The Next Dungeon: Winter Nexus

Posted by Citan on Saturday, November 8, 2014

(Wow, I really haven't been taking advantage of this blog since the website revision! I'll try to do better. Here's a slightly-extended version of the newsletter in the launcher today.)

New Dungeon Delayed

Sigh... if you were waiting on the dungeon this weekend, I'm very sorry to disappoint you, but this damned dungeon is not behaving. It will be a few more days! We'll launch it in the middle of this week. There are too many missing bits right now, and I don't want the first impression of the dungeon to be crappy. Because it's a fun dungeon... or will be!

A note about this next dungeon -- it's designed for a trio of players with skills around 50. This particular dungeon takes place in the Fae Nexus, a twisty realm between worlds, where the temperature has been magically controlled so that many different kinds of creatures can coexist. Cold and Fire attacks are not as effective here, so if you're a Fire Mage, you'll want to have your second skill prepared as backup!

By the way: please be careful not to overspecialize your character! It's hard for me to show how detrimental this will be until more content is in, but there will be lots of times and places where certain skills don't cut it. The game really is designed so that you'll NEED both combat skills leveled up, with viable equipment, especially at high level, and especially in dungeons. I'm going to try to add content that helps show this, so you get a less-skewed impression of the skills.

Fire Magic in particular seems WAY more versatile than it is in the full game. For instance, almost everything in the desert is heat-resistant, and they aren't especially hurt by cold either. (Deserts get super cold at night.) The Fire Magic skill even mentions that a lot of things are resistant to it. But so far, I haven't added content that's resistant to it, and instead I've added lots of mobs that are WEAK to fire, so it's easy to think Fire is the ultimate combat element and you'll never need a back up plan. But you will!

Feedback Me!

I'd really appreciate it if you could take a minute to send two feedback messages in-game (or on the forums if you prefer):

let me know what is working for you (what's convincing you to log in again? How can it be even better?)

let me know what's frustrating you the most (what made you hesitant to log in today? What's the most important thing to fix?)

I use your feedback to prioritize changes, but recently the amount of feedback has been very low.

But remember I'm just a guy here, doing my best, and I do know there are lots of frustrating things in the game. I'm fixing them as quickly as I can, so please don't take my head off! I just need to know what is MOST frustrating, so I can prioritize, not all 999999 things that need fixing all at once. And knowing what you find FUN is also really important. I've been known to "tweak" non-broken things because I didn't realize they were working for people. Feed me!

Where Are We With Money?

A few people have asked when they'll be able to support us financially, and I really appreciate the enthusiasm! It's taken a lot longer than I expected to integrate payments and Joomla and the Gorgon server tech all together to create a seamless experience. It will be a while longer, maybe a month or more, before we can take payments directly from the website. In the mean time, we're thinking of doing some other sort of financial campaign, maybe a mini-Kickstarter for a very small amount of money aimed at one or two game features. That way the art pipeline isn't slowed down too much by these delays. We'll let you know when we have a better idea of what we're doing!

(As an aside, this new Joomla website has been a LOT harder to develop for than I expected. I've had to fight my urge to rewrite the site again from scratch! Because while a completely custom website would be done a lot faster, it wouldn't be as extensible with third-party plugins down the road. At least, that's the theory that keeps me banging my head on the Joomla extension API...)

Thanks for your patience with everything -- I know alphas can be tedious at times, but we'll get through all of these delays and obstacles to have a really cool and unique game at the end.