Hey folks,

Max here, creating the update today! Happy first day of summer! Looks like another solid week with good progress on the game’s development. As we head into the warm season, we’re ensuring that the changes we’ve made are working, fixing new issues as they come up, and pushing forward on all fronts (like rams)! As always, we’re full of warm summery (and fuzzy) feelings for our awesome Backers, so thank you for staying patient and joining our tests. Eagerly looking forward to making next week as busy as this one was, though hopefully with less of the plague that has struck down a few of us this week!

No test this weekend, but keep an eye on our tentative testing schedule to stay up-to-date on testing.

If you missed today’s update livestream with me (Max) and Ben, you can find that HERE.

Now, let’s check out the week’s progress highlights in our Top Tenish list!

Top Tenish:

1. WIP- Tech – Rams: This week, Spidey continued work on Rams. Rams now have seven control points: Six for pushing and one for using the ram’s ability, which was just added in. Rams will now do damage in an area in front of them. Bam! He also updated them so they prefer moving in a forward motion, and require two people to move.
2. Tech – Status persistence: Christina landed a big win for us this week when she landed status persistence. A player’s current stance and which gear slots they have readied will persist. When traveling between zones, respawns, entering scenarios, and logging in, those settings will be remembered!
3. Art – Doors: Jon has finished modeling the new massive doors for Cherry Keep. These will now get animations and will be placed within the keep wall.
4. WIP – Tech – Portal Doors: Christina also landed the functionality behind “portal type doors”. These are the doors that, when activated, teleport a player to the other side. Once complete with art and effects, these doors will allow defenders to leave a keep without granting attackers access to the keep.
5. WIP – Tech – VFX: This week, Wylie worked on system-shared particle parameters. This gives us the option to randomize and animate collections of particles as a group instead of as individuals. This lets us really synchronize effects like color, rotation, velocity, sprites, etc., across an entire system. For example, if we have some leaves falling from a tree, this will allow us to reliably do a color shift on all those leaves at the same time!
6. WIP – Tech – Building Destruction: Colin worked on making items move dynamically when they become detached from a building. This will make building destruction look better when the building has items attached to it.
7. WIP – Tech – BPO Detachment: Both to support Colin’s work on making BPOs ‘fall off’ when building blocks are damaged and to address some Builder’s Brigade concerns, Matt spent most of the week revisiting the core assumption that BPOs would be removed when their “attachment block” was removed. While there shouldn’t be any immediately-observable difference from this change, it will allow us to go back in and make larger items (like doors) behave more realistically as the blocks under/around them are destroyed.
8. Tech – Spatial Query Visual Debugger: Matt took a short break from working on BPOs to provide the rest of the gameplay team with a way to visually see the spatial queries being run on the server for damage, NPC target selection, and more. This should help significantly with investigating bugs.
9. SFX – Corpse Chucker: dB has designed and implemented the SFX for the corpse chucker. I hear it is very Mooving!
10. Bug Fixes – UI: AJ spent some time this week fixing issues with the UI.
    1. Buff and debuff icons next to your health bar are now separated into positive and negative effects.
    2. Fixed a bug where not all combat log messages were being shown.
    3. Fixed a bug where the ability button icon is not updated if you modify the ability using the builder.
11. Bug Fixes – Gameplay: We spent a lot of time this week squashing bugs.
    1. Anthony fixed a bug with Furious Shock and Ally Administration. They will no longer give healers an infinite range.
    2. Caleb fixed an issue that was breaking multiple abilities. The modifier filters were broken, and that was causing this to not function properly. This has been fixed.
    3. Anthony fixed an issue that caused Celestial Lightning to last much longer than intended.
    4. Anthony fixed an issue that prevented spell shapes from properly applying their damage/healing modifiers to damage/healing over time effects.
    5. Caleb fixed an issue with deflection that allowed it to trigger on self-damage.
    6. Caleb and Anthony fixed an issue with temporary statuses during ability prep/recovery getting stuck (like Druid’s 90%+ damage reduction or travel stance prep slowdown) if the ability is interrupted they will no longer get stuck.
    7. Caleb fixed an issue where ability end events were not firing.
    8. Caleb fixed an issue in which point capture spawn points were not being captured properly.
    9. Caleb fixed an issue in which physics objects were not being spawned at the proper location.
    10. dB fixed an issue with trebuchet launch sounds.
12. Art – Animations – Various: Scott worked on one-handed Weapon(s) and Mage Cast with Weapon(s) AnimSets for the Male and Female Luchorpán. He also re-targeted the Luchorpán greatsword animation when the character is wearing a cape and/or skirt.
13. WIP – Art – VFX: Mike is correcting color values on VFX to account for recent change to use the correct color space. The colors were too saturated, and this change will make them look better.
14. Art – Animations – Bow Basic Attacks: This week, Sandra finished up the short and long bow basic attacks! She added new attack timing to them, and gave the attacks an overall coat of polish.

Pretty solid progress overall! Especially when you consider how many folks we’ve had down and out with a nasty stomach bug. Plenty of work getting done!

For art this week, we start off with some shots previewing an animation from Scott, who is continuing to work on Luchorpán weapon animations. These are some key poses for a guy with a cape and a greatsword!

Next, we have some concepts for our new, variant smaller doors, which we are creating Realm-specific styles for! Here we have Arthurians and Vikings!

Not to be left out, here are some TDD portcullis concepts!

And last but not least, an update to progress on that awesome scorpion model Jon’s been making for the board game! Here is the monstrosity with a bit of posing (although it’s still a WIP):

And that’s everything I’ve got to tell you about for this week! Thanks for reading, thanks for your patience, and most of all, thanks for your support and being our awesome Backers. We continue to work as hard as we can to bring you the game we promised to bring.

CU later!

– Max

P.S. MJ here. Next week, we’ll introduce you to Charlotte, who’s going to help us out with some engine tests this summer. Have a great weekend, everybody!