Sunday, August 25, 2013

ToDo until public alpha

Content:
  • Mapping for Wenibe and surrounding
  • Scripting for some quests
  • Create and balance content for 20 levels:
    • Equipment
    • Mobs
Bugs:
  • Instance freeze bug - find it and fix it or add an automatic monitor for instances and terminate those which seem to be caught in an infinite loop.

Technical:
  • Create a website
  • Find a server hoster and set up the gameserver

Target indicators

The players now see which combatants are currently targeted by spells of which element. This should make barrier-management more easy.


Speaking of barriers: These can now be cast by players and are now scroll-based like all other spells. Just as I planned, each player-character can have only one barrier active at a time, but this barrier doesn't need to be on itself. So a party can decide to stack all their barriers on one designated tank while leaving all other members unprotected.

Still missing on the barrier front: A tutorial, scroll icons and an NPC to sell them.

Thursday, August 15, 2013

Barriers

This is a feature I first decided to take off my roadmap to alpha, but I realized that it's a too important part of my game concept, so I started implementing it.

A barrier is a buff which works like a HP buffer for a special element. When it is cast on another player, all damage with that element will eat away the HP value of the barrier before reducing the actual HP of the players. The HP buffer of the barrier decays naturally during the lifetime of the shield.

Currently there is only a provisorical implementation - every player starts out with a 100HP fire shield which loses 1 HP per second. But I am going to make barriers spells. Each player-character can have one barrier active at a time, but it doesn't need to be on oneself, so a player can make the tactical decision to protect another partymember instead of oneself.

There will be two kinds of barriers. Long-time wards which decay slowly but need a long time to cast, and quick counterspells which are cast very quickly but also decays rapidly. The first kind is used as a precaution when wandering dangerous areas, while the latter is cast when you notice someone attacks you to prevent the damage.

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Private chatting

Yesterday I added private chatting. The "whisper" option on the character context menu is now functional. There are still two problems, though:

1. Although the protocol allows it, there is no way to open a chat with someone not on the screen
2. There is no way to close chat tabs, except for reloading the website