really cool to see new spells being created by text JSON files like this.

A rewarding side effect of this data-driven approach is the quick iteration time on changing and reloading data without having to rebuild the game, saving about 5 minutes per testing cycle.

I wish I had a cool video or screenshot to show but this will have to suffice. It is an example of data driven enemy tooltips.

(Yes I know that isn’t a skeleton, it’s all test data at this point)

Dynamic Quests
Nolan requested more specificity to how the text is chosen and this required a rewrite of the core dialogue selection system. More details to come in tomorrow’s detailed update.

The first part of Dynamic Quest generation is coming as part of Update #3 Exploration.

UI Redesign

We’ve had some good meetings on how we can redo the HUD of the game. The above is just one mockup of many but it proves a couple of points which seem solid:

• Bust out of the hard frame and allow UI elements to ‘float’ in different zones of the screen
• Spell selection is bottom center
• Focus attention when speaking with an NPC
• The player portrait will always be on display and show damage by filling with red (like Pillars, Baldur’s Gate)

Jessi and Phil are heading up our UI redesign as part of roadmap Update #3 Exploration.

Priority Tasks

• DeLastOne suggested highlighting Knowledge Subjects directly in the dialogue text. Good idea. We’re trying to implement it.
• 2009dh pointed out with inventory being precious, provide the option not to pickup loot in dungeons when it appears.

Other

We’re currently doing 360 reviews for our 10 employees.

At a minimum, a company should do formal reviews once a year. A really good company will do them twice a year. I’ve put them off for 18 months marking me as a bad leader.

WHY DO THEM AT ALL?
How does a person know if they are doing a good job? Meeting expectations?

A comprehensive 360 review gathers feedback from people above (supervisor), beside (co-workers), and below (direct reports) to give a full picture of someone’s performance.

As you work in ‘close proximity’ with someone there are great things you notice and little annoyances that accrue. When do you ever get a chance to share these? Stand-up and project meetings aren’t the right time. Even praise can be hard to share. The words “I’m proud of you.” can sound weird in the wrong context or moment.

What if they are difficult or awkward topics? Like farting too much in the office?

An actual issue I had to address with a programmer at my software company. He didn’t last.

So a purposeful one-on-one time to share the teams thoughts and encouragement in improvements is necessary to healthy team growth.

WHY DO THEM NOW?
I put off doing them because there just never seems to be an opportune time:

• Jan - Feb we were crunching to get the Demo out for Next fest.
• Mar - Apr we were getting out the launch of the game to Early Access
• May - Aug we were crunching on Content Updates
• Sep - now we’ve been scrambling to get Combat Rewrite done

So it’s happening now. It’s a big time investment for myself, meaning I don’t have as much time for other things like Dynamic Quests or staying up to date on the forums. But I will get back on the forums soon.

That said, if you would like to be involved in the process, go ahead and post on Steam. I’ve already incorporated previous posts in some people’s reviews. Phil and I are the most public facing team members, but if you want to shout out some audio, narrative, gameplay, or art I’ll make sure it gets to the right person.
MORE ABOUT THIS GAME

 

[Jarmaro]

New Combat for a New Year

New Combat is coming Jan 19 2024

It has to be Good
There is an adage in video games “Games are late once, but bad forever.” We started on NEW Combat in March. Recently, we were pushing hard to get it done before Christmas. For you! For us! Especially the guys who have been on it for 9 months. But we just can’t build, test, tune, and release it in that time. After all this time and waiting I sense it has to be good! So we’re giving ourselves enough time to hopefully get it right and not kill ourselves over Christmas.

With that out of the way, let's jump into a quick overview of some of the things that is coming with the new Combat Update!

Interesting, Thoughtful, Strategic Combat

We’ve rebuilt every spell from the ground up with a new paradigm, system and UX. Combat now asks a multitude of interesting questions for which there are many possible choices.

Five Full Schools of magic for a total of 30 New Spells
– Each school has been rebuilt from the ground up to have it's own identity and flavor. Preexisting spells have been remade new. When and which spell to cast matters! Each school of roughly 6 spells is equally valid and valuable. Play your mage fantasy however you want.

Magic Research & Progression System
– This whole new system uses XP gained from combat, research, and experimentation to unlock new spells.

We will be sharing more details of each spell school over the coming weeks leading up to launch.

New Mechanics

• Ara - Adjustments to the Ara pool system, including managing your Ara (Mana) resource across turns. Unused Ara now carries over across turns.
• Action Points - increase by 1 per round (like Hearthstone) up to 8, opening up more options latter in battle
• Armor - We removed the two kinds of armor (physical and magical) from monsters, now enemies just have HP and resistances

Enemies
We’ve completely revised our four existing races: Spiders, Wolves, Skeletons, and Goblins. Now we are happy to introduce a new race:

Crocodons.
Burrowed deep beneath the earth, the crocodons have hibernated some 2,000 years. As temperatures approach those of the years before the Frost, the crocodons stir from their long slumber…

Save Files
Maintaining your hero's progress is super important to us. Yet, we completely redid equipment. What to do? Our solution is to refund the gold value of any existing equipment you have, teleport you to the starter town, and allow you to buy new equipment from the shops. The old equipment doesn't easily translate to the new unfortunately.

Also, because of how world generation works, crocodons will only appear in new games, not existing save games.

We will maintain the latest build before Combat releases as a new Legacy branch for those of you who might not be ready to make the switch yet.

That's what we're sharing for now, but we'll release more details as we get closer to release.

What Questions Do You Have?
Phil (Community Manager) and Mark (Combat Lead Designer) will be recording a Q&A / AMA about combat. Post your questions here and we’ll answer them in the video!

 

[Haba]

This is the longest running bankruptcy case since Lehman brothers.

 

[Jarmaro]

Dev Priorities: Dec 11, 2023

Before we jump into today's update, got some exciting news! We received word over the weekend that we made the shortlist of
IndieDB's Top 100 Indie Games of 2023
, so a huge thanks to all of you who jumped on and nominated us!

Now is the voting round, and our chance to nab the 2023 Indie Game of the Year award and we'd love your support! You can cast your vote for us here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises



Update 2B: NEW Combat

WIP on NEW Combat.

We set a date! New Combat is coming Jan 19!

Behind the scenes it took three days of work and super long meetings to finally set a reasonable publish date. Mark kept reminding us “I’d love to get it out soon too! But we need time to play, test, and refine it before it goes out.” Finally I just asked for a date he’d be comfortable hitting. This is how we arrived at the 19th. The most tested and balanced work we’ve ever done. Will it be perfect? Nope! But it will be good.

Some details in the screenshot:

• Spells are now data driven from tiny little JSON legos (combatons) all defining what the spell is and does: how it applies damage, does it apply a status effect and if so how?, how it affects neighboring spots. A standard spell has about 7 combatons, more complex ones could be 15.
• The casting power bar is back, but now per school, representing player mastery in that spell school. It is unlocked through our new School Progression system (not a quest).
• New monster race of Crocodons is coming as part of this combat update.
• New cast box, method of casting, and targeting. The UX is improved
• New tooltip system. We had to, as it is now all data driven from tiny little combatons.
• Ara numbers are much larger. We’re still experimenting with the right numbers.
• We will post info on Ice School later this week.

Combat is basically everyone’s focus.

Weekly Patch Priorities
I caught up reading the Steam forums last week since I was swamped doing reviews. It is important to me: If you take the time to say something about Archmage Rises, I will make the time to read it. Most of the time I will respond. Based on the feedback I saw these are priorities for this week:

• Ashpeef has a crashing save file we are going to solve.
• Phileosophos brought up an issue with NPC directions to things. People say ‘East’ but it is more South than East. Super misleading. We’re investigating
• TakeMyLunch wants the ability to turn off the Rivals. We’re looking into a simple way to do this.

Currently Phil and D2 aren’t on the critical path for Combat, so we think we can do these. But it might change.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

It’s snowing outside, so this Elmore Dragonlance pic inspired by Dragons of Winter Night felt right.

That illustration is the cover of Dragonlance adventure module DL6 Dragons of Ice:

 

[Jarmaro]

Introducing - Ice Magic

As we get closer to the release of the Combat Update we'll be sharing some info about each school of magic. Today we wanted to talk about the School of Ice Magic:

What is an Ice Mage like in the new Archmage Combat?
Cold, Hard, Calculating.

The core gameplay behind our Ice Mage is mastery through controlling adversaries, primarily through target prioritization and measured spellcasting.

Most ice-based spells, in addition to dealing ice damage, apply a stacking debuff called
Chilled. This debuff builds up on an enemy, eventually Freezing them in place.

Once Frozen,

• Enemies become locked down; they can’t move or attack for a turn or two.
• The next Physical Attack shatters the frozen effect and deals excessive extra damage.

The allows players to pull off devastating hits on frozen enemies by mixing in weapon attacks like a Battle Mage...

Or cleverly leveraging a spell that deals physical damage, such as our re-imagined Ice Lance.

We're knee deep in snow testing and tuning this school's spells. Just yesterday some changed some single to multi-target. What about targeting one enemy but adding debuffs to neighbors? It's changing every day as we find the sweet spot. Sweet, like maple syrup on freshly fallen snow. Try it, it's delicious!

As of today, here are some of the confirmed spells you'll be able to learn:

• Frost Bolt:
  Fling a frigid bolt of pure winter at the enemy.
• Ice Lance:
  Pierce your frozen foe with a mighty shard of ice.
• Sleet:
  Drive your foes before you with a relentless onslaught of sleet.
• Frostburn:
  Smother your adversaries beneath a deadly shroud of frost.

We'll have even more details diving deeper into the magic of an Ice Mage as we get closer to release.

What do you most want to see in the new school of ice magic? Let us know in the comments!

PS: If you haven't yet, we'd love for you to vote for us for the Indie Game of the Year Award! You can cast your vote here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/archmage-rises

 

[Jarmaro]

Introducing - Fire Magic

What is a Fire Mage like in the new Archmage Combat?
Powerful and Furious.

Fire Mage gameplay is a fury of escalating risk that can pay off with the rewards of near-limitless fire power (pun intended).

As a Fire Mage, you become more deadly through a stacking buff system called Embers which you gain after casting certain fire spells. Each Embers buff increases the strength of your fire magic, making each attack much stronger.

Embers, while very powerful, also come with a cost: the heat from those embers deals minor fire damage yourself between combat rounds. While trivial to start, the escalating heat damage from the stacking layers of Embers can quickly out of hand, leading to some interesting gameplay choices.

Luckily, Fire Mages can also mitigate this growing risk by casting certain powerful spells, such as Pyre and Emberstorm, which consume embers to deal a large chunk of damage all at once.

Choosing when to increase your growing power further or cashing out in a blaze of glory separates aspiring fire mages from true flame masters. But be careful, because those who play with fire also tend to get burned.

Here are a few of the upcoming fire spells you will be able to learn as a fire mage:

• Singe
  - Loose a swift gout of flame upon your adversary.
• Inferno
  - Blaze a path of smoldering ruin through the foe.
• Fireball
  - Call up a raging mass of flame and hurl it upon your enemy.
• Pyre
  - Immolate your enemy beneath a heap of burning coals.
• Emberstorm
  - Scatter the flaming remnants of your wrath across the battlefield.
• Flame Shield
  - Wreath yourself in flames that lash out at your attackers of their own accord.
• Fire Charge
  - Stoke your battle-fury until your very touch engulfs your weapons in fire.
• Scorch
  - Blast the battlefield with the searing heat of your anger.

We'll have even more details diving deeper into the magic of an Fire Mage as we get closer to release.

What do you most want to see in the new school of fire magic? Let us know in the comments!

 

[Jarmaro]

Weekly Dev Update: Jan 8

NEW Combat coming Jan 19
Next week we release NEW combat. Something we’ve put a ton of effort into and hope you enjoy!

Here is an internal WIP video one of the programmers shared to show certain things working. It excited me to see how far we’ve come, so I’m sharing it with you too. Don’t take it as promises of any particular feature, just that it is better combat.

• Last week, we did a full audit test of the game to see how broken it is. I expected 99 bugs but it was only 36. We’ve already managed to fix many of them. We’re performing another full test today to see how shippable it is.
• One of the reasons we couldn’t ship until Jan is we have to do three passes on all the spell schools. We’re just finishing our second design pass today, then embarking on pass three. This is when the numbers and timing really get tuned for each spell. So far, on schedule!

There is a new spell progression system. Here is a WIP example of how we’re really trying to celebrate the level up.




Migrating Your Progress to 0.2.100
I’ve been asked several times “Will my progress be saved across versions during Early Access?”

My answer is “Yes. As best we can, it is a priority.”

Here is a line directly from our feature documentation

We need to preserve progress. Players can’t be told to just restart. They have to choose (opt in) to restart.

This is one of those times where we’re doing our best to preserve your progress, given massive massive changes to the underlying structure of the game.

1. All the spells are new, even if they have the same name. We will be refunding all spell XP so you can rebuy your spells.
2. The spell progression system is totally different with new buffs/rewards for hitting new ranks in a school. Spell XP will be refunded.
3. With a new system comes new XP costs, there just isn’t an easy way to map them. So you may have had 7 ranks in Fire before but now only have 2 ranks. But those 2 ranks are more powerful than the old 7.
4. Equipment (weapons, armor, etc.) have also changed drastically and function differently. We will refund the gold value of all equipment so you can buy new equipment.
5. Given the above, that means you will be naked and unequipped in the world… if your save file was in a dungeon and just about to go into battle, that’s real sucky. So we’re going to transport you to A) Your tower. OR, if you don’t have one, the starter town. Sorry if that isn’t ideal for you, it’s the safest thing we can do that works for everyone’s situation.
6. The new enemy race of Crocodons won’t appear in any previously generated worlds or save files.
   To experience them, you have to generate a NEW world.

We’re making best efforts here. I’m putting a programmer on this task today and it will take several days to pull this off. But if that isn’t sufficient for you, we will keep a Previous Build Branch on Steam. (Let’s call it “Archmage Classic” OK, lousy WoW joke.) So you can decide when you want to play the new version.

To be super ultra clear on this point:
We are publishing the new version of the game to the default Steam branch, meaning everyone will get it. You have to opt into the ‘classic’ branch so as to retain the current version.

After saying alllllll that, the new version is best experienced in a new world and new game because the changes start right from character creation.

Better NPC Dialogue
If the above wasn’t enough, Nolan is still cackling madly to himself as he works on an improved version of NPC dialogue. NPCs will be more aware of you, things you’ve done, and previous conversations. Things like this:

"Welcome, welcome." Bertram Bottom is complacently washing a bucket half-full of tankards and plates. He glances up in annoyance. "Brave of you to carry a dagger as your primary weapon. Most people see it as a last resort."

This is part of the new Dynamic Quest system, but will be coming before it is released in Update #3 Exploration.

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/506480/view/7460842316027496219

 

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/506480/view/3982938039522263260

Combat Update Beta Release

Hey everyone!

We're getting really close to the launch of the new Combat Update we've been working hard at for the past little while. This is just a quick update to let you know that tomorrow we are planning to release a Beta version of combat earlier on in the day for those of you who want to jump in a little bit early and preview the new update before we launch it publicly later on in the day. We are doing this so that we can hopefully catch some more last might bugs that we may have missed, and would love your help in finding before we fully release the new combat to the wild.

If you'd like to get in on the beta release, be sure to switch your Archmage Rises' branch on Steam from "None" to "beta - External Beta Testing" so that you will be able to get the new update when it hits the beta branch.

I know you're going to ask us when to expect the update to release, and while I don't know 100% when it will get released, we're aiming for around a noon EST release for the beta and around 5pm EST for the public release. These are ballparks, so it's possible these timeframes may change...

As usual, I (Phil) will be available in Discord if you have any questions about the update or want to get more live updates on the progress of the release tomorrow

PS: If you do download the new combat update early, we'd love your bug reports! We'll be continuing to polish the update right up until the public release, so the more early feedback we can get, the better! Thanks for your help and patience

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

"New x system"
I really wish they stopped advertising each iteration of their alpha systems as the next big thing.

 

[Jarmaro]

Archmage Rises is Reborn with NEW Combat System!
Today we are very proud to release our BIGGEST UPDATE EVER with a NEW Combat system. It changes almost every aspect of the game.

Major Highlights:

• All new combat with FIVE unique, full featured, spell schools, totaling 52 new spells!
• All new weapons, equipment, and protection system. Even magically charge your weapons!
• All new spell progression and learning system. Get learning bonuses and affinities.
• All monsters completely revamped, with all new abilities and AI
• New monster race: Crocodons

Things to know:

• Previous worlds and save files are not compatible. We tried really hard but couldn't do it. Sorry! Read more on how to switch to the Legacy branch to maintain your progress and update when you choose to here.
• Combat is intentionally challenging. Don't expect you can take on some monsters with the one spell you learn in school! Go to a chapter house and do some research. More info in this post.
• Skeletons are temporarily disabled until next week. It's complicated.
  
  
  
• We're still working on Combat. Testing, tuning, playing, reading your feedback. We feel this is a good first step.

More info on the thinking behind the Spell Schools:

• Introducing Storm Magic
• Introducing - Earth Magic
• Introducing - Fire Magic
• Introducing - Ice Magic

With changes this massive there are bound to be issues. We think we solved the major ones today with a short Beta. We appreciate your help and support!

 

[Tyranicon]

Liking the progress on this, although it still feels like they're pouring buckets into an ocean, especially with the very ambitious roadmap they have.

At this point, I might re-download the game next year or something.

 

[Jarmaro]

Liking the progress on this, although it still feels like they're pouring buckets into an ocean, especially with the very ambitious roadmap they have.

At this point, I might re-download the game next year or something.

I'm about to launch the game for the first time in a long time, gonna see if the combat rework has finally made the progress satisfying, and if the gameplay loop is good at last. WIll give impressions later.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

i am interested in this game, even picked it up a while ago, but think it needs a long time in the oven. ping when necromancy or vampirism is a thing.

 

[Jarmaro]

Being realistic I didn't expect a lot, but still I'm unsatisfied with my experience. UI is improved, so is the combat and the magic progression (or so it seems after playing for a few hours), but the core is still janky. The most irritating is the lag at the start of every turn, after you take every action, really. The same happens on my laptop and PC, doesn't matter what machine I use I get this obnoxious little freezes. In addition, now the gameplay isn't as balanced and the first random 'kill goblins' quest led to me dying three times due to game spawning way too difficult enemies for my firdt battles.

In short, improvements are there, but the experience leaves a lot to be desired. That said, I continue to believe in the project despite it flaws and look forward to playing it eventually.

 

[Space Satan]

I still assume this is a neural network-affilated scam. I mean That Whch Sleeps came too early - should it fire a KS camapign severalyears later it could milk idiots forever by NN-genrated picures and videos. Archmage could do it just n time!

 

[Tyranicon]

I still assume this is a neural network-affilated scam. I mean That Whch Sleeps came too early - should it fire a KS camapign severalyears later it could milk idiots forever by NN-genrated picures and videos. Archmage could do it just n time!

There is a game here, and it's got potential.

The problem is that it will probably take a very long time to achieve the dev's very ambitious goals.

Still, I'd rather take some dude's pie in the sky passion project over regurgitated AA/AAA "RPG" game #405.

 

[Jarmaro]

Patch Notes

Big thanks to you all for the feedback and bug reporting bugs with the Combat update.
We combed through over 160 bug reports + Discord + Steam Forum posts. This is what we able to address this week:

Improvements

1. Fixed a lot of the lag issues in combat. It was a combination of factors: memory leak, logging, errors. It's much improved. We're still working on it.
2. Generally, the feedback is new combat is unfairly too hard. We have improved the Conclave graduation ring you begin the game with from protection 50->70. We also removed rings from sale in shops, that wasn't supposed to be there. One of the troubles of a data driven game is sometimes data gets read in and used in places we don't intend. There WILL be ways to get additional rings and improve upon the one you start with, but it's super valuable and core to the game so you aren't supposed to be able to go to a shop and just buy a second one for 200g.
3. Skeletons are back in the game! And their resurrection ability is super annoying! Skeletons will appear in existing worlds and saves.
   
   
   
   
   
4. Skeletons are a mid tier enemy created ages ago and left roaming the earth. If you are a young new mage straight outta school, and find yourself up against a skeleton: RUN! We made it so they don't appear around your starter town. Better distribution of monster lairs is coming in the Exploration #3 update.
5. We improved Character Creation to provide better rewards so you start with 3 spells instead of 1. Things are always obvious in hindsight. This should feel better now. This also affects some of spell progression.
6. Tuned down some weapon damage. Decreasing base damage per AP and the Quality-based damage multiplier. They weren't supposed to be much better than spells.
7. Character creation summary screen now shows spells learned rather than XP gained.
8. Protection now appears on the Character Sheet. We thought it was sufficient seeing in on the equipment, but clearly that was dumb.
9. Eating Foodstuff causing nausea. The first mistake we made is player's shouldn't start with foodstuff in inventory. Second is Foodstuff is a catch-all label for raw ingredients used in cooking. Like raw flour, a turnip, and bunches of Rosemary. If you ate a cup of raw flour and 6 sprigs of raw rosemary, you likely would have a tummy ache. Our bad for not properly explaining this resource designed for trading isn't intended for eating (you can in a pinch). So it still makes you nauseous but the tooltip explanation says why.

Fixes

1. There were numerous issues leading to save file corruptions. We think we got them all.
2. We had a bad bug with quest quantities showing weird code. This was a problem with the highlight code, so we quickly hotfixed it by taking out the highlighting. It is now corrected and highlighting is back in.
3. Fixed an exploit where you could unequip your ring in combat, then re-equip it, and you'd be back to full protection. It's not THAT magical!
4. Fixed: players can't equip weapons they don't actually own. Sad, I know.
5. Swapping weapons no longer soft lock the game.
6. Magic progression screen no longer appears blank (thanks MIM_MC1, Fonz, and JAMESTHEANGRY07)
7. Sturdy and engraved pickaxes were wrecking game. Now they don't.
8. Healer no longer double charges. Healing is a far less lucrative field now.
9. Pyromaniac reported duplicated options in the Tumbleweed encounter. Fixed.
10. Combat soft-lock reported by Odynn after casting a spell
11. Lighting issue with dice in combat
12. Inventory issue in House Repair quest.
13. Missing combat backgrounds
14. Fixed an issue where sometimes players couldn't move on the map after combat
15. Fixed several other last minute bugs

Known issues:

1. We have multiple reports of "giant monster issue" where the monster sprite goes crazy large. We've invested significant time into investigating it and as of now we can't reproduce it. We finally think we may have found out what might be causing the issue, so it might be fixed, but might not...

Update for my previous impressions:
Update is a game changer for the combat, played for just 15 minutes and it's noticable as hell. No more freezes and lags. I can't believe it was fixed so fast, lightning fast and great impact on the gameplay. Huge props for the devs for the work they've done, the game's looking better by the day.

 

[Jarmaro]

Weekly Dev Update: Feb 1, 2024

I’m a little tardy in writing this post because I’ve spent the last 2 days in meetings figuring out what we focus on next. Combat was all-hands-on-deck to get it out, then everyone and everything to patch it last week.

The Future is Bright

Combat represents a new foundation from which we can build. And build we shall. The rest of the game to be exact!

Rival Mages Update
Our next formal release I call Rival Mages to add the ability to fight mages, starting with rival mages. The new combat system makes this pretty easy to do.

Why are we doing this? There were a couple of outstanding tasks I want to address from when we did the mini-update or Rivals.

• Hunt down your rival mages in the world and kill em.
  
  • We’ll add in the ability to befriend them with benefits later, right now we’re getting the fighting part working.
• Make rivals appropriately respond to you (instead of being clueless when you talk to them)
• Add a showdown mage battle to the end of the Mabren’s Tower Quest
• Add a better reward to the Mabren’s Tower for completing the quest
• Add in a new NPC reaction system. This is prep for the next big update.

This update is only going to take a few weeks to make. Will surprise everyone with a date once it is done.

(Man! We really need to stop doing all these unplanned releases and get to work on the roadmap!)

Roadmap Update #3: Exploration
Almost a year ago I had to put together a roadmap so people could generally know what I’m trying to make with this game. One of the challenges of publishing a bullet pointed list of features is it doesn’t allow room to listen to the game and see if a feature is just a neat idea or really what the game needs.

So for exploration we’re going to focus on these core features:

1. Dynamic quests - having the game generate quests based on local data. Starting with two types:
   
   • Kill Named Monster quest
   • Find Named object quest
2. Create our first faction: The Conclave. A simple version of it.
   
   • Ability to climb up some ranks with some rewards
   • Hands out quests using the Dynamic Quest engine
3. Update the map generation
   
   • It’s way too mountain heavy in the middle
   • Have better more meaningful biomes
   • Better distribution of lairs for where the player starts
4. Improve interacting with Points of Interest on the map
   
   • Finding lairs
   • Seeing and encountering patrols
   • Finding resources
5. A new UI with new HUD
   
   
6. Get rid of dumb stuff that bothers us
   
   • All the stupid tracks everywhere
   • Stamina -> replace with Fatigue system
   • Nourishment bar -> replace with Hunger system
   • Pick axes being the only way to get a resource instead of something magical
   • Exploration rolls and the “Hex View” screen entirely, it’ll be replaced above with better points of interest

You will notice Weather and Seasons didn’t make that list. I’ve decided it isn’t important right now. The Conclave faction functionality will provide way more engagement than the seasons changing. Seasons isn’t necessarily cut, I’m just pushing it down the roadmap somewhere else.

Thursday Patch
Last week’s patch was massive. It was so massive we were testing late into Thursday night still trying to get it out, but found some serious problems. In total it contained some 40+ fixes, of which the release notes covered the highlights.

This week we are working on these issues:

• Ability to use items you sold - hard crash
• Weaponsmith dialogue breaking
• Dialogue underline click handling issues
• Quest giver changing based on conversation (Ashpeef)
• Trap click options not working (Mumzhar)
• Healer not treating injuries (You had one job!)
• Healer not accepting relationship discounts
• Innkeeper losing quest options
• Weapon stats issues
• Skeleton corpses not reforming twice

You had one job!