[ 2023-01-17 19:22:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

- All the negative conditions are now affected by "stresistance" and sent as a "condition" character event - There's a new very aggressive male Harpy - Cuteness adds a negative aggro difference - this way >1 aggro values make some sense too - Bling adds a positive aggro difference - this way even peaceful monsters could attack you - New Item: Harpy Bow - along with its own crafting recipe, Harpy's both drop the crafting material and the bow itself, so it's not just low-RNG based and there'll be a slow but steady progress too I took a couple of days of this week but should get back to working on the game in 1-2 days

[ 2022-09-26 18:17:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

I have a new approach where I log changes digitally after I make them, instead of just taking notes and quickly visiting my notes each week during a report. With the previous approach a lot of the small changes didn't make it into the report. The update this week will likely be closer to Friday. - Bunny set now has the ID "bunny" and received 50 Cuteness bonus - Added Pink Goblin achievements - New runner function: throw_item(num,x,y) - White Egg is throwable and aggroad nearby monsters - Likely going to merge the item throwing and Merchant's Throw skill at one point and make them projectiles too - "mluck" game and character events, also a "+M" text animation for the merchants who receive an item -Snowball's freeze is pvp only now - G.conditions.pickpocket - Getting out of the bank now requires the bank to internally disconnect too, previously this was just for getting in the bank, when there's a system lag you can feel both connections. Also patched some common ways to get in or out of the bank through other means than a door. - There's a new stat called `incdmgamp` - Incoming Damage Amp. - "cursed" and "marked" skills use them - Cursed condition now decreases output by 20 - so it's much more effective against Priest's, damage output only drops to 5% by stats - "3shot", "5shot", "cburst", "cleave", "shadowstrike" has a new response format, basically it's the first hit amplified with `.targets[]` and `.pids[]` - "stomp" now returns the `.ids[]` that are hit - New Monster: Harpy - New Ability: Warp on Hit - New Feature: Flies when charging - Monsters don't spawn things now when they are disabled - Dark Mage multiplier is 64 now, and there are achievements - New Property: Impact Resistance / "phresistance" - Some monsters received varying levels of it - New "condition" character event, but it doesn't trigger for everything yet, refactoring is in progress - Status Resistance is integrated - "bad" property on G.conditions is no more, they only have "debuff" now - Monster Hunter sets have new resistance bonuses - Some classes have new resistance bonuses - Started re-balancing some monsters, once the new dynamics are set, could adjust the existing kill numbers on players if the final difficulty differences are more than 4X

[ 2022-09-19 20:37:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

All NPC's are live entities now, they can be found in `parent.entities` - their ID's start with "$"'s Citizens started receiving new features, some seek a certain type of players, some attack monsters, some heal nearby players New NPC: Cunn - can follow a player between maps! At one point, each NPC will be documented, for now it's up to you to discover what they do! Priest's now have a separate `.heal` property and each classes have their own `.output`s - so Damage Output no longer affects Priest heals, yet, it's proportionally more effective on Merchants and Priests! New Skill: Merchant's Frenzy
Many bugfixes and improvements, including timeout corrections on attack frequency changes

[ 2022-09-11 23:51:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mainly a week with bugfixes New Feature: Split Stack! You can use the `split(num,quantity)` function in CODE or press the middle mouse button on an inventory item New Rogue Skill: Pickpocket - tries to pick a single quantity PVP marked item from a random inventory position at each use PVP marked or locked items no longer stack with each other Party DPS now has a difficulty multiplier from monsters, even indirect skills/contributions factor in the difficulty, .lucrativeness property became .difficulty as well on monsters, previously they both did the same thing by multiplying the gold drop Reworked spawns from monsters, now they only spawn at nearby players who attacked the monster

[ 2022-09-05 13:26:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week was filled with various small/big bugfixes that improved QoL, so decided to continue the program for one more week! There's a new feature, monsters can get bored and disengage from their targets if they are not attacked for 20+ seconds, how fast they disengage is based on RNG + their "rage" Friend Token shop is open but not populated, there's only one cosmetic currently, best not to exchange anything yet Simplified the CODE "Save As" interface, removed the codes of other characters unless a merchant is viewing the interface, and it now defaults to saving to an empty file, there's also another bugfix which made "/codes" fail on MacOS Hop Sickness no longer resets when you reload onto the same non-home server, also when you open the game, the default server is now the home server of your first character, just start and stop that character once for it to take effect Nerfed the Dark Mage's "lucrativeness" multiplier from 120x to 42x

[ 2022-08-29 20:01:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Code Functions: interact, use_nearest_door, enter, join, bank_swap, leave, lock_item, seal_item, unlock_item, wishlist, giveaway, join_giveaway, exchange_buy, equip_cx, set_home All Code functions now return Promise's! There are many new Game/Character events as well. There's a new "Home Server" system, when you join a non-PVP server you get a 12 minute Hop Sickness, and when you have Hop Sickness, you are not able to join events, going to restrict access to more things in the coming days, possibly second hands and lost/founds One Week Bug Bounty Program: Made an enormous amount of changes this week, couldn't test everything, so for a week, just causing an ERROR! from a server by using a method that you'd use the way it's intended, finding a malfunctioning method, or causing `parent.deferreds` to not be empty (basically an un-answered Promise) will reward a Bug Bounty Box! I'm sure there are many to be found. The player who first posts the bug to #bugs on Discord with instructions on how to reproduce gets the reward. At this point no socket method should be called manually and every method should be called through Code functions, and while playing the game normally, or while using Code functions, if you can reproduce orphan Promise's, you get a Bug Bounty Box!

[ 2022-08-22 17:40:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mainly a week dedicated to reworking the skill system, however one fun change I started was adding healing to Caroline, planning to add certain traits to Citizens, ways to make them follow and fight with you, for Caroline it'll be Cuteness Instead of the earlier skill cooldown logic when you transported, integrated the old character.s.penalty_cd.ms to all the cooldowns, now each time you transport 3 seconds is added to the timer and it's there to delay each skill you use, seems a bit extreme for blink etc. - so going to halve the cooldown on use in the coming days, basically each time you invoke a skill, the duration of character.s.penalty_cd.ms will halve Finally reaped the benefits of simplifying the skills system, absorbed "attack" and "heal" inside too and covered all responses to make "use_skill" return a Promise! There's a new simpler Promise response system too, they mostly all tag along with "game_response" - downside is the need to refactor the existing hardcoded responses, mainly "upgrade" - as a growing pain, the format, mainly the ".reason" of rejections will change in the meantime and will need to be re-documented (or documented) Slightly changed night lights as well, there are now night entities and night lights, starting to illuminate windows at night as well Friend token shop is here, going to introduce cosmetics jars in the shop to start with, they'll have an irregular format in `G.tokens` though, something similar to `G.tokens.friendtoken["cx-cosmeticsname"]=1` - as the token format was originally just a mapping of item keys to token amounts There's now a lower glitch to put as a placeholder places where content is just not ready Thanks for all the feedback and bug reports on Discord, most made it into the game, going to visit the equip/unequip system next for Promise's

[ 2022-08-15 07:51:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week was mostly spent on refactoring the internal skills, projectiles, hit animations system. Basically there were a lot of mis-handled animations and procs, simplified the system a lot and moved everything I can to the data side. As a result G.skills, G.projectiles, G.conditions etc. are quite enriched now. Two paladin skills are live, Smash and Purify

The most visible change this week is the Server Time and Day/Night Cycle, It's Night time between 0-5 and monsters can sleep - when you click on Server Time, you can practically see the event data


In the meantime experimenting with lights, and how to make nights less depressing, lights are very complicated as they are very simplistic and depending on where you stay, the illumination can be illogical, so I'm leaning towards a fog of night, rather than a flat darkening which confused everyone, I personally don't like it myself either, but going to give it some time There are many other small changes and bugfixes, for example you can make a cake now

[ 2022-08-08 13:58:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Biggest addition this week is the A/B Testing daily event, also improved the information pages of the earlier events
After receiving the Harpy idea on Discord, started working on a new zone, Jayson completed it yesterday, it's called Frozen Cove and it's accessible through Frozen Cave For the Goo Brawl, there's now a Rainbow Goo with the `rgoo` ID and after the next update, regular Goo's will become `bgoo`'s - the Monsters UI is slightly improved as well New Craftable Item: Bat Fang Amulet (Discord Idea)
Items now have their monster droprates listed in a new format There are many bugfixes this week, at the end of the week I started refactoring the attack and projectile / hit animation routines, ended up diving deep into G.skills / G.projectiles - It'll delay the game update yet in the end it'll simplify things a lot and enhance the data. There were many small bugs like a reflected projectile having a different hit animation, game checking attacker stats instead of projectile stats on procs, skills that don't use a weapon using weapon features etc. - when I'm done with the refactoring hopefully these will all be fixed - and when the routines are simpler, it'll allow for me to more easily integrate the better promise responses for skills

[ 2022-08-01 18:27:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

There's a new map called 'goobrawl' and an accompanying daily event "Goo Brawl" You can enter these new events by name with `parent.socket.emit("join",{name:"goobrawl"})` and as a reminder the event data is in the `parent.S` object, so checking `parent.S.goobrawl` in code will let you know when it's live Currently each server runs a random event around 7pm and 9pm - this will change depending on your timezone, there'll be an NPC at one point that communicates the exact timing of these events
Second daily event is the Giga Crab - extremely challenging, spawns Huge Crab's and only receives 1 damage if there are any Huge Crab's alive!
There's a new internal routine that analyses growth of accounts, this allowed me to add a new rule that prevents multi accounting without any debate. Basically you can run accounts for others as long as they are selfish. When their growth is charted, if they don't grow and instead transfer resources, it will result in long temporary bans
There's a new status called Hop Sickness, this can better shape in the future, right now characters record 40 server entries, depending on your hops in the last 3 hours, your character gets an increasing Hop Sickness. The debate is going on but a simpler solution is likely to bind accounts to a single server and let that server be changes every few days, characters could still function on other servers with stats that hinder the growth 50%+ When you invite someone to Adventure Land, you now receive a "Friend Token"! The shop / exchange isn't live yet, haven't decided on what to offer, likely incredible cosmetics, Hoping to fuel some growth this way. As a reminder the invite URL's check IP's too, so even if your friend buys the game on Steam afterwards, it'll likely match Last few years haven't been too kind, I guess for all of us, last year was especially hard for me. I've lost my best friend/dog. He had a good life but it was still devastating, turns out he was my last source of motivation, took quite some time to recover. No guarantees whether I can keep it up, but I'm back and it feels good to tackle some big challenges to start with! The daily events are off to a rough start, but it's a start! I want to thank everyone who reported #bugs and #feedback on Discord, tackling those small suggestions helped me gain momentum. I'd appreciate small actionable #new_ideas as well. For example simple recipes for existing items, or suggestions to introduce planned items that never made it into the game: https://adventure.land/communityselector/pack_20 Daily Events will introduce Fun and PVP tokens to the game, some of them could just be items introduced into these shops. Other Changes:

• vorb and cyber's attributes changed
• No more G.inflation, new G.multipliers
• Snowflakes recipe
• Snippet's can now have await's in them
• Drop info at the Monster Inspect UI
• Bow of the Weaver received the Weave ability (!)
• Crafting and dismantling now propagate properties and materials with different properties don't stack.

[ 2022-07-25 19:52:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Tiger received improvements, now it just bails out if there's a >999 attack - and somehow the 100% reflection didn't initially made it into the game, now it has 100% reflection and 99% avoidance The internal calculate_item_properties(def,item) is refactored to calculate_item_properties(item,{def:def}) - second argument is optional

[ 2022-02-06 18:39:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our Extended Lunar New Year event is here, each year a new legendary animal is going to join the ranks, this year Tiger rarely appears to players, he's peaceful and rewards every hit you can land! Coming Soon: Valentine's Event

[ 2022-02-04 18:21:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's Holiday Season on Adventure Land and there are 3 new items coming soon!

[ 2021-12-10 22:55:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween event is extended and I'm really happy with the reception

It wasn't an easy month however our spotlight on r/MMORPG and the influx of new players have been very very motivating

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/qas8dy/adventure_land_the_code_mmorpg/

Finally have a bit of momentum going on, hoping to maintain and grow it

[ 2021-10-26 19:07:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween event is live!
There's a new buff system, .cbuff in G.monsters - defeating a monster provides different buffs to different levels of players New boss Slenderman, new Priest Mace, new cosmetics, 2 new Lolipop Mace's that pop are coming soon!
Also looking for feedback regarding fish, they'll occupy an inventory space each, so you'll be fishing and going to Desertland to exchange the fish, thinking of exchanging fish to a random interval of tokens each, and there'll be a token shop As an example, a rare fish could give 1-5000 tokens, so even if you catch one, there's an added layer of randomness

[ 2021-10-10 22:58:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

A slow week, most noteable addition this week is a misc addition: Offspring - they adopt random properties from their parents, I'll announce if/when they are integrated. Initially this seemed like a good idea but I'm not sure any more 2 other unfinished changes this week, a better limitations enforcer to prevent abuse of using characters above the limit, the change included a server to server communication system. The second one was mailing all the giveaway items and limiting the entry to 1 per authorized buyer. I was in a car accident, nothing major but my car was damaged, lost a lot of time this week and sadly will lose more as anything car related is a hassle, avoid buying a car if you can :) Halloween is coming soon and Adventure Land's Spotlight on https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/ is on 18th! It will show up on the sidebar this week!

[ 2021-09-27 16:59:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

As a short recap, continuing from Week 121's Thoughts, forcing progress is the better option, going to try and add 1 little thing to the game every day whenever there's nothing else on my plate [17/09/21]: Procs like freeze/burn now roll when a projectile is launched and other attributes are adopted by the projectile itself so weapon swapping etc. doesn't affect things anymore [18/09/21]: Buff Orbs: These Orbs will provide specific buffs like fire/freeze resistance, only one buff will be active at a time, Orbs will be scattered and hard to reach [19/09/21]: Enriched mining, a slightly better animation, a misc zone in the beach cave and introduced nuggets as drops [20/09/21]: Warrior skill: Dash - to dash over obstacles or just dash forward
Maps are getting new zones that can be blinked or dashed to

As far as open sourcing goes, I've received a lot of honest and constructive feedback this week on Discord, most of the pro's in my mind were eliminated, and the cons that remain are amplifying the hard parts of developing a game that other developers play, it won't be easy to collaborate as collaboration wasn't on my mind when I was developing the game - so delayed the decision for a while

[ 2021-09-20 20:53:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Jayson has been working hard, there's a new Desertland map coming soon, the complexity of the map is going to increase too Mainland also has a new upcoming look with a lot more detail

[ 2021-05-31 19:51:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

I've come to a point where I can't force progress, what worked in the past doesn't work anymore, it's been like this for a while, maybe the problem is approaching things quantitatively - if I stop trying to force progress, a natural flow of development could occur - or maybe my limited creative capacity has caught up and now its dragging things The obvious solution was to open source the game, as pretty much every player wants to develop the game too. The right/hard way to do this was to re-write the entire backend codebase in NodeJS, as releasing it in Python 2.7 wouldn't help anyone - as Python is obsolete now. This approach, which I intend to do at one point, will allow anyone to create their own MMORPG and experiment with the genre in minutes I think I'm going to build up to it and do things the easy way tho, open source the game as it is, see whether the game can progress creatively with a community effort - and if there's interest, then re-write the backend in NodeJS

[ 2021-05-24 20:20:28 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mainly spent working on the tutorial, not much to show this week yet

[ 2021-05-17 23:19:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week was mainly dedicated to working on the new player experience, first character of a new player now emits the aura for 7 days, but it didn't seem like enough - I hoped interaction with non-afk players could improve the experience It was sad that most new players didn't even discover upgrade or compound, so started by adding 3 new tutorial steps, kill a goo, upgrade and compound - and looking at new players from yesterday, indeed it seems to be a move in the right direction, now most of them do basic upgrades There's also a new first drop logic, for the first character of a player, it includes 90,000 gold, 3 rings and a belt for the time being - so the tutorial steps can be followed immediately



I guess a next stage could be to introduce the multi character aspect of the game, and maybe provide an interactive merchant code that visits the characters, collects items, upgrades, compounds etc. Added "Warpstomp" to "xmagex" - Warps and stomps - Both the Crypt and Lair adversaries have armor/resistance's now too Ice Golem now becomes an announced boss like Franky If you are fighting the same monsters, now all skills that directly check for the party consent will work if you are not in a party

[ 2021-05-10 15:32:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

The instance "Lair of the Dark Mage" is ready
There's a new ring that adds the "Zap" ability, shoots a 200ms cooldown ray that deals 200 pure damage As with everything, this instance will get balanced a lot too, I plan to introduce more common orbs that drop easily One noteworthy experiment this week was NexusNull's suggestion of a new approach to disappearing texts, the last phase was more readable yet a bit awkward after getting used to the current look of things, as texts moved with entities too - shelved it for now, but the new name tags etc. were also shelved experiments at one point, I think the next stage of disappearing texts will be free texts, yet once a text overlaps another text, the text above will move faster so they quickly clear each other, also dot damage's should have a lower priority and fly away fast into a random direction when this happens I think the most noteworthy addition this week will be the "NewCharacter joined Adventure Land!" realm announcements, instead of #game_events, they will also publish to Discord/#general - similarly level>=80 announcements will be realm announcements too, but won't get published to #general - I suspect the new announcements could get bugged and spam the game or bring down a server etc. - so best to be on the lookout In addition to this, new players have an aura that lasts an hour, the aura emits for a day, it's a small incentive to visit them from time to time

[ 2021-05-03 17:40:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

There's a new instance coming soon to Winterland
Where you battle a Dark Mage that goes through 4 stages
There's also a new island with the Ice Golem dropping the key to the dungeon, Ice Roamers also drop the key but not as frequently The big news this week is the auth bug NexusNull discovered and shared to be fixed, a big thanks to NexusNull and number_e for their help - the bug was allowing any account to be accessed Many many weeks ago, again during the Summer, I had a strict work/life schedule that worked very well, however it fails in Winter as the lack of sun is usually demotivating, at the weekend I started this strict approach once again, and after a long while started making progress The bad news is, there will be a 20 day full lockdown here, starting Wednesday night, so I'll lose at least 2 days this week while preparing - best case scenario the update could happen closer to weekend, feel free to suggest new items and new dynamics, the Mage goes through a Ice / Fire / Nature / Darkness change, basically there are 4 variations, and after each one is defeated, the one after that spawns, there's a new "respawn_as" property in G.monsters

[ 2021-04-26 18:28:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Winterland received it's new look, there's also a new path connecting sections above the Arctic Bee's - Planning to add a rare spawn below ice roamers where a Mage will have to blink-in and magiport others Items break now, so if you are Fishing/Mining, it should be part of the code logic
There's a new emotion, a single heart, currently a rare drop from Mining:
There's also a change to the tanking contribution calculation, so it's a good time to take another look at .pdps values Spent some time re-visiting the code-syncing system, fixed a mac app store issue thanks to feedback, and there's a new warning if you introduce a 2 files with the same slot number - However I believe there's still a race condition-ish bug remaining that's wreaking havoc when it's triggered - There's a new article that's also integrated to the load/save interface: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/code/8-code-slots-and-files

[ 2021-04-19 19:35:59 CET ] [ Original post ]

Not much done these 2 weeks, I hate to publish empty weekly reviews, but these 2 weeks were lost too, mainly spent time completing my home, spring cleaning/preparation etc. Completed Mining this weekend, currently just in the existing mining tunnel, you can mine mainly for gem fragments - since it's a dangerous zone, it should be a small/fun coding challenge Apart from mining, there are minor changes and bugfixes coming, the main one is heals not being reflected any more
And also Winterland is going to be revamped soon, nothing major, just a renovation :)

[ 2021-04-13 01:26:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's the Egg Hunting week :) The fishing rod is craftable now, doesn't break yet, and mobbing is nerfed And to go along with it, I managed to cram in a new feature that I've been meaning to add for a very very long time: Emotions! Basically they are like cosmetics, but they make your character show an emotion, currently the first one is an animation where you drop an egg, but upcoming ones can be small gestures, sounds, animations etc. They reside on `character.emx` You can `socket.emit("emotion",{name:"_name_"})` And they are documented at `G.emotions`

[ 2021-03-29 20:50:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Unproductive 2 weeks for the game, I was occupied with my personal life and at the same time unsure about what to work on next, lost my motivation Documentation, Tutorial are #1 must-do's - yet working on them is so unfruitful, however, today I forced myself to work on re-visiting and documenting each function - also converting my random comments to JSDoc's - realistically there's no ETA, but it's a start Met with a friend today who's making https://colonist.io/ - didn't know he was an avid mmorpg player, his ideas and experiences resonated with me a lot, also fortified existing feedback, thinking of increasing HP's of players 3-fold in the coming days Maybe a potential next focus could be to complete the single character limited-time pvp world: https://steamcommunity.com/games/777150/announcements/detail/1723127556404218537 I wasn't very active on Discord this week, turned out to be a huge mistake, a special thanks to UhOhPolio for his bug report on Cute Bee spawn, luckily I didn't refactor `G.monsters.cbee` to `G.monsters.cutebee` as egehanhk pointed out, so those 2 bugs cancelled each other out and we avoided another endgame bug :) Talking about mmorpgs and developing mmorpgs, my desire to open source early grows, but the main issue is that Python is dead, open sourcing before refactoring the Python backend to NodeJS will just cause frustrations while the main purpose of open sourcing is to (optimistically) help the mmorpg genre by accelerating experimentation of unique ideas - Developer(s) can quickly test their ideas before they potentially invest more on them At the same time I'm working on my new project/game, it's a project that has 2 parts, so I ended up combining my collective approach to app/game development into a common framework, so If I refactor, I'll use the new JS-based libraries and framework for Adventure Land too, this will mean that a big portion of that new project will start open source as well - at this point I pause as I can't decide whether it's a good thing or bad thing, as bug finding and searching is a big part of Adventure Land gameplay for most, I'm afraid of making code public, but at the same time, making it open source will result in those bugs being found with certainty - anyway I'm just babbling TL;DR: Not much these 2 weeks, just some ideas

[ 2021-03-22 20:48:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Apart from small/moderate bugfixes, this week is dedicated to Fishing, it ended up being a merchant skill, it comes with a "prelock" attribute and a 48 minute cooldown, the cooldown is set when you join a server, so you have to stay on a server for 48 minutes straight to fish

There's a new "zones" attribute on G.maps - Planning Mining, Farming, Gardening, maybe collecting with similar dynamics And in case you were wondering, as long as you are in the zone, facing the right way, and have exhausted the cooldown, it's just a matter of RNG and the drop table of that specific zone is in G.drops
I think the merchant can have all the skills with a high cooldown, but maybe other classes could each have one such skill with a shorter cooldown if it's well received

[ 2021-03-08 20:32:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Overall a slow week for the game, but it was a nice week Many many crypt and crypt-related bugfixes Reduced tanking multiplier of party contribution 33% New rare monster: Cute Bee and Golden Bat receives a similar explanation too New Merchant Skill: Mass Production++

[ 2021-03-01 15:59:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Crypt is finally ready! And all the adversaries inside has been improved from earlier weeks as well Keep in mind that everything related to The Crypt is unbalanced and subject to change, some of the items are rushed, feel free to (or please do) make suggestions on Discord to balance/refine them New Merchant Skill: Mass Production Rushed this one in as well, hopefully no bugs New Dynamic: Courage This one was being discussed for a while, after this update, Warriors are the Physical tanks, Priests are the Magical tanks, and Paladins are the Pure tanks, while Merchants are the most fearful of the bunch :) There are 3 new properties: .courage, .mcourage, .pcourage and .fear - basically, .fear is the fear level Keeping the week in review short as I'm quite exhausted, but really excited to keep on delivering new content along these lines

[ 2021-02-22 20:57:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

It was a very productive week and it feels great to introduce so many new mechanics / challenges, I hope the new dungeon, uncreatively called "The Crypt" will pose a serious coding challenge, even if the optimal strategy becomes pull+avoid+kill, it still requires a considerable amount of effort to tackle all the adversaries inside
Anger makes an enemy randomly charge a player, they are harder to tank and avoid The healer latches onto someone to heal, otherwise heals herself and the heal amount is hard to overdamage The auras are pretty self explanatory The new Zapper zaps everyone around 300 radius with 1200 instant pure damage rays when placed, so better take it down fast Adversaries roam the crypt, so when they get together, I hope they can overwhelm even the most seasoned parties








The crypt key is a random drop from the cave The interfaces received small improvements, there are various other small changes as well, a new tune for the crypt, and the cave's tune is also fixed next update The big change this week is monsters targeting and focusing other monsters, so if your code doesn't handle such a scenario, better do some refactoring! For the next week, going to add at least 2 drops each to adversaries, the new items didn't make it to this week The unfinished zone in the Mansion is also going to become an instance/dungeon called "The Tomb" - there's a small event instance in Winterland as well, going to complete that too - and will likely add a unique dungeon to the Mainland, above the scorpions - not sure about the concept yet

[ 2021-02-15 18:47:42 CET ] [ Original post ]

A slow 2 weeks, started week 105 with food poisoning, then had some house related issues, overall lost a week but built a new mechanical keyboard in the downtime - it's a joy to type on Started Week 106 a bit lost and demotivated, apart from the Lunar New Year item updates, there wasn't much changed game-wise - at the end, decided to just concentrate on some unfinished content and complete them First one will be the cave dungeon with the 8 adversaries I shared earlier, second one could be the conversion of the mansion door to a special entry dungeon There will likely be dungeon keys dropping from monsters (bats, rats) - and the instanced dungeon will open with these keys - this will also allow very high xp rates etc. - if nothing goes wrong, first version of this system should be live this week

[ 2021-02-08 17:41:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Lunar New Year event is live on Adventure Land - the highlight of the event is Dragold, there's a new item like the Dragon Armor, the OX Helmet - and an upcoming priest-only weapon
Jayson designed 6 adversaries for the instanced Cave dungeon, the dungeon should arrive within a month
I started a new project, going to work on it alongside with Adventure Land, these 2 weeks I've dedicated to that new project, it's going pretty well, good news for Adventure Land is that I've tackled all the NodeJS as a backend solution challenges - so when the time comes to open source Adventure Land, I'll probably spend around 2 weeks re-writing everything in NodeJS. Unlike the earlier speculation, it will have local emulation so players/developer will be able to test things fast locally Since the community is so helpful, it seems like a good idea to open source before the hard to reach goal too, but honestly it's a pretty big step and I didn't completely think it through - security-wise it's a big risk to take

[ 2021-01-24 17:27:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

A slow week for the game. Mail and Messages on COM now have paging, so you can load older mails/messages. There was a major bug that brought US III down twice, it's patched. There are 3 new elixirs from the Witch. The Poucher bow received it's new look (Also other new sprites are ready for upcoming items)

New Code Functions:

- open_stand - close_stand - bank_retrieve - bank_store (fixed) (Thanks to D.Coles on Github for the PR's)

[ 2021-01-11 20:48:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week comes with one overdue but major addition: The Tutorial! :) The first iteration is simple, but it allowed me to eliminate the Newcomer Mode / Pro Mode duality - right now, the first step goes through the interface, and the second step introduces the Code and the X/Snippet interface

Other Changes:

- Guide articles now have Prev / Next buttons - Newcomer Mode is no more, with the Tutorial added, the top buttons are unified and simple - CONF is now simpler

[ 2021-01-03 21:55:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

I wanted to release the first version of the Tutorial this week, but instead tackled another important challenge, Code documentation accessibility and finally merging the Game Guide and the Code Guide The new interface, in my opinion, makes it really practical to search Code functions, references etc., Guide articles are linked if they include explicit search phrases, there are also hand selected MDN topics that are linked Since Code functions aren't individually documented or finalised yet, this doesn't solve the problem at hand, but definitely makes things much easier, feels really good that everything now comes together, I guess the next stage would be to improve the linking, for example, when you type "cm" - a direct reference to the Character event and how to handle it should come up New Guide Entry: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/multi (Multiple Ways to Run Multiple Characters) In the coming days, plan to slowly re-write and extend the Guide with Code examples, data references etc. Not sure about the extent of the Tutorial yet, it will duplicate some efforts too, but I guess, even if it just teaches the player about the interface, makes the player do various things, go to various places, makes them attack, use a skill with code etc. - even that could be enough - it would also eliminated the need for the "Pro Mode" - and the interface could always be simple - thinking of re-styling the top right buttons too, however don't have any bright ideas yet - minimally CODE, COM, SKILLS, GUIDE, CONF would be there, TRAVEL could go into COM - Actually the SKILLS could be moved to the top of the skillbar too, but it could look bad, and possibly makes things more complicated for a new player that skips the tutorial

[ 2020-12-28 10:39:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Biggest addition this week is probably the Explosion and Blast properties, added an easily craftable bow and a prototype great staff with these properties (the bow is super weak, the staff is strong), one is for physical attacks, the other is for magical attacks - going to refine other properties and abilities in the coming days too
Improved / implemented the all recipes interface, also added recipe shortcut to the item information window
The witch becomes a new crafting NPC, the first craftable has the prototype recipe of Snake Oil, which became a debuffing potion this update - also refined G.conditions, only ones that have the `.bad` flag get debuffed - even if they have the `.persistent` flag - In the future, Priest skill won't be able to deny the persistent conditions
And merchants get new trade slots!

[ 2020-12-21 20:53:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Attribute: "mp_reduction" / Skill MP Reduction - Reduces the MP usage of skills with a % New Item Ability: "restore_mp" / Restore MP - Instead of using MP, restores 2X with a % - 5X effective against humanoids Received a video review: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/835979727 - It was very eye opening, thanks HappyCerberus - While it was clear the docs have been lacking for some time, it was good to get a wake up call, seeing his initial struggle helped me better formulate an approach to solve this problem Still unsure how to merge the old "Guide" and the "Code" guide, it's confusing having 2 seperate approaches - actually, it's more like 3, "Guide", "Code Articles" and "Code Docs / Reference" One thing is clear though, instead of slapping a new player with a "Coming Soon"'ed Guide, they should at least be welcomed with a basic tutorial that shows them and makes them do the basic things, like opening the CODE UI for the first time etc. First addition in this prioritised direction was to add "Inspect" buttons everywhere, and improve the show_json() internally with added buttons and annotations - now all characters, monsters, inventory items got an Inspect button, also the item and monster references received a small UI clarification New Items: - Mana Gloves (Names are a work in progress) - Mana Amulet - Belt of MP Reduction - Exoskeletal Arm - Diamond Key (Unlocks the next bank teller) Other Changes: - "humanoid" property on Monsters - "MP Cost" now appears as "A.MP Cost" Small Improvements / Fixes: - Inventory clicks now toggle the item (Thanks to MauranKilom) - Fixed a Rogue issue that misset .s.block (Thanks to egehanhk and Rising) - trade_buy() extended and added trade_sell() (Thanks to egehanhk) - Fixed skills getting Invalid Date's as cooldowns (Thanks to Allure_) - Shells are now announced (Thanks to earthiverse) - Messages are now stripped from Zalgo modifications and weird Unicode's, Smileys

[ 2020-12-14 14:08:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Overall a very productive and happy week, after the well reception of the new Co-Op Grinch, I intend to introduce regular bosses or events that mimic the same community response Ice Skates and the North Star didn't receive their stats yet, Ice Skates will be the first item with a property that works in only one map - it will likely be the first example of a special stat, I might make it a special stat that only comes with an item, and convert the rest of the scrolls to special stats that are attainable by scrolls Jayson came up with a carriage solution that will allow every pet to be mountable, admittedly most will be for fun as riding a Goo doesn't have any practical use

Changes:

- Inventory activated skills with "inventory" array as a property - Fiery Throwing Stars and Snow Flakes for Rogue's - Monster with "1hp" property now have 1000x global drops (Thanks to earthiverse) - Fixed the re-appearance routine of chests when you move from map to map - Skills now have a "hostile" flag, you can't use hostile skills in safe zones - "global" flag for monster added for "Grinch" - chest drops on characters Ps. Snowballs have a hidden feature!

[ 2020-12-07 09:57:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of all let me start by saying that weeks 91, 92, 93, 94, 95 were all wasted - overall, in total, the toll of moving to a new home, a new lifestyle, was close to 3 months to game's development I moved to a place away from the city, a home that enforces a healthy lifestyle by design, away from all the distractions Even though I moved this week, I'm slowly adjusting to it, and things are getting more productive by the day - I hope I'll be able to keep it up It's so easy to lose momentum, yet, regaining it takes a lot of time, in the coming weeks, I'll probably stick to small changes and improvements until my brain gets re-wired As for the Week 96: - Implemented Fire Resistance (placeholder, only avoids the status) - Implemented Freeze Resistance (placeholder, only avoids the status) - Snowball (upcoming, graphics are ready) - New "lucrativeness" multiplier and cgoo's boosted in XP - Determined the new holiday season items and the achievement (Thanks to everyone on Discord) - A slow start to the Holiday Season today! Most of the new additions should be live next week

[ 2020-11-30 18:13:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Another slow week but managed to complete the animating cosmetics, like the bat hat that moves with you and the flaming eyes Going to introduce some of them as rare drops from Halloween bosses this week

[ 2020-10-19 22:50:02 CET ] [ Original post ]

Halloween event is up to a slow start, working on new cosmetics to introduce during the event - these new cosmetics will animate too!

[ 2020-10-13 20:25:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

It was a dark three weeks. Initially I decided to concentrate on moving to my new home. It's far away from the city, in a serene place where I can just concentrate on work. I shouldn't have stopped working on Adventure Land, didn't expect things to drag on this much. There's still at least one week to go. Apart from minor bugfixes, there was almost no progress, one promising bugfix is for the location correction routine, it seems each correction was faultily stopping characters on the client side, while they still continued to move on the server, this caused the cascading corrections that probably most of us experienced at one point Planning to start the Halloween event this week, and enrich the event continually

[ 2020-10-05 22:28:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

Week 84 was unproductive for the game, practically took a week off - Rename Character is finally ready, renaming is free once for new characters or non-leveled characters - There's a new achievement/title called "stomped"/Stomped - You need to get randomly hit 1200 times by Stompy consecutively, getting hit by any other monster resets it - Heartwood's Tangle is ready - "gooped"/Gooped title/achievement for receiving 60M damage from Goo's - Monsters have a random attack delay now, +- 50ms - First 2 Paladin skills are ready (Thanks to jameswatson's reminders on Discord) - Mana Shield probably will be very fun until it's balanced - Attack animations (the movement push towards the target) are more pronounced now ^ The game/servers aren't updated yet, it'll likely be in the next 1-2 days

[ 2020-09-14 19:41:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

Biggest update this week is the improvements to the messaging system, now all messages are retained, regular chat is server-wide - and pm's work both offline and within servers! The next step will be to update the https://adventure.land/comm/ so it will become more practical and also be a messaging hub (The typing bubble animation is also live now) Worked on Steam payment integration, it's theoretically ready now, but practically need to do some more work Observers now automatically update position, both when you are just observing a server, or when you are observing someone There's a new experimental escapist monster: Tiny Fairy After the next update, only merchants will be able to join giveaways, but at the same time, I'll probably make Cyberland hostile for merchants, as more and more things are added, don't want to move merchants dominantly to Cyberland - Also congrats to Kolo on Discord for figuring out what "give" does :)

[ 2020-08-31 17:49:18 CET ] [ Original post ]

First version of new movement system complete + the server logic is now multi-threaded with node workers - this is a major improvement, as the performance bottleneck was instance/monster computing, which is now mostly async and offloaded to other threads. Additionally, there's a new internal cached precomputation system, previously it was done at each server launch. As the new calculations take more than a 100 seconds, it was a must to add this new system. Thanks to it, servers now spin up instantly New chat typing bubble animation / experiment (Unlaunched) New name tags! Instead of the original name tags that appeared optionally on the bottom of players and npcs, the new tags are on by default, they appear on top, and extend when a character is focused or hovered on (Thanks to egehanhk's suggestion on Discord) Monsters also received a new HP bar that includes their level, and there's also a very basic Difficulty calculation (Suggested by ellian very early on)

I've started visiting pinned ideas on #new_ideas, going to implement or eliminate them one by one - first one was Sanguine Amulet and item auras
Thanks for Matin's suggestion on Discord, Phoenix will drop a very very rare new hair

[ 2020-08-24 17:49:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Re-visited Pets after adding Cosmetics last month, then dedicated the week to adding pathfinding to monsters, it's ready to release - To summarise the addition, most monsters, maybe all, will be able to pursuit better, take corners - However, due to computational limitations, they won't immediately take the shortest path to you wherever you are. The results are pretty interesting, if you farm Vampire Rats on the hill for example, rarely one can climb up to you. On the Spooky Town, it's almost impossible to outrun Mummies In the future, probably going to adopt a multithreaded approach and dedicated the additional threads just for the logic of smart monsters and pets Upcoming changes: - The Phoenix now has 160,000 HP - an increase from the original 60,000, the "fcape" droprate doubled - Merchant's Luck buff now has a `.strong` flag if it comes from your own merchant, it can't be overwritten by others with this flag - 4 Fingers no longer work on non-friendly targets outside PVP - Some UI Fixes - Definite cosmetics jar bugfix

[ 2020-08-17 17:52:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

New code functions: upload_code, get_active_code_slot, get_edited_code_slot, disconnect New Game/Character events (in Code DOCS) Hardcore Mode: You have to be within 10 levels to attack Agile party invites/requests: You can send/accept invites/requests freely independent of your party status, or the recipient's party status, when you enter a party, or if someone else enters your party with your invite, your requests expire, invites only expire when they are accepted (Thanks to number_e's urging) steamhappy Cosmetics: Premium Armor/Hat items unlocked, Cosmetics Jar's now show what's inside them, new cosmetic drops from monsters, Updated: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/all/cosmetics (Thanks to Muhncheez's reminders) > Item compounds now decay the positive components after a success, however, for ages items, it might still be enough to reach the max% > Burn interval is now 210ms instead of 180ms, intensity cap is [previous/3+attack] instead of [previous/2+attack] - and there's a new/experimental duration formula, each attack now increases the duration at least 400ms, the duration can go up to 12000ms - the increments in between are dependent on the current attack and the current burn intensity - and if there's an existing burn, a super burn can last up to 8 seconds rather than 5 now Endgame Bug: Beg on Discord discovered that auth checks was faultily disabled for the log_in calls only, this change was made recently to fix an issue which occured if accounts logged out while characters were in-game. He reported an unintentionally leaked game credential on Github to help, his report lead to this discovery later on. In order for this to work, you still had to know the character's numeric ID. I'm very thankful for his report and having such a positive community.

[ 2020-08-10 18:12:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

The week started with a bug and bug fixing frenzy, a forgotten 1/10 cosmetics jar drop rate from Goo's and Party% calculations far exceeding 100% - it was a good exercise in post disaster processing/recovery Implemented the Damage Received to Bonus Damage mechanic, it will likely appear on a Warrior weapon, but I think it could be a welcome addition to Rogue's as well With the recent additions that diversified options, I started considering a very basic character build too, likely Level 60/70/80/90/100 selections, 2 options at each, so a 2x5 simple build that adds a skill/passive/attribute to your class I was going to update the game before this Week's update, yet decided to delay the update 1-2 days, as quite a bit changed "item_sent", "item_received", "gold_sent", "gold_received" events Experimented with node/puppeteer after getting inspired by syrup's interface on Discord, headless Chrome uses more resources, yet the jsdom approach has been problematic so far, at one point might re-write the CLI to just use Chrome - maybe a secondary version

New item grades: Legendary and Exalted

All upgradeable items now become Legendary at +10, and Exalted at +12 - Exalted items can no longer be upgraded - T3+ items become Exalted at +10 - to compensate, T3/T4 armor get extra stats at +10 Legendary scrolls are now buyable, "scroll3" is 480,000,000 for the time being, in the future, the price might lower, but there might be a challenge to acquire it There are 2 new offerings, Primordial X and Primling, Primordial X is for grade 3, i.e. Legendary, Primordial Essence is now less effective for Legendary items, Primling will drop from monsters, it's for High grade items (grade 1) - Essences are now more effective if used on lower grade items, but %-caps don't change "grades" data on items become an array of length 4, example: [0,0,6,10] - A rare item becoming Legendary at +6 and Exalted at +10 Plantoids and One Eye's are balanced New Achievement: Unlucky - failing an upgrade/compound with the exact% - you get an Essence of Greed too, that's needed to craft the Primordial X G.skills .wtype property can now be an array, for example "3shot"/"5shot" has ["bow","crossbow"] as wtype - Only skills with a wtype now trigger attack passives Mansion's Crypt map updated There's also a new mainframe command: swap - It's up to you to discover the functionality

[ 2020-08-04 04:54:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

A week with small, scattered changes and additions, the equal party share among one's own characters is now live New Monster Prototype: Black Scorpion New Item Prototypes: Sanguine Amulet, Heartwood, Enchanted Earring, Ring of Gold The changes from earlier weeks are now live too, including the rebalanced Fire Roamer Most interesting recap from this week is Archalias's ideas and suggestions on Discord, I want to thank him for his contributions, most of them are surely going to make it into the game, 2 of them are already in - Can't wait to add the weapon that increases attack based on recent incoming damage

[ 2020-07-27 21:15:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week's focus was an Achievement system + Item Titles as rewards First challenging achievement is the "Fire Hazard" where you have to kill 20,000 monsters consecutively with burn last hits - It awards the "Hazard" title which grants +4% Crit Damage Second achievement, an easy and random one, when you roll the % perfectly on upgrades / compounds, the item gets the "Lucky" title, +2% Luck Item properties are now stacked, it will be possible to get them re-titled this way (Only one of them is active at any point) There's an upcoming minor re-balance, affects the Fire Roamers and the new prototype bosses in the Mansion

[ 2020-07-20 18:44:58 CET ] [ Original post ]

Overall a very productive week - Added Item Mailing - New System: Traps - Achievement Integrations - Hardcore events on Sundays The first rewarded Hardcore event was pretty fun too, good turnout, wish I didn't forget and take some screenshots, got into it too deep myself, forgot everything else First example of a trap is the `G.monsters.fieldgen0` - It applies a dampening field (`G.conditions.dampened`) which prevents magiporting in, blinking out and teleporting - ultimately, going to introduce more of them for PVE, bosses could spawn them, beneficial / long lasting ones could be used by players etc. It was fun trying to complete a semi autonomous server for the Hardcore event, ended up being very productive, hope to repeat it this week by bringing back the daily event system prototype for Saturday! Hardcore event will be a weekly thing too, each week in a different zone, this week it'll be Europas, next week Eastlands

[ 2020-07-14 02:58:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added a new zone inside the mansion, it's open for preview but the drops/event/complete-dynamics aren't there yet
There's a new tracktrix scoring system, the guide page explains the new dynamics: https://adventure.land/docs/guide/advanced/tracktrix

Other changes:

- Armorbox drop table buffed - Essence of Frost crafting recipes eased

[ 2020-07-06 18:22:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dedicated this week to updating all the game clients and fixing all the issues, updating the Steam clients is hard work, it takes time, but it's relatively fun - changes are instantly live, on the other hand, Mac App Store is sad, for some reason the existing version can't be downloaded properly from the App Store, I guess something happened when they teased to feature the game then didn't do it. I submitted the updated version, it's still pending. Overall Mac App Store is definitely not worth the effort for a non-established game Fixed the "Authorization in Progress." issue some were experiencing (thanks to Generol's debugging help on Discord). When the client is alive for long, some still experience singular window crashes, hope to tackle that issue soon too (if it's possible) Most noteable game change this week (not live yet) - is the armor / resistance and attack speed formula, resistance multiplier is now 1 instead of 1.5 - there's also a cap for gains (160 for str, 180 for int, 160 for dex), after the cap, gains are reduced - for armor/resistance, it's reduced 75% - attack speed is more homogenous comparedly (by shifting the dex gains more to lower levels, hoped to make dex favorable for non-dex classes as well) - in the coming days, going to document edge details like this about the game in the Guide Progressed on the new scroll system, it's not ready yet, couldn't decide on the naming either. Main challenge is to distinguish the new system The property scrolls aren't all too intuitive for newcomers either. Might end up making it easier to understand as well. For property scrolls, the `Stat: 7` attribute indicates a scroll-less item, but for this new "Special" scroll type, unsure how to indicate the availability - anyway I'm rambling, hopefully we'll see the result on Week 75

[ 2020-06-29 21:20:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

Lost week 72 almost entirely while switching to a new Macbook :( When you lose one week like this, usually the following week is a slow one as well, it takes time to regain the momentum - Other than this hiccup, things are generally good, both development wise and life wise
There's the new Code UI, Pros: It clearly shows which Code slot you are using/editing, the slots have new colors as well, makes it easy to differentiate between character/code slots Con: For new players, loading a code slot might not be easy to discover, you have to either click the existing code slot, or the gray code slot type text in the new UI Launched CLI on week 72, and it's been improved a lot in week 73, it has a functional localStorage support, and a native implementation for CM's (code messages) - also there's an upcoming Code article that will make it easier to use and extend the CLI (yet to release these features)
Week 73 was dedicated to adding new attributes, I feel very limited while trying to come up with new items, with the new defensive attributes, it should be a bit easier - most monsters can drop accessories that don't directly compete with high level accessories, yet, could be favored for alternate builds I also started working on the "Cards" idea, they won't be cards, but rather, specialized scrolls and properties - The discussion: https://discord.com/channels/238332476743745536/259894563047473172/723085712689332265 Americas III is live again Armors have been re-balanced, T1's ended up getting nerfed, T2 stayed the same, T3/T4 are boosted - Haven't finalised all the details yet Goblin and Ponty now favor items with properties, even if there are 5 items of that kind already, they replace those with the special items (Thanks to Dre4mc4tcher's reminder on Discord) Upcoming Items: - Fiery Cape - Orb of Testing (Includes Poison Resistance)

[ 2020-06-22 22:56:33 CET ] [ Original post ]

Spent most of the week fixing the initial issues with the updated Code system, spent the rest for the CLI - Lost a lot of time this week due to hardware issues, getting a new macbook hopefully tomorrow - Wish me luck please, as these things can fail out of the box too :( The CLI is very dirty, but it works and it works well, the external smart_move calculation ended up being a bit too unaesthetic for my taste, it's very practical but it just uses a copied/modified version of the runner_functions code, ultimately I might make the CLI master pull functions from the actual runner_functions and run them instead, I was going to release CLI today, but the main menu interface wasn't ready yet (for the subscription), so I'll release it later on CLI usage will cost something like 29 shells / week to start with (not per character, account-wide), as I divert more time to its integration and features, going to increase the cost - Ultimately it'll probably be 2-3$ a month at most Going to initially put the raw code on Github, later versions will probably be more seamless and it'll probably come bundled within the libraries folder Got some major good news today, Adventure Land got it's Google Cloud credits extended, thanks to these Startup credits, I can build the game without immediately worrying about the costs, they help immensely.

[ 2020-06-08 18:18:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week's update is one of the most major updates to the game, I'm really proud of finally being able to make it happen - Hope it gets enjoyed too. It was by far the most requested feature: Being able to edit/maintain code files locally. The update includes tons of small changes around how code is handled, I'll try to list them all

• Type /codes in chat to open your local code folder
• Each change gets auto uploaded and auto downloaded (if it happened elsewhere)
• You can make changes with the client open or closed, they get synced when you open the client, if there is an online change too, the local file is moved to /clash
• The /libraries folder includes an up-to-date copy of library .js files
• Code is no longer being maintained on localStorage, the server sends the last used code slot with the character - the "slot" and "run" flags are still local, so you can have your character using different code slots in different places
• New character code slots, the # is the Character ID
• To prevent issues, old codes are still on the storage_get("code_cache_backup")
• When you run or stop code, it gets auto saved if there are changes
• When you make changes locally, it gets auto updated on characters that use that slot directly
• Adding "autorerun" phrase to a code somewhere, in comments, makes the character automatically re-run the code, but it doesn't make the character run the code if it's not running
• When you use your character on a new place, like a new browser, it now loads it's character slot on default - but it doesn't auto run the code
• The /history folder backs up codes on deletion, or when an external update comes in, so if you unintentionally overwrite a slot on the browser, you can hopefully recover it even if the game client is open (still best to use mac/windows auto versioning/backups or code versioning etc. if you care enough)
• Renaming local files automatically renames the code slot
• Deleting the local file while the client open asks confirmation to delete the code file, if you delete a code file when the client is closed, that file just re-downloads when the client opens
• You can now make code slot changes in the bank
• load_code now reads the local file on the game client
• New function: require_code
• X.codes includes information about the code slots
• parent.code_slot includes the current code slot, parent.code_ref includes information about files that is persisted through the data.json file
• Slot names can only include: "0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuvwxyz_-.+ "

[ 2020-06-02 04:26:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started the week by adding bundles to cosmetics, so related stuff drop together from exchangeables, bundles are transferred as bundles too, so it was a bit complicated integrating them to everything - especially making sure they can't be sent, when a piece from a bundle is in use Got very distracted mid-week, started making some life simplifications, improvements - hope they bare fruit in the coming weeks At the weekend, started working on the Code versioning and external editing system, each character will have it's own auto versioned and synced code slot - which will also be editable in a physical folder - lately it's been the most demanded feature (the external ide usability part) - hopefully, once tackled, it'll improve the experience significantly, I'm personally very excited, even though I've always just used the in-game editor, I can feel a new chapter starting for my own characters with this change too :)

[ 2020-05-26 00:53:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

Week mainly dedicated to releasing the first cosmetics pack, hairs, improving the cosmetics system, adding new hoodless options to priests/mages, fixing the initial issues - next pack will likely be armors - going to add bundles this week, so some stuff will unlock in a bundle, include variations of the same thing etc. - Asked Jayson to work on lots of alternative skin shades to add small variations to how characters look
On the content side, a slow week, new monster: Pink Goblin, Skeletor now drops a T3 Scythe, a new dead weapon, Spear of the Dead, and all Dead weapons are dismantle-able/craft-able The new bank levels are also live, for the time being, the keys drop from Pink Goblin's and Franky Great ideas on Discord this week too, most probably going to add a Reap skill to Warrior, and there are still a lot of simple/enriching ideas leftover to implement from earlier weeks

[ 2020-05-18 20:24:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

It was sadly not a very productive 2 weeks, started a lot of things but didn't complete any, Jayson worked hard Almost ready to release the hair cosmetics exchangeable, in the end, decided on a hybrid solution that I think satisfies everyone - cosmetics are account-locked, easily transferable between characters, they can be repetitive, some are rare, to unlock them, requires a variable amount of shells - this way the market won't be flooded with cosmetics, yet, rare ones will still be marketable - seems to tick all the boxes There's a new Rewards NPC, for Tutorial rewards, Level based rewards and so on - the experience is incomplete There will be 2 new bank levels, basement and underground, the underground level connects to the underground - each level requires a unique key to unlock - will drop from monsters - ultimately, it will be possible to unlock 48 bank pages in total
There are new upcoming items, there should be an update before Friday - there were also a lot of awesome ideas on Discord this 2 weeks, I will try to integrate as much as I can into the game in the coming days

[ 2020-05-11 22:29:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Finally switched to live cosmetics by converting all existing main character sprites, eliminated the gender option and added a secondary default skin color option - along with more masculine and more feminine looks Couldn't decide how to proceed with the release of new cosmetic items, there were a lot of feedback and ideas on Discord, probably going to pick a hybrid approach, where cosmetic exchangeables will drop repetitive cosmetics, some cosmetics will be rare, players will freely move cosmetics between their own characters, but when the cosmetics are bottled in a `cxjar` - it will be account locked on default and will require shells to be unlocked - this way the market won't be flooded
(Example of an account bound item look) Integrated some of the materials to the monsters, also added rare cosmetics/glasses drops to Mr. and Ms. Dracul - more drops from existing monsters/bosses are on the way

[ 2020-04-27 18:06:00 CET ] [ Original post ]

We had a major bug, not endgame, but it was a fun one, discovered by Archalias on Discord, you could equip any weapon to offhand, which resulted in some interesting combo's Most important/noteable event this week is my commitment to release cosmetics, and just concentrate on it until it's done, the first step is replacing each class's existing skin with interchangeable cosmetics - this will likely eliminate genders in the future too, as it will mostly depend on how you end up looking
(Female ranger vs. her potential new look, the armor belongs to a paladin tho) Changes this Week: - Belt is available from Cole in exchange for collectables - Ring of Armor / Resistance boosted - Digestive Stones drop from Stone Worm's - Stinger drops from Stone Worm's - Improved the new item equipping/tiering interfaces - Drafted All Skills/Conditions and All Recipes

[ 2020-04-21 18:44:46 CET ] [ Original post ]

Overall a very very productive week, 2 major achievements: New cosmetic weapon glow and the completed weapon tiering system and initial balancing - Started experimenting with the Paladin class too






New Items: - Crossbow (Weapon Box) - X-Shot (Elixir) - Hunting Bow (Porcupine's) - Swifty (Stone Worm's) - Dagger (Weapon Box) - Frozen Sword (Craftable) - Artisan's Bow (Weapon Box) - Mace (Weapon Box)

[ 2020-04-13 20:35:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

For this year's Egg Hunt event, added a Wand for Mage's as a new/unique item, along with the new Wand (T1.5) - there's a T1 wooden Wand available to be bought directly from the basic weapons npc Most important change is an updated weapon logic, now each class define how using a weapon affect it's stats, for example a Warrior can equip/use a Bow, but it's very inefficient - Along with this change, completed/improved the internal weapon tiering logic too - Initially, now all the bows are controlled by this new/practical logic (and the new wands too) - What does this mean? Well I can finally start introducing T3 weapons, as they will be easier to balance Working on the Dungeon, added a new polygonal spawn logic, integrated into our Arena first since it's fitting for Irradiated Goo's as well, so far so good, tackled the initial issues. Progressed the new map editor features further. The dungeon is ready map-wise, global drops are ready, individual drops/monster dynamics are left to week 63. There's a new trap format too, first example is a zone that slows you down Spent close to a week preparing the required artwork for Mac App Store / for potentially getting featured, preparing marketing material doesn't come easy to me - it's very stressful

Other Changes:

- New Code Functions: get_party, get_servers, get_characters, kick_party_member, consume - move, xmove, smart_move routines now return Promise's - New Method: stop('smart') - New Abilities: "regen_hp", "regen_mp" - Added new buttons / shortcuts to the Guide - New Discord message for game updates

[ 2020-04-07 11:37:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dedicated this week to re-visiting the map data format and upgrading our in-house map editor Up to this point all spawns and zones were rectangular, they were always manually set, monsters will all be roaming inside the dungeon, so added zoning capabilities to the map editor to make things easier, spawns zones will be large polygons for the dungeon Secondary improvement/addition is dynamic animations, with this extension, going to add stuff like high frame chimney smokes to liven up the game - this was a bit of a challenge because up to now we only had 3-frame animations that were tied to the animation speed of the map, with this change, animations are completely free - they also blend with players (render over or under players depending on location)

[ 2020-03-25 08:49:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

While Jayson almost finished the Dungeon map design, I dedicated this week to tackling the challenges of moving to NodeJS/new cloud technologies - While game-wise it is not directly productive, I consider it a good investment - I suspect it's going to take around 2 weeks to actually re-write/re-structure and move everything when/if the time comes to open source Good thing about the current Python backend is that it can fully run locally too, the new Node JS one will assumably make things simpler, however, new stuff can't run locally, so it will be a game that will go live with 1 command - it's both cool and bad, bad because free tiers are very restrictive and cloud costs are high - I just hope it won't be a roadblock to those who attempt yo build their own experimental mmorpg's - and I guess it also eliminates the step each project has where you go from local development to a public version

[ 2020-03-16 21:26:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 this week, fell in love with it, inspired me to go forward with the companion mobile app and related improvements The result is: https://adventure.land/comm/ You can also click any in-game character () and just start observing them from the main screen too The mobile app is also complete, it's a lot like the Electron client vs. Browser - so the browser is more practical yet mobile app is full screen / more authentic - going to release the iOS one soon, couldn't test android as I don't have an android device, emulators are almost impossible to debug with (TL;DR: You can just use /comm on mobile, it won't be better than the actual thing for some time)
I was almost going to release the XP Extractor item/device, yet couldn't decide on the amount of XP extracted from a character and bottled, if the cost is set to be one qubics (5m gold) 100m XP makes sense - So you'd extract 100m XP from one of your characters using 1 qubics (or your merchant could buy XP from a character with a special listing) - The dynamics are hard to decide as I can't predict how the market would be - I'm guessing 100m XP would be worth 20 million gold? (so the cost of one bottle is the 20m you pay + the 5m cost) Added the "Performance Settings" - the selection screen also got a new layout - Turning off the "Pre-Cached Maps" makes the game playable on low performance devices Monsters that transport back to their spawns now retain their original ID's, with this change, they are automatically re-targeted For Week 59, going to experiment with retaining every message sent - local, private or party messages, if you send a pm to an offline player, it's going to get saved for viewing later on too - if that player is on another server, going to get delivered there - planning on adding a "Global" section to "COM" too, where every local message appears (or maybe a 4th "global" type message) Small changes: - New "wblade" projectile / hit animation - Improved X.servers data - Improved X.characters data

[ 2020-03-10 19:46:26 CET ] [ Original post ]

A fruitless week from my end, but the Dungeon design progresses - the week was mostly wasted on tax stuff and some other things Refactored the server a bit, the next update will fortify the extra gold drops, favor Rangers a bit more (as targeting 1+ monsters used to reduce the gold amount to prevent abuse - now it will factor in the last engagement time internally) From #new_ideas, Rapier will make it into the game, as a 2-hand weapon with 1-hand stats with additional attack speed

[ 2020-03-02 22:19:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Mostly an experimental week, not very productive Jayson pushed the Dungeon design architecturally, while I experimented with new mechanics One nice new feature: Weather animations, currently snow and rain, maybe a sandstorm for Desertland in the future, and storm fx to complement rain Other than weather, experimented with limited vision, lighting and a fog of war-like vision limitation - this fog of war is needed if the vision of a character is smaller than the viewport Small change, elixirs can now be right-click consumed too

[ 2020-02-24 23:09:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

It was a very productive full week, tackled some edge issues Started by messing up the gold dynamics, we have an entirely new system now where the engagement with the monster affects the gold drop, especially for low level players, it makes so much more sense for them to fight harder monsters, the longer the fight the better the gold income - For veteran players, I've been increasing the base modifier for the gold drop gradually too, while nerfing boosters etc. Tackled a very major UI issue, mainly an html shortcoming, if an entity is updating, clicks to that entity never register anywhere, in my opinion it's a long standing browser/chromium shortcoming. So for 3 years now, if your inventory was updating, or a character was continually updating, you couldn't click/interact with them, it was beyond imagination annoying, at least for me. On the weekend, I decided to tackle this problem once and for all, at first developed mimicker dom entities, for anything clickable, these acted like fixed position overlays, it was a classic case of developing before thinking, it didn't work with the inventory, as it was almost impossible to make drag and drop function as it used to function. I then decided to just re-visit each major interface, and modify them to only update things that changed. For example for the inventory, if it's open, instead of the entire inventory updating on every change, now items change singularly. Integrated this approach to the focused characters too, even if they continually spam something, like equip/unequip, you can click on their other items, click on the Invite/PM buttons etc. Conditions are still re-rendered at every update, so you can still observe this click issue - but important stuff has been patched There were more edge UI improvements too, items on the "All Merchants" page render all the information, similarly, items on the /character and /player URL's now render item stat types/properties too The "DUNGEON" server design is progressing as well, I originally wanted to make Adventure Land a very PVP oriented and chaotic game, it evolved more into an idle PVE game, I see the Dungeon as an opportunity to introduce (or force) more direct engagement

Other Changes:

- Monsters no longer level up during engagements - Incoming damage multiplier for party contribution reduced from 0.4 to 0.3 - Items stacking limit can now be lower than 9999 - .s property determines the limit - Citizen Luck/Gold buffs and dynamics nerfed - Chests go stale (no gold bonus) if you don't loot them in 10 minutes

[ 2020-02-17 20:50:22 CET ] [ Original post ]

New System: Charging Items - currently only the Warp Vest and the Power Glove's and only Ancient Computer passively and randomly charges these items Warp Vest and the Power Glove's received their abilities, Warp Vest can warp to anywhere in the game, yet it takes ~an hour to charge, and after 100% charge, ~20 hours to gain additional charges - Power Glove's take ~120 and ~90 hours to fully charge, when you unleash the power, you get a high attack speed buff for some seconds, it's like an on-demand and overloaded Sugar Rush. As a reminder, Power Glove is a rare drop from the Konami Quest (just enter the code and grind) Two new set definitions, "The Legends" and "Rage and Fury" - first includes Star Killers, Warp Vest, the latter includes Fury and Sucker Punch Fixed the last remaining entities/monsters issue after the recent change, this mainly plagued the appearance of monsters in the browser (unfocusing and focusing the page), they halted for a while before moving again Fixed combination damage, you can no longer trigger combination damage by stacking your players on top of someone else and including them in the damage - However this still works during coop fights (Checks character.s.coop.id) Nerfed the +1000% Gold/Luck citizen buffs, should've done it earlier New Item: Stompy's Nose Ring Snowman, Love Goo no longer affected by damage return, they should also level slower Fixed the Shiny item system (grade condition was missing), lowered the %'s too Overall, a slow week, lost 2-3 days to some other stuff

[ 2020-02-10 19:05:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our Valentine's day event is rebooted! It was an exciting week in terms of exciting issues, first one was a hoard of uncontrollably growing monster pack caused by the new routine that can kill monsters with damage return, the condition spawned a new monster each time it was death before a projectile can hit it. Second one was more major, discovered by Biene (Dre4mc4tcher on Discord) - the upgrades never failed on the new Europas Dungeon server. When an exception occurred before the post upgrade cleanup, it caused the previous upgrade item to be restored after a failure. Thankfully he reported it and we avoided our first rollback. Planning to make April 1st a planned rollback day, the game will shutdown at one point and everything will rollback to midnight

The T-Shirts are finally released New System: Platinum / Gold / Bronze Ingot's/Nugget's can be used to produce Shiny items from +0 upgradeable items (FreezePhoenix's idea on Discord) Took the Europas Dungeon server for a test run, I think I'm going to use the new "Doorway Protector" mechanic for the Pirate Ship instead - the attraction of the Europas Dungeon should be hard to kill monsters and pvp / last hit gets the loot mechanic

Small Changes:

- Fixed an issue that caused characters to get stuck at 0.5 alpha - Trade History is improved, recurring purchases now stack too - Vampire Rat's now drop nuggets instead of ingots - Items from Glitches are now Glitched items - Legendary scrolls drop from Emerald with a very low% - Items can now stack inside chests

[ 2020-02-04 19:12:44 CET ] [ Original post ]

A very productive 4 days after the last update, really hope I can keep this pace up, here's a long list of changes:

• Projectiles can now be avoided if the `.m` attibute of the target changes or the target moves away more than ~72 pixels (to be improved later on, higher for healing) - `.m` attribute changes on transport/teleport
• Improved the "hit" event documentation and added "action"/"incoming"/"target_hit" game/character events
• New system: Penalty Cooldown, when you equip an item, `character.s.penalty_cd` is incremented 120ms - when you attack, your cooldown is increased by this cumulative (but decaying) amount - I suspect the dynamics might change with feedback
• New Item: Frost Bow
• New Projectiles: Fire Bow, Frost Staff, Harbringer, Oozing Terror
• Fire, frost weapons, harbringer now have 2 looks on characters - one resting and one active look
• This is internally a major change, significantly refactored how players/monsters (aka. entities) are sent and processed, they are now bundled with `start` and `new_map` socket events, so there's no vision delay when you first enter a map - Also, more importantly, when you focus an unfocused browser tab, parent.entities no longer become empty momentarily, it's always populated now, this change might break some things with a low probability
• Save code works in bank if you don't change the slot name
• Improved Dragold, new skill charging UI, multi burn has a different projectile, added armor/resistance, nerfed the multi burn damage and interval
• Monster state restoration fixed (when the monster teleports back to its spawn), previously the contribution was reset for bosses, and the announcement was re-sent
• When the server restarts, monsters that drop to 1HP no longer provide 100% drop and count as 1 kill, their drop is proportional to their hp and they count as 2.2X of their progress - so if a boss is only at 10% - it counts as a 0.22 kill - if it's at ~50% - it counts as a whole kill - going to document all these arbitrary multipliers at one point
• Added "death" game events
• New code function: get_focus
• Increased Fire Roamers' essence drop rate
• Monsters can now die from burn too
• Both monsters and players can now die from damage return
• New public character property: `.pdps` - exact metric that's used to calculate party share %
• Evasion now contributes to both `.pdps` and coop points, burn contributes to `.pdps` A lot of other small changes as well (for example traps can now kill players)

Phew, it has also been 1 year in Early Access, was planning to do a review of year, but better not demotivate myself, doesn't feel like it was a productive year :)

[ 2020-01-27 18:43:34 CET ] [ Original post ]

Dragold ended up being too strong, every 15 seconds, hurls a fireball to everyone who fought against him, even if he isn't in an active fight. These fireballs each deal 5000 damage before reductions and apply a burn with 100% chance. Definitely going to use this mechanic again but going to calibrate it so it's easy to detect and possible to evade (like running away before it happens) Apart from the Chinese New Year event, it wasn't a very productive 2 weeks. The Pirate Ship zone design iterated a bit. Spent most of it researching new cloud technologies, there's a high probability I'm going to rewrite the backend of Adventure Land in JS before open sourcing, currently it's in Python. After Python 2.7's end of life, it doesn't make sense to continue with Python any more. Also Google Cloud, in my opinion, made a lot of illogical choices when they re-made everything with Python 3.7. It's not an easy to use, turnkey, "app engine" any more, you have to deal with each service manually, each of them are like unique programmer dementors, waiting to suck your soul. Originally, App Engine was a beautiful product anyone could use to practically develop almost anything, currently they made the barrier of entry extremely high. For this reason it makes sense to rewrite Adventure Land with NodeJS/App Engine. The logic is, if it's all in JS, at least it will be less complicated, someone wanting to develop their own MMORPG won't need to deal with an additional language on top of everything.

[ 2020-01-23 14:03:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Holiday season was a bit of a holiday season for me too, but started re-visiting the ideas around daily events and attractions - here's the current draft: Daily Events: [2X Each Day ~30mins each] [8PM-9PM] - Goo Brawl [PVE] - A/B Testing [PVP] - Come up with more [TODO] Daily Zones: [9PM-12PM] Monday - Mansion Mystery [Roguelike-ish] [Done] Tuesday - The Castle [Done] Wednesday - Cloudland Thursday - Dracul's Lair Friday - [?] Saturday - The Island with the Tall Tower Sunday - Pirate Ship [PVP] [Done] Everyday [12PM-1AM] - [PVP] A multi-level dungeon opens for 1 hour So basically, the plan is to start the day with 2 small game-like daily events from 8pm to 9pm, then a limited time zone opens for 3 hours, the dynamics of the zones will hopefully be unique to encourage more on-screen and assisted gameplay From 12PM to 1AM, plan to introduce a dungeon that is a bit like an underground tower or silo, a PVP zone, it might have it's own special server too, so while the PVP is of the safe kind, the risk/reward dynamics could encourage strong characters, code or collaborative gameplay Each of these zones and daily events are going to open up new paths to introduce new items, but I feel like the 12PM to 1AM zone could be the main source of the endgame exchangeables - especially for the weapons, while the rest could be for unique armors and accessories and such So the coming weeks will likely be progressing on this draft and completing/concluding things from earlier weeks, like the cosmetics system, pets system, minor changes like the achievement counting dynamics and so on

[ 2020-01-07 10:38:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started completing incomplete things. Added the Fire Bow and the Fiery Gloves, the gloves make a minor set with the shoes. Added "Burn" and the "burned" state, it's currently not finalized or documented. Basically if you trigger the burned state, the target takes damage over time for 5 seconds, close to your initial damage each second - When it gets re-triggered, the intensity can increase but not much Winterland and Desertland received "burn_multiplier"s and "freeze_multiplier"s Added code slot persistence, when you load a code, the slot is persisted and appears when you try to save, however, if you load a code, then immediately undo it from the editor, the change isn't automatically picked up Fixed the game_log / number logging issue on the game clients and item ability %'s can now stack, for example dual wielding Fiery Swords on a Warrior will double the Burn%

[ 2019-12-24 02:39:20 CET ] [ Original post ]

These 2 weeks have gone by really fast, it was mostly filled with patches and small fillers apart from the launch of the Holiday Season event. I went through some personal challenges, had the chance to work on a major problem I had and leave it behind, currently feeling pretty good, gaining a lot of momentum lately too
Really proud of this new interface that explains each aspect of the event with Code examples, going forward each event, special mechanic, special zone is going to include a similar info button that explain the dynamics with Code examples
There's visual progress on the Pets front as well :)

Some of the notable additions:

- Monster info now includes the "Base Gold" drop rate, the data is in "G.base_gold" - The NPC Mr. T is now named Cole instead - game.on("event") - Underlying methods of show_json are now able to show the attributes like .x/.y - which are getter/setters of PIXI objects - Special monsters can now resist being stunned with 50% chance, probably going to make it transparent in the future and introduce it as a "Skill Resistance"

[ 2019-12-19 19:46:57 CET ] [ Original post ]

Worked on the CLI a bit, the memory leak is solved - only problem remaining is the low performance of the vm environment, added a way to offload computation to the master.js file that runs the CLI characters - once I complete the external smart_move, I'll release the CLI Started refining the Code/Skills interaction, replacing existing functions with better named functions that have clearer/singular purposes, existing functions will keep on working. There's a new accompanying Code article too. Started promisfying use_skill Going to release the Holiday Season event this week

Upcoming changes:

- destroy_item becomes destroy - New code function: is_in_range(target,skill) - New code function: is_on_cooldown(skill) - New attributes on G.skills: range_multiplier, range_bonus, cooldown_multiplier - Possible breaking change: .range values such as "1X+32", "3X" are no more - use_skill will accept an array of objects for multi-target functions

[ 2019-12-03 13:13:47 CET ] [ Original post ]

Improved the cosmetics system further, it's hard to settle with a feature-set for the cosmetics system, It's read for release at this point, however I'll probably spend at least one more week on it. It's also hard to decide on the delivery of the cosmetics, we currently have 5 premium items, if all of the cosmetics drop from these items, it becomes a very rng-heavy delivery. It might be a good idea to separate different things to different packs. There's a new item called the "cxjar" - basically if you liquify a cosmetics entity and put it into an "emptyjar" it becomes a "cxjar", for example bats will drop "cxjar"s including bat wings with a very low %. In addition, it will be possible to receive cosmetics from exchanges too! Some progress on pets as well, I think the puppy licenses and that one "kitty1" item that dropped from a "glitch" is going to increase in value soon :) New Feature: Citizen Aura's - Kane grants +1000% Luck and Angel grants +1000% Gold to start with, whenever they are nearby. The auras only last 12 seconds At the next update, there'll be a new "chest" opening Game event, the data includes a lot of details, the +Gold% of a character now only applies if you are close to the chest, and if you are in a party, only the looters +Gold% applies To counter some abuse scenarios, magiport and blink now act like you spent 30 seconds in the abyss, so all of your buffs age 30 seconds too, otherwise It'd be possible to stack chests, designate a character as an aura boy and only loot chests with the +Gold aura Another small change, "compound" now returns a Promise (game needs to be updated first, so not now now, probably within this week)

[ 2019-11-25 21:07:14 CET ] [ Original post ]

Solved most of the initial theoretical dilemmas around the pets system, monsters will drop chrysalises or eggs, these will be combined with monsterboxes at the pets NPC, at this step you'll name your pet and it will be born (monsterbox might get renamed to something more creative, depending on the art) - Pets will each have their own unique character There's a new mechanic, blocked items, a very common repetitive bug report is opening a merchant stand and storing the stand or sending them to someone else, now actively using an item blocks that item so it can't be sent, stored or sold - releasing a pet from it's box will block the box too, which is why I had to add this now. While working on this, decided to give the Ancient Computer a merchant stand functionality too Obsessed so much over the look of female characters, to make them look more distinctly feminine, progressed a lot in the face and hair department, the exact placement of the hair, the amount of bangs, the shading of the face, hopefully it will all be perfect before the cosmetics release Jayson converted all existing characters to a better dimensional format and went over them all, the cosmetics system will be able to unlock uncustomizable but unique characters too, you'll only be able to add hats and maybe back accessories to them Obsessed a lot over the CLI version of the game too, stress tested it in many different scenarios, leaned routines further - currently there's a memory leak coming from jsdom, none of the setTimeout's/their contexts are garbage collected - until that's fixed, might release the CLI version and add a auto-restart feature to it to overcome the memory leak - I was planning to add a 20 shells/day cost to CLI usage, to balance CLI usage against regular players and prevent practical multi-account farming, however I'm open to other suggestions (thinking of adding a recycle feature too, to convert cosmetics items back to shells, this way CLI users can auto-purchase them and support the inter-game economy) Re-visited the game clients, going to update all platforms soon with Electron 7.1.1 - however practical character switching using webviews won't make it to this update

[ 2019-11-18 19:45:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added a tunnel underneath Mainland to more easily move to Spooky Forest
This week's main addition is the account-wide achievements system, which applies the maximum# of kills from any character to every character
This system pushes players to split their characters into other parties, basically if 9 players come together and form 9 different parties maximum gain is achieved - which could be a good thing to be honest, but to balance things, here's my current idea: 1) If the kill happens away from a character, it would now count as 0.5 a kill 2) For each of your own characters in a party, 0.4 kills are added for each kill (2 characters = 1.4 kills each, 3 characters = 1.8 kills each) With these changes, players can still go 9X9 and prosper, but those who party their own characters won't feel bad about it either - open to further suggestions on Discord/#feedback Spent most of this week theoretically working on Pets + Cosmetics, I intend to release them together

[ 2019-11-04 20:49:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week was dedicated to our new /docs page: https://adventure.land/docs All game and code documents, guides, articles and references are now linkable! When you open a linkable reference on the browser, you can copy-paste the url to more quickly help others find solutions! Pledge: To ease helping other players and prevent repetition, post a frequently askable question on Discord/#feedback and I'll add it as a page to our Docs! (One example: How can I send items/gold to other players?) The naming and nesting structure isn't finalised, so I haven't dived into it myself, but post a logical question and I'll add it even if it's in a temporary place for now (I can't come up with 20 FAQ's for example, if I could, I'd add them as Frequently Asked Questions on top of the Guide - and maybe Common Examples on top of the Code/Learn)
There's one new code article that uses 2 new code functions - get and set - there's a very practical example that makes you alternate between 2 actions and persists your action even if the game is refreshed!
Want to publish the cosmetics system, after requesting feedback on Discord, one other strong idea emerged, where cosmetics would drop similar to item exchanges (to a special inventory), and you could easily transfer and trade them, this approach does seem to solve the downsides of my approach, which are (1) My approach isn't account-wide, whereas with this new approach, the cosmetics can be transferred to your own characters too (2) With my approach, rarity isn't easily achievable, simply opening a pack N times unlocks everything (3) no-trade vs being tradeable - Downside: It's even more lootboxy, but at least now it's tradeable? I'm honestly very unsure about which path to follow

Other Changes:

- S.snowman and S.franky are now populated whenever they are alive (as requested) - New code functions: get, set

[ 2019-10-29 19:34:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week was dedicated to the first prototype of the mailing system, currently only player to player text mails are possible
Combined the Friends / Nearby / Server tabs of COM into a single Com-rades tab to save space
After some feedback on Discord, revisited the local code messaging system, code messages to your own characters should hopefully be 99%+ consistent now - retention is still possible but much much less likely to happen

Other Changes:

- New Code Function: safe_log - Candy droptable reformulation

[ 2019-10-22 14:40:53 CET ] [ Original post ]

Burst now deals pure damage with a higher multiplier and controlled burst has almost no cooldown but wastes 80 mp at each use - The old initial supershot/burst cooldown is no more - back in the day, hp levels were low, since they are currently high, no need to prevent high burst scenarios Internally unified most of the skill responses, they are pretty much ready to be Promise'd The updated Spooky Forest is live, Spooky Town has 2 new entry points, thanks to the feedback from Discord, the Halloween bosses too can be dynamically observed to increase engagements A very exciting change this week is the new name of our town - Mainland! - Congratulations and thanks to Torins for finding the new name, I mean - "main" + "-land" - it's a match made in heaven for a coding game Another simple but notable improvements is rendering weapons on monsters, the Halloween bosses are the first 2, as suggested, going to make monsters drop the weapon they are equipping with a % - For the planned pirate ship, thinking of randomly equipping pirates with weapons It was overall a productive week, the game is finally updated and the Halloween event is live, a lot of small changes and animations. However, I'm not sure what to work on next :) Last 2 days have been a bit aimless, thinking of adding the Mail system so we can have weekly leaderboards / rewards and so on, the Mail system would allow a game-wide backend logic to reward players with items

Other Changes:

- Trying to enter the bank now costs an additional 32 calls - Band of Fury and Star Killers can no longer be legacified

[ 2019-10-15 17:57:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our Halloween event is live! Candies are global drops, you can easily track when the Pumpkin bosses are going to spawn and join the fight!
Along with the Halloween event, the Spooky Forest is updated, and there are 2 new entrances to Spooky Town Candies drop a very rare new Ranger Bow too!

[ 2019-10-13 19:57:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week's highlight is the delayed attack/heal/skill landings, ie. hits - each projectile has it's own speed, some weapons have special projectiles, in time weapon speed (for initial take off) and dodging (for physical projectiles) will get into the mix too. You can now observe an incoming magic projectile and erect your reflective shield, it's pretty fun watching the projectile reflect back and forth when it happens :) attack() and heal() functions now return the new "action" event, the "hit" event can be observed from Game Events, or as "hit"/"target_hit" from the Character Events
We have many new animations too, thanks to Jayson's efforts - so many new ideas

Got a new weapon for Halloween! Has 2 different versions, one regular version and a special Halloween version - the Halloween event should launch before next week's update (I hope :) I feel like I lost this week with the flu, illnesses are the best excuses to procrastinate. This new attack and animation system makes me question the meaning of life, I continually ask myself whether it improves the game. I certainly hope it does in the end. I'll also note to myself that what the game really needs is the tutorial and guide improvements, and a Steam store overhaul/update afterwards. Every day and week I feel the guilt of not progressing faster, especially as the holiday season gets closer

Other Changes:

- Projectile info at: G.projectiles - Token exchanges no longer announce the item - Suppressed the orb announcements - Resort door in Tavern fixed (thanks to Bjarnu on Discord for the reminder) - A long standing 3-shot cooldown reporting bug fixed (thanks to Seth on Discord) - Added 50% Evasion to one of the Automatrons

[ 2019-10-08 20:26:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

New Animation Style: Character to Target Burst - Instead of the old lines, skills that affect other characters or monsters, will render connections representing the skill - the screenshot above is the new Controlled Mana Burst
New Animation: Force/Momentum Projectile's for Melee's - The animation challenge for melee characters is their high range, so for now, they'll throw these projectiles representing the momentum they generate
New Mage Skill: Reflective Shield
New Mage Skill: Entangle
New Mage Skill: Alchemy
Started re-attempting new player acquisition with Reddit and Adsense Ads, the Reddit one started serving at a very slow pace Jayson prepared a multitude of new awesome projectiles and animations, a new heal animation and an accompanying projectile, new shield animations - Also completed the updated Spooky Forest Thanks to Saiz's report on Discord, I discovered a bug in the referral system, the 200 shells rewards weren't being processed, after I re-dived into the system, decided to simplify how it works, since we switched to a DRM'ed account system now, there's no need to enforce the 72 level requirement for the reward, so I first reduced it to 48 levels, but then decided to remove it altogether, if you introduce a friend to Adventure Land, you'll instantly get 200 shells - as this change could potentially introduce loopholes, couldn't release the new stuff on Monday, hoping to release them in the coming days after more testing

[ 2019-10-01 20:03:55 CET ] [ Original post ]

Completed the first version of the projectile throwing attacks and the weapon animations, currently it's a rough prototype, in time going to refine each weapon types' animation Ring of Armor and Ring of Resistance are now available from Mr. T now (thinking of renaming 'Mr. T' to 'Cole' by the way)
New skill images are ready too, going to integrate the new skills on Week 35 Jayson is working on some map improvements and new/better projectiles for different weapons
A big thanks to the Discord community for continually helping the development:

Thoughts:

This new animation system sparked a lot of new ideas related to weapon and attack speeds, some weapons could be slow to engage, some projectiles could be slow to reach their target (variable delay based on distance) - At one point, thinking of adding a delay logic to attacks (currently it's all instant) - but hopefully not on Week 35 - better concentrate on other aspects for a while

Other Changes:

(Both thanks to egehanhk on Discord) - Fixed a monster movement logic issue that made them disappear - Fixed Cupid Bow's Promise responses and ping calculations

[ 2019-09-24 15:15:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

Inspired by: https://discordapp.com/channels/238332476743745536/238366540091621377/619091519181291520 This week was dedicated to the new in-game weapon renderings, and new attack animation trials. Currently the weapon rendering prototype is live. All classes except Rogue, in my opinion, looks good, the Rogue is very challenging, as the scale for weapons needs to be 50% - I'm hoping once our eyes get used to it, it will look natural, this is the reason for the current trial. A secondary alternative is adding smaller pixel representations of the weapons with the 100% pixel sizing - this is already a must for weapons like the Fiery Staff / Blade and the Frozen Claw, as their images have pixel art representing fire and ice (their final in-game versions will differ) Ultimately, the weapons will animate during attacks, replacing the age-old attack lines - and +8 / +9 / +10 weapons will have special fx (depending on their grade / value and colorscheme)

Other Changes:

- Fixed the drop info for items like stat amulets - New setting to turn off the new weapon/attack system

[ 2019-09-17 18:51:52 CET ] [ Original post ]

As I was on holiday, couldn't progress too much in these 2 weeks - our pixel artist was also similarly unavailable, so the new skills and items haven't made it into the game yet Managed to complete the prototype of the "All Merchants" interface, this allows you to quickly view the exact whereabouts and the trade inventory of all the merchants in the game with an open stand

Changelist:

- Fire Spirits now drop Essence of Fire's - Fixed the "grades" bug that was introduced with the new fractal tiered armors - "darkblessing" and "warcry" now indicate who the buff came from - Updated Ranger's class definition - New Code Article: CODE > LEARN > Advanced Topics > API Call System - New Game Event: "api_response"

[ 2019-09-10 19:30:43 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added a collect+exchange starter Orb, the Quiver is now obtainable this way too
Overall it was a slow week, added Ring of Armor, Ring of Resistance, Belt to the game, adapted 3 mage skills from Discord/#new_ideas to be added to the game, drafted one "Super Magical Ring" with an active ability (future drop), however our item pixel artist is away, the images didn't make it, I also got caught up in playing the game a bit myself, neglected progress a bit :) Last week's item changes made "Star Killer's Pants" Mage/Priest-only, this upset players that invested a lot on high level items, this week the "Band of Fury" becomes class locked too, however, if you call "parent.socket.emit('legacify')" - It converts all affected items in your inventory to become "Legacy" prefixed items, thus keeping the original properties of the item (just unrestricted class for current items) I'll be away from home for a week, taking my work system with me, so I'll keep an eye on game health, but I'll likely not be able to make significant progress Also congratulations to Muffin from Discord for discovering an unannounced mechanic that could've been exploited, and reporting it right away

Bugfixes:

- Fixed the party/monsterhunt logic, the deleveling part was left unintegrated - Patched (hopefully) another issue that caused monsters to just keep on walking indefinitely (new issue) - Patched the "distance()" function to work with the proxied character object in Code

[ 2019-08-28 20:05:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

It was another productive week. Also I want to thank everyone who send motivating emails, messages on Discord, they really help
This week made the game more friendlier to newcomers, but at this point, I feel like I have to release the tutorial, even if it's not fully complete
With the new "All Items" and "All Monsters" sections, I feel like the Guide has become very useful, I find myself checking it all the time, started using the non-"Pro Mode"

Finally fully completed the "Information (i)" section, also made most of the item icons and references clickable, instead of rendering in-place of the old item, now these referenced items render as their own popups - It's not immediately noticeable, but the item sections have been enriched quite a bit New damage type: Pure damage, Boo Boo's currently deal pure damage, going to reduce the variance of pure damage significantly, maybe make Fortitude apply against pure damage too


Idea for week 30: Fire/burn: 5% damage burn every second, Ice damage: Move+attack slow, Poison damage: Reduced healing, Lightning damage/struck: Damage while moving or attacking - Thinking of applying some of these ideas to monsters and skills, it'd make the Fiery weapons more useful, the % of burn chance will be low, but since the burn deals % damage, it will be significant - Going to re-visit Mana Burst too, add a % of lightning-struck state to it, possibly the full mana burst is going to cause it 100% New Monsters: Fire Spirit and Poison Pom Pom - the new Pom Pom, "pppompom" poisons it's target with every attack, Porcupine moved to Desertland Monsters with high attacks (currently >100) now attack and move a bit smarter, they keep on attacking even if they can't move and change course dynamically Experimented with a roaming Dark Knight, definitely going to introduce the mechanic to the game, I might invest the time to add path finding monsters too, otherwise possible dungeon/raid like encounter scenarios end up being a bit dull Jayson prepared many new armors, hats, hairdos, a guitar and a turtle shell as a backpack for testing. The cosmetics system feels more and more refined by the week. The only reason I haven't released the system yet is that I'm not sure whether a selective randomness is needed, for example, if your character is female, a hair bundle ideally should reward a female hair - however such a pre-selection might not always be preferable The month-long update on Monday was very eventful, as #googledown prevented the deployment for 45 minutes - even still, love App Engine :)

Other Changes:

- New Stat: +Crit Damage% - New Item: Legendary Compound Scroll - Base Stat Orb's integrated - Most items announced in earlier weeks released

[ 2019-08-20 19:39:10 CET ] [ Original post ]

Overall a very productive week, I really wanted to update the game on Monday, but with all the changes, likely the update is going to take some more time Most important addition this week is the "Information (i)" section on all items, this section details everything that can be done with the item, from exchange to crafting and collecting, dismantling - which monsters drop the item, every way it can be obtained and so on

Added 6 new class specific sets to the Monster Token Shop, to balance the other items, added set bonuses to the Rugged/T3/T4 sets - pretty soon, the T3/T4 sets are most likely going to become class specific too, for a short period of time, it will likely be possible to morph existing items to another class (Rugged set has some light bonuses, while the T3/T4 sets have Fortitude-only set bonuses, subject to change) At one point, I intend to re-visit weapons in a similar way, possibly add tiers to weapons, define the upper limits, so a stable economy around weapons could form Both the token shop and the crafting/dismantling recipes are now paginated For week 29, planning on improving the Guide with "All Items" / "All Monsters" sections too, basically the "All Items" section will be an easy way to browse all items, for newcomers to quickly assess how to find new gear and so on - For example, on the "Capes" section, click on a cape, see that it's acquired by exchanging leather, click on leather, see monsters that drop leather, click on one of them, automatically move to Winterland and so on

Changelist:

- G.drops to include drop data, instead of tracker-only access - New sets at G.sets

[ 2019-08-13 22:00:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

Couldn't get much done on Week 26, I usually get stuck when it's time to make big changes, however, I believe Week 27 was the start of a new era Going forward, every monster will drop at least one rare item, and at least one crafting item or collectable item There's a new NPC that will exchange different combinations of these collectable items to useable items, so it's actually much like crafting, as far as the socket calls goes, it's actually crafting, but as far as the game design goes, it removes the need to come up with crafting recipes that need to make perfect sense (Thanks to our collaboration with Ellian, our pixel artist for items and skills) Much of the first exchangables will be for early game, for example the Wanderer's set will also be attainable through these collectable items etc. - later on going to move onto stronger monsters, finally populate the underground with this new design and so on Orb's are coming soon too, no more event-only Orb slot items! :)
^ One small change that makes the game more friendly to newcomers, a common early player feedback was missing chat messages when inventory is open, this little notification will hopefully solve that problem Going to release this new system in the coming days, hopefully around Thursday, and if it's well received, going forward with the population

[ 2019-08-06 18:45:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

Just a small step in the right direction this week, the Code "DOCS" gets a much needed search option - It was originally requested on Discord
Nothing to show on the new content front, no momentum yet. I've been digesting all the recent feedback - Once again, hoping this week is the week that I start a new chapter in content introduction

[ 2019-07-23 19:11:01 CET ] [ Original post ]

Cosmetics system changes and trials consumed most of these 2 weeks, especially the first week. Added beards, tested long beards, almost reformulated everything to make them look good. Sadly my approach to generating new items didn't bear fruit yet, so there are no good news on the new content front


From early player feedback, started makings things easier to understand and the game easier to navigate. So today's update includes some interface changes and additions, most notable one is the one below - where the empty slots have darker borders (I still can't get used to it but it makes more sense, might revert to the original looks later on)


Thanks to the Monster Achievements list Trexnamedtom prepared, I completed the first draft of the monster achievements, now all monsters have multiple achievements. I tried to balance it as much as I could, time and feedback will refine it further - I suspect once more monsters like the Golden Bat are added, there could be some different/unique achievements in the future - Otherwise, current achievements are perfect for the game's idle nature (Also Tracktrix just exposes all drop tables to anyone without any requirements now, much simpler)
Drafted with the idea of a Mini-Map above the Travel interface, converted to an image, the Town is 5MB's, so it's not trivial to render it simply as an image and make a mini map, so might try a mini-map of a more pixelized nature one day
The plan for the upcoming weeks is adding new content and making the game simpler to understand for new players

[ 2019-07-16 21:39:30 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started Week 21 by re-visiting the Cosmetics system with the intention of pushing it to completion and releasing it - Jayson prepares the sprites and I calibrate/integrate them, design the system around them - Ultimately, during Week 22, decided to do another revision before release - It's really challenging to make the hairs, hats look perfect, this revision is to make things easier
Moved the game servers to Google Cloud, initially experienced some issues where the game servers stopped receiving incoming emits, currently the game servers seem stable Ellian, who prepares our item sprites was busy in June, so delayed the new content additions to July, have a new approach to introducing new items, can't wait to see how it'll turn out After making the upgrade system more open, I realised that I started this journey to make a more open, less cryptic, simpler mmorpg, and after time passed by, I just forgot about my original intentions, the new upgrade system reminded me, I believe it made the game better, so I decided to push forward: Tracktrix received a new look and a new section: Exchanges, in addition, it now shows the monster drop tables and exchange drop rates - Having an Ancient Computer in your inventory unlocks all the data, otherwise, 100 monster kills or 100 exchanges are needed to see them!

[ 2019-07-02 16:25:40 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week's update probably included the most major change to the game since its inception, public upgrade/compound %'s and an accompanying roll animation! This change makes upgrades more transparent, caps the lower and higher %'s so the economy will be more stable in the future - and slows down upgrades - making merchants more crucial and opens up the possibility of selling pre-upgraded basic +8/+9 items. Initially was going to make this new system available through Tracktrix, or a special NPC in a special cave or something similar to that, but since it's aimed to be a core part of a core system - in the end decided to make it just available - Trexnamedtom suggested a way to speed up upgrades, so it might be added through a unique item or achievement The upgrade system is aimed to make upgrading basic items challenging, but allow "babied" items to have higher chances (so the gap between npc items and valuable items isn't so high) - and I believe this update fortifies this design too. You'll come to discover that wearing items slowly increases their upgrade % - and upgrades have a higher % after failures - so in the end, basic items usually get the lower cap of the % - while you can make sure you always upgrade near the highest % for valuable items In July, planning to introduce a lot more items, armor sets, weapons, populate the existing token shops, maybe introduce new ones - so normalizing the upgrade system was a relief, seemed like a prerequisite - Until July, might concentrate on completing the cosmetics system Second major improvement this week is the QOL improvements, one of the major shortcomings of the game was controlling your character and inventory while the Code was updating/changing things every second, the following improvements mostly solved these issues

Improvements:

- Inventory refreshes no longer closes open items - New system: Focusing instead of targeting - Your characters and others can be focused while the code targeting continues - Upgrade, Compound, Exchange interface restores itself after an inventory refresh As a result, even if your code is continually targeting new monsters, using potions, refreshing your inventory every second, you can now freely inspect your character, equip/unequip items, check out others nearby, upgrade/compound without the items resetting every second

Changelist:

- Arena is now a Safe PVP Zone - Server reset cooldown now appears in game logs too - New property: character.q - similar to .s or .c, for delayed actions - "placeholder" item - placed in the inventory to reserve the inventory position - upgrade/compound code functions updated - New property: character.focus - parent.xtarget points to the focused character

[ 2019-06-18 15:40:05 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week's highlight: New stat, Fortitude! Aimed as a PVP attribute, reduces player vs player damage diminishingly, 100 Fortitude currently reduces net PVP damage by 50%
Secondary new attribute: Manasteal! Similar to how Lifesteal works, Manasteal is based on the net damage with a % - so if you deal 1000 net damage, a 0.5% manasteal steals a maximum of 50 MP (Originally 0x00's suggestion on Discord) New stat scrolls: Scroll of Fortitude, Scroll of +XP, Scroll of +Gold, Scroll of +Luck, Scroll of Armor, Scroll of Resistance, Scroll of Armor Piercing, Scroll of Resistance Piercing, Scroll of Speed, Scroll of Lifesteal, Scroll of Manasteal, Scroll of Critical Hit (Crit), Scroll of Damage Return, Scroll of Attack Speed (A.Speed), Scroll of MP Cost Reduction (MP Cost), Scroll of Damage Increase (Damage/Healing Output Increase) - Not yet available, most will be very rare, Scroll of Fortitude will be via PVP Tokens Major Change: XP Loss is now 10% at PVP servers compared to PVE servers Considering revamping the upgrade system, keeping the same %'s, but making the exact % and exact roll transparent, making each next roll pre-determined and provably-fair, making each upgrade take around 2-3 seconds, slowing the upgrades a bit too

Changelist:

- Network Card can now be obtained for 2000 Monster Tokens - Stat scrolls now have a "multiplier" property - Character Sheet updated, has "Max XP Loss" info - Lifesteal is now based on net damage dealt - All monsters now have an internal default MP of 0.5% of their HP

[ 2019-06-11 07:29:25 CET ] [ Original post ]

Added the Monster Hunt quest this week, Daisy on the Town gives an infinitely repeatable monster hunt quest to eliminate monsters that leveled up too much
Re-working some base dynamics, speed is getting nerfed, high speed characters makes the game too easy, slowly starting to re-visit other dynamics too, weapons and weapon speed will be next, currently, as a new addition, each equipped weapon drops your speed by 4, a shield drops it by 5 Worked on the Tracktrix and monster achievements further, still far from complete Started introducing new items, Amulet of Mystery and Ring of Luck are the first 2 - Plan to introduce more through token exchanges - Thinking of making monsters drop mostly rare/regular accessories, crafting items and exchangeables, while new/endgame weapons could be obtained by PVP/Fun/Monster tokens and so on

Changelist:

- MP Cost calculation re-worked - Evasion is capped at 90% now - XP Tome's now cost 3.2M - New Map: The Hut - Network Card can be obtained for 5000 Monster Tokens too - Class locked items - Priest's Mace is the first of it's kind - "equip" socket method has 4, "unequip" has 12 call cost now - Monsters can delevel now, happens during the monster hunt quest if a level 1 monster is killed instead of a high level monster - New Code Function: find_npc - returns coordinates - smart_move now moves to a random pack when the monster id is provided - example: smart_move("snake") - Fixed some issues that caused the .targets logic to break - result of this change, if you agitate or taunt nerfed mummies now, they target you instead of disappearing right away

[ 2019-06-04 18:11:36 CET ] [ Original post ]

Experienced something resembling a writer's block these 2 weeks, intended to introduce more content, but there were no sparks. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that I care too much about the results. It creates a certain kind of fear where you're afraid to make mistakes and end up doing nothing at all. Decided to consider the game development like a game itself and just introduce new things, have fun, deal with the aftermath - In the end, managed to break out of that fruitless state on Sunday Out of all the things I want to add to the game, the "Pokedex"/Monster Achievements-like system was outcome/effort ratio-wise at the top Internally, each character has it's own internal counter for monster kills. There's a new item called "Tracktrix" - it allows you to see your stats and see the achievements/stat bonuses each monster provides As an example, if you managed to kill 10,000,000 Goo's - you get +1 permanent speed bonus, unlocked as long as the Tracktrix is in your inventory
Tracktrix curently costs 120M at the Premium Items NPC. Once the Tutorial system is complete, it will be an easy to acquire item - likely through a simple item collection quest (so the plan is to direct new players to this quest via the tutorial)

[ 2019-05-28 13:02:24 CET ] [ Original post ]

Json has been working on new a logo to replace the original one I created, I fell in love with this last iteration he came up with - Ideally want to the code aspect of the game represented in the icon too - maybe in a future iteration :) For me, week 15 was a slow week, other than some small bugfixes, I didn't really make any tangible progress - I dedicated this week to introducing new content to the game, and the week was spent thinking / contemplating / procrastinating. Hoping to actually introduce new things on week 16 [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7O6vdxPraA]The Weirdest MMO You've Seen, Promise!
Our player Vaserati sponsored his friend Skylent to review the game, you can see the result above. It was a very educational video for me, fortified and extended a lot of the deductions we made over the recent weeks - mainly the need for detailed and extensive documentation and examples. After watching the video, I realised that I've never watched a stream from the viewpoint of a player that's distant from coding. Some of the initial results include: 1) From time to time, after improvements, request streams from new players to see how they interact with the game, determine common pitfalls and find solutions 2) Extend descriptions with code-related info 3) For skills - add code ID's and actual code snippets that show how each skill can be used in code

[ 2019-05-14 18:45:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Most important addition this week is the new Guide with separate pages and a more visual/detailed approach, it's still a work in progress, slowly improving it Second major change is the new account restrictions, for some reason this was an extremely requested feature - I really wanted to keep things more relaxed but in the end caved in and added these new restrictions. Currently if a player creates multiple accounts, they all act like a singular account in terms of game limits. Also if someone buys the game and refunds it, there's a system that detects it. I feel kind of mixed about the players caring more about buy+refund situations than me but it's good that the new restrictions was so well received, while in general restrictions aren't usually welcome.
As a bonus to this new system, if you buy the game on Steam, but prefer to play on Web, you are now authorised internally as a Steam player, so if you play the game on a shared network with other players, the game no longer subjects you to IP limitations! Fixed the initial issues with the dueling system and the new instance routines Did some internal work this week, spent one day doing some work on our tilesets, spent another day porting the photo upload and dynamic image serving routines from an earlier project of mine, mainly for the new guide photos Added "is_silenced" to common functions - Characters were able to use skills while being stunned beforehand - Might add a silencing mechanic to the game too

[ 2019-05-07 14:15:29 CET ] [ Original post ]

This entire week was dedicated to the dueling mechanics, since Duelland is an instance of a map and not a singular map the changes included some new instance mechanics and fixes too Duels are between any 2 parties or individuals, they are flexible. Participants are restored to full hp/mp and a clean status state. After the duel, they are restored to their original positions and to their original states Currently duels can be engaged with the /challenge chat command - either with name or by targeting someone Technically, each duel is added to the server data, i.e. parent.S - If there's a duel in parent.S.duels - the transporter NPC lets anyone join and spectate the duel, during the duel, the instance data, i.e. parent.I is populated, parent.I.A includes the challenger party, I.B includes the acceptor party, each entity of the array is updated secondly with coordinates and other info like hp/character type (Going to document these soon)
This week was a "work freely" kind of week, while the dueling logic was complex, it was a 3 days job, so overall the performance of the week wasn't high, going back to working more structured in Week 14. As an important bit of info, acquired Google GCP Startup credits, so future servers will likely be hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (the backend was already on App Engine). Thanks to these credits, don't have to worry about costs as much Wanting to concentrate on an improved Guide, Documentation and Tutorial for Week 14 - at least make some progress - as these 3 seem like prerequisites for growth

[ 2019-04-30 12:43:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started the week by working on the CLI version of the game, it's now integrated with the game and can reconnect when disconnects happen - each character is now a node worker thread - I'd say it's ready for initial release and testing - however, still need to decide how to introduce official CLI gameplay, there might be a cost or a debuff, or maybe an in-game requirement/quest similar to proof of work systems Most important change this week is the introduction of Giveaways - You need a special hat to run giveaways, Hat of Generosity, when you put this hat on and attempt to list an item for sale, you can run a giveaway similar to how you list your items for sale - and if you are running a giveaway - the hat appears on your character so other characters now there's a giveaway to join - Had a lot of fun with giveaways on Monday - it was a nice ending to the Easter event On a personal note, I was running a very strict work schedule for a while, waking up at 6:45, working 8 to 5 - If you have well defined tasks to complete, a strict work schedule works wonders - but lately this wasn't the case - from time to time, I break this cycle to work more freely, and this week it was broken, the first fruit was the giveaways system, which I wanted to add for a while The priority for the game is the documentation and the tutorial system, but I don't really have much motivation to continue those at the moment, so I'll probably try and add more fun things for a while and hopefully get a burst of motivation to complete the tutorial/documentation in a short amount of time later on My project for week 13 is Duelland and the Duelling system

Changelist:

- Monsters can now have initial conditions - added the "fullguard" condition to Wabbit - Fixed a very edge issue which caused heals to inflict pvp damage in pve servers (Thanks to dusty on Discord) - Cleaned up most of the console.log's thanks to the CLI version which prints them all to the terminal - "ghatb", "ghatp" - Hat of Generosity items and the Giveaway system - Rabbit's Foot now cost 480 fun tokens

[ 2019-04-23 20:20:17 CET ] [ Original post ]

Started Week 9 by continuing the cosmetics efforts from Week 8 - Added eyewear to the list of possible face modifications - Integrated new cosmetics to character thumbnails that appear on the party list and the character selection screen
I had a trip planned that spanned Week 9 and Week 10, I originally planned to continue working on the game during this trip, yet this proved to be impossible, I mainly wish I took my mechanical keyboard with me, the faulty and icky butterfly keyboard of my Macbook made it torturuous to do any work, as the "Y" / "O" keys don't register most of the time :| On Week 10, we had one catastrophic event where Europas servers went offline - after inspection - seems to be a dataserver issue where the server was actually disconnected from the network momentarily Added a new system where noteworthy events appear on the top/right part of the screen, near where the party list appears, during the Easter, this new UI counts down minutes to the Wabbit spawn, and takes you to Wabbit with smart_move - Also integrated Franky and Snowman, whenever they are engaged, the engagement appears for every player on that server - This new UI will come in very handy when daily events are implemented
Added a new 20 second server shutdown cooldown, and when this cooldown starts, every engaged monster drops to 1 HP so all engagements can be completed - The last thing I want is to upset players, so this new mechanic ensures no progress is wasted during somewhat frequent yet irregular game updates

Changelist:

- Reflected magic damage is now reduced by the attacker's resistance too - Several fixes to the new send_cm logic that also sends local messages, seems stable now - 4 New Easter themed items and set bonus - New Mechanic: Defeating a monster granting a buff - New System + UI: Snowman, Franky, Wabbit engagements appear near the Party UI - New System: Shutdown cooldown and engaged monsters dropping to 1HP - Golden Bat spawn no longer broadcasted - Fixed desertland's spawn/map issues - New variable in parent: I - including instance data, only used in Tavern - New variable in parent: S - includes server event data - S.wabbit, S.snowman, S.franky can be populated - Special monsters now level up 20 times slower - New game event - "shutdown" - Documented at DOCS

[ 2019-04-16 14:08:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our Easter event is live! The eggs drop globally, collect them, craft them into a basket and exchange them for rewards! The Wabbit can spawn in any place - defeating the Wabbit grants the Easter buff for +100% Luck for 24 hours!

[ 2019-04-14 06:59:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Updated the server-side attack routines, the main purpose was to be able to Return promise's from the attack() functions - which requires every response to be refactored and documented - along with this change, also added a way to easily compensate for ping delays and increase dps! The new attack documentation and event documentation includes all possible scenarios like reflection, damage return, mobbing, stacked damage and so on - If I missed any, feel free to let me know New character property: character.ping - calculates an average value for your character's ping, mainly by recording the network round-trip of the attack events 2 new ranger skills: Hunter's Mark and Piercing Shot - Thanks to Spadar's design on Discord/#new_ideas - From early feedback, it seems Piercing Shot needs some balancing :)

After Big Dad's suggestion on Discord, modified the Code/character object to lock most of its read-only variables and log an error if someone tries to change them manually. It's an issue newcomers stumble onto frequently, this change will solve the issue practically and prevent confusion
NexusNull on Discord discovered and reported an endgame bug which allowed him to buy anything by making his gold amount to become NaN. After the discovery and patch, re-visited all server routines once again. Hopefully something like this won't happen again but I personally believe there will always be exploits, when they happen, and if they get abused, there's a system to roll the game back to a previous point in time. We are lucky to have players like him onboard that report instead of abuse so we can continue playing without a rollback. send_cm can now send local messages, so if your characters are all on Steam, or if they are all on Web, they can communicate with send_cm, even if they are on different servers! Nearing the end of the week, started working on the Cosmetics system, it's going really well, prototyped the interface and possible customisation options

Changelist:

- character.on("attack") event - character.on("heal") event - game.on("attack") event - game.on("heal") event - Updated attack() function and documentation - Monster attacks now emit regular "hit" events too - Ranger Skill: Hunter's Mark - Ranger Skill: Piercing Shot - character.ping - Code function: reduce_cooldown() - send_cm now sends local messages too - Nerfed Energize's party % contribution - Party character limit is now 9! - Updated Ent's drop table

[ 2019-03-26 14:12:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Most notable achievement this week is the working tutorial prototype with task + step completion animations, has a new accompanying internal system that adds a secondary database object for all user accounts, going to use this new internal system in future for mails too - this system was needed as the main user object gets locked when you enter the bank. Currently the tutorial has 4 steps, the actual challenge will be coming up with useful, rewarding tutorial steps and individual tasks with accompanying explanations/information







There's a new Rogue skill called Mental Burst, thanks to SpadarFaar's idea on Discord, it's the first skill with a stat requirement, requires 64 Intelligence as the skill is quite powerful - It has it's own cooldown and if the target is defeated, the damage dealt is combined to MP. The damage is "magical". After the HP increases, Rogue's were relatively weakened, this skill improves their standing There's a new monster called Ent, thanks to Pluet's idea on Discord, it has a new monster ability, Tangle, slows down it's target with roots, has 8 million HP - suitable to be farmed with large parties - drops a new item, Wooden Sword There are 2 important bugfixes, thanks to Tigga on Discord for reporting them and providing reproduction data/info - The first one is related to how the Bank used to normalise data, it was possible to lose items by sending invalid data. The second one was an elusive movement bug, normally you shouldn't be able to get your character stuck, but stuck characters were rarely being reported. They were caused by some old-method animation routines that modified x/y values of characters directly - basically using Stomp when you were touching a wall - and sending a move command right after One important change on entities (monsters and characters) is the new .visible property, egehanhk on Discord reported that if you cache a target, and move to another map, that cached entity/target acted like it was still on the map, basically there was no way of knowing it was a stale entity, this new .visible property solves that problem, as the value becomes false when the entity is destroyed / it's no more visible

Changelist:

- New styling for Code's Learn section - Updated Save/Load Code Interface - Bank fixes - better data normalisation - An image assets gallery to inspire new ideas (on Discord) - New tutorial system - (X.tutorial) - Refactored animation routines to prevent stuck characters - New functional property on entities .visible (Character/Monster Reference) - New skill: Mental Burst (G.skills) - New monster: Ent (G.monsters) - New monster ability: Tangle (G.skills + G.conditions) - New item: Wooden Sword (G.items)

[ 2019-03-19 13:54:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

Most major change this week is the new JS Promise system, first examples are the buy and upgrade functions, instead of returning no value, they now return Promise's - which provides an alternate and easier way to detect the completion of actions. For those who don't know, when you call the buy() function, it sends a buy command to the server, which completes the action and responds, so almost none of the game actions are instantaneous, they are async - If your ping is 100ms, a buy() command usually completes in 100ms



One side advantage of refactoring the entire codebase and server responses is making everything more easier to translate - once this refactoring is complete, almost every game response will be inside the "game_response" socket event Added the Wanderer's 5-piece Armor set, pieces are scattered across the Town, Cave of Darkness, Spooky Forest, Spooky Town, Winterland - It's the first actual set with bonuses! Second one will likely be a pirate set Stress tested the game to find performance issues, couldn't find the causes yet, but players who hop servers too much are reporting the game slowing down on Steam after a while, possibly has another cause, also it's a good time to remind the "/pause" chat command Started but didn't complete "duelland" - a new map for duels, to be able to safely test pvp fights between 2 parties Started collecting Linux-related problem solving tips at: https://adventure.land/linux Improved smart_move - it now has a new ability called "Baby Steps" - when it's close to the target, it starts considering smaller moves, to get into and out of tight spots easier (thanks to Seth's reminder on Discord and nerd's secondary bug report) - It was a long standing and half-ignored issue, glad to leave it behind

Most exciting idea this week - From Jilaris on Discord

Achievements are always heavily requested, Trexnamedtom originally drafted the first proposal for achievements, and once we move on to game-level achievements, his draft will likely still be the starting point -but- the main problem with achievements, and the reason they aren't in-game yet, is the effort to return ratio (in terms of development) Jilaris suggested adding simple achievements based on how many monsters of a type you've killed, for example for killing 1,000 Goo's, you would get permanent 10 HP's, for 10,000 Goo's, 10 permanent MP's, for 100,000 Goo's, 1 permanent attack and so on. His idea really clicked with my vision for the game, and it's both simple for me to integrate, and at the same time, simple for players to understand. Furthermore, I believe it would add a new purpose to the game - for early achievements, it would nudge players to go after other monsters and at the same time, reward those who just like to stay in one place - as a bonus, promotes partying Planning a Pokdex-like item for the addition of this new system Lately, from #feedback on Discord, one of the common concerns have been how the game doesn't force you to go after stronger monsters and how you could just grind a monster you can one-shot. While this new system isn't the ultimate solution for this problem, it will add meaning until new, higher hp and harder monsters are added

Some thoughts on a CLI client and gameplay

Re-experimented with running Adventure Land in the command line, thanks to the existing modifications that enable running characters as bots (the start_character system) - it was possible to directly run the game with minimal modification. As a proof of concept it works. It's exactly like running an iframe character in a very lightweight browser. There are several problems that come with CLI characters: -(1) Makes it easier for future botnets to leech the game -(2) Potentially reduces the enjoyment of regular players -(3) Makes it easier for a regular player to run separate accounts -(4) Could conflict with ALBot (which started as an official project with our community member NexusNull) and potentially other player-made game clients, due to future roadblocks aimed to hinder (1) and (3) To address (2) - I aim to add an observer interface for CLI players to observe their characters (potentially change their code remotely), and hope to have the mail system ready by that time, so even though they mainly play from CLI, they can (and will likely be required to, every 2 days) visit their characters, observe them, reply to mails and so on - this way, a player who stumble onto a bot character can interact with the person behind the bots Currently this undertaking isn't a priority, the priority is still the early player experience, documentation and new game content - but there's something cozy about running your character from a Raspberry PI, it continually comes up, and to be honest, if I can meet my requirements for (2), it would be how I run my characters too

Changelist:

- Codes are now run at the global scope inside their iframes - "level_up" Character and Game events - New character events - Moved handle_death() and on_cm() to runner_compat.js - Promise system, internal push/resolve/reject_deferred functions - Improved the character# limitations enforcer system (thanks to a bug report from "Big Dad" on Discord) - Updated SKILLS UI with new top buttons (thanks to a reminder from "Big Dad" on Discord) - Fixed a bank deposit/withdraw issue where sending a non-integer amount would wipe out all your gold (thanks to NexusNull) - Updated buy(), upgrade() functions, added new documentation interface - New locate_item(name) runner function, returns -1 if the item isn't found - Added the "irregular" flag to "cyberland" - also added a door out to "main" - Fixed show_json - non-object arguments was throwing exceptions after recent changes - Improved internal performance logging and metrics, planning on slowing down characters a bit and increasing xp/gold ratios instead - Wanderer's Set

[ 2019-03-12 13:48:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Most challenging and important part of the indie development journey is managing yourself, it's easy to get crushed under the responsibilities, the ever increasing workload, new things popping up every week. To keep up, I was planning to switch to a strict work schedule, and on 28th of February, I managed to correct my sleep schedule and started working from 8am to 5pm on weekdays, and 8am to 12pm on weekends. So far so good.


Prettified the DOCS and completed the Character / Monster references, both "Available Functions" and the "Game Data" reference now render as a list, when they rendered as individual buttons, they were really hard to consume - Also each new page hide the ones before and they are re-shown when you close the page Working on new content, Jayson prepared a new Pirate Ship, our freelancer Ellian prepared the new item images, first set will hopefully be live this week, it will be a scattered random drop, as requested by the community Slacked a bit by working on new achievement, level up animations on Sunday and Monday, also re-visited Music and SFX, disabled directional SFX, it's stored at "options.directional_sfx" - Might add a way to disable all ambient SFX in the future, changed the Hit and Use sound selections, the new ones, in my opinion, are more serene and less intrusive, also lowered the default music level. Discord was heated this week too, thanks to the feedback, I've decided to reduce the gold drops of easy monsters, and boost the XP rates of challenging monsters in the future. Adventure Land was "farm anything you want" by design, there's an internal system that ensures this, by adjusting the gold drops. I don't think the changes will be major ones, they'll likely be along the lines of 20%-30% of increases and reductions. The major change this week is the increase in HP - Strength now gives 4 times more HP, while Vitality gives more than 2 times HP. Vitality is also now more effective at low character levels. Additionally, each point in Strength increases Armor by 1 now (previously 0.5). These changes are aimed to increase the duration of PVP fights and increase the PVE endurance of characters Keep in mind that all game dynamics are subject to change and nothing is final Early Heads Up: I'll be traveling from 29th of March to 10th of April - Progress will be slow during these dates Changelist: - Boosted the party contribution of Priest's by 36% - HP gain by Vitality formula changed - HP gain by Strength formula changed - Armor gain by Strength formula changed - Item "hp" values are multiplied by 1.75 - leave_party() Code function - New elixir crafting recipes (Trexnamedtom) - options.directional_sfx - Improved instances and teleporting monsters - There's a new runner_compat.js - moved auto_reload() there - Refactored G.itemsets to G.imagesets - As actual item sets are in G.sets, it was confusing - Monster object now has more properties adopted from G.monsters, documented in DOCS - Taunt cooldown fixed, refactored other hardcoded cooldowns to reference G.skills instead - Monster ability definitions refactored and documented - Improved the game_stringify function, which show_json relies on - Arctic Bee pack is a starter pack now, has the "grow" attribute - All monsters and characters have "in"(instance) and "map" attributes now - Characters now have a "bg" layer, to render animations below the character sprite - There's a new system called DTM, i.e. draw_timeout modifier, it's a multiplier, >1 if the animation event/timeout was delayed, to render animations easier for any fps level, currently the game is mostly hardcoded to 60fps, some animations have custom calculations but it's very impractical to implement such routines, at one point going to refactor all animation routines with this new practical logic - Level 70+ level ups are now announced server-wide

[ 2019-03-05 11:11:49 CET ] [ Original post ]

Week 4 was mostly resting, took 3 days off. Didn't get much done but feel energized for this week. Finally refactored "Free Character" to "Stop Code" - Also added a "Stop Code" button to the main menu if "Pro Mode" is off, new players sometimes get their Code's in an infinite loop and have a hard time figuring things out, these changes hopefully make it easier Added the craftable Tri-Stone rings, with 1% chance, they become a Dark Tr-Stone at the +1 compound operation, the value of vitality scrolls increased over the weekend Introduced the new, misc zone, Cyberland!
At the teleporter lady, you can press ',' (Comma) and enter transport("cyberland") - it's the only way to enter, and logging out from the mainframe gets you out, be careful tho, it's a lethal zone Fixed an issue where 3shot/5shot wasn't working for characters that are started with the "/start" chat command or "start_character" in Code. Improved some other routines in the process The #new_ideas channel in Discord thrived. ReximusPrime shared a well-thought humanoid boss, Bomber suggested new inspiring set items - It's clear that item diversity is needed. Planning on introducing new random drops, T1/T1.5/T2 armors, weapons to add more color to the game without upsetting the endgame balance

[ 2019-02-27 05:42:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

This week the discussions on Discord was concentrated on new content ideas and requests. Pluet shared the #buffrats infographic and started a new trend. Serg followed suit with his cards/sockets idea. On the #pvp channel, we came up with a Regulated PVP system that will likely make it's way and replace the Free/Ruthless PVP system we have


Introduced Refiners in Discord, and an accompanying #refinery channel, Refiners will be established players who proved themselves with ideas that make their way into the game, they will gather ideas from #new_ideas, #feedback, or their own, refine them so they are ready to be added to the game - Also added a public #round_table channel for all Volunteer players, so discussions between Volunteers are transparent to all players
The Documentation improvements are going well, the "Character Object" is fully documented, the "Learn" section and Code tutorials are shaping well, decided to write one code tutorial every day, I believe this week the "DOCS" section will be complete and the "LEARN" section will be filled with tutorials/examples in 1-2 months For Week 4, I aim to start introducing something new every 1-2 days, whether it's a new item, a new crafting component, new mechanic, or a new monster Adventure Land sadly received it's first negative review this week, the 100% positive reviews were really motivating while it lasted. I personally hate games that make you go through a strict tutorial process, so I won't ever add anything like that to Adventure Land, but I feel pressured to introduce something to help players that get lost and don't discover things on their own. Currently thinking of a code-assisted list of things to do, don't have any sparking ideas for a non-intrusive UI to introduce this list to new players tho Changelist: - Magiport dynamics changed, also added the "on_magiport" / "accept_magiport" Code functions - Windows 7 Network Patch - in CONF > Advanced Settings - fixes network delay issues that happens on some systems with non-default networks - Fixed / Published the on_map_click method after a request - Linux issues continue, sometimes opening the game from the Terminal is enough to solve the problems, when it's not, running the game with the "--disable-gpu" flag helps - Added "Spider Silk" - drops from Spiders - Buffed "Golden Earrings", they are cheaper to compound now, and can be dismantled into gold nuggets with 8% chance - "dismantle(num)" code function - Improved/Changed show_json's spacing - Modals/Pages now hide the CODE UI, they also hide each other, made this change mainly to make it easier to concentrate on Code Tutorials and Documentation pages, otherwise, when things stacked on each other, the clutter made it really hard to concentrate, I find the current UI/UX very clean - LEARN button is now orange, added new functional labels for Code docs and tutorials - Improving event handlers, added "attack" and "heal" events - Extended the Code character object with event routines, pretty soon most methods will be via "character.on(function(event){})"s

[ 2019-02-19 19:33:09 CET ] [ Original post ]

Experimented with alternative ways to load/run characters, tested placing multiple character windows in one game window, didn't work out, discovered the tag, it was a match made in heaven, multiple characters can be rendered in a single window, switching between them is instantaneous, they can also be rendered in grids, like 2x2, back and forth - Since this feature is aimed more towards established players, going to delay implementing it for a while Only slightly improved the CODE Docs, I was hoping to make more progress, created the templates for foldered tutorials and started creating object references - Going to continue working on Code documentation and tutorials this week too Chinese New Year event ended, there were complaints that the drops were too lucrative, but I believe it also enabled new players to trade a bit Launched the Valentine's Day event, there's a new item with the ability to Charm monsters with a %, it will likely be a regular craftable item - as far as I observed, most new players don't hunt the Love Goo, which randomly spawns every 45 minutes, going to make future events more interactive, once such a spawn/boss is live in the server, it will be shown on all the interfaces, likely similar to the Party UI, the monster sprite will appear on the game interface and once clicked, the character will `smart_move` to that location, making participation easier - Players Pluet and Sinstrite had suggested global candy drops before the event, so even though participation of the boss hunt seemed low, players are receiving Cupid's Bow's through exchange Published the Mac and Linux versions of the game on Sunday, Linux version was heavily requested, sadly the Linux version ended up being very problematic, Linux users are natural problem solvers so things seem to work out, but I do wish things worked out of the box, last issue I worked on was GPU related, can't assess whether it was an isolated issue or whether it will be widespread, if you are reading this and using Linux, looking for feedback

[ 2019-02-12 16:22:13 CET ] [ Original post ]

Launched the Europas II and Americas II, III servers. Chinese New Year event is live, preparing the Valentine's Day event. A multitude of small bugfixes and polishing Added a Realm tab to Communicator/COM. To make it easier to switch servers. It was truly a joy watching the first Youtube/Twitch streams. Sold net. 265 copies up to now. As an indie developer, this first week has been very stressful. If the game received bad reviews, I'd probably crumble. Luckily, feedback from early players has been very positive. However, from my observations, the initial experience needs improving, this is what I will concentrate on, to better onboard and guide new players Plans for Week 2: Improving the CODE documentation, adding basic examples new players can learn from

[ 2019-02-05 10:18:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

Our Chinese New Year event is live, It will run through the 10th of February Red Envelopes drop globally, you can exchange them from Xyn at the Town, there's one very rare exclusive reward and a lot of firecrackers! If you can't find Xyn, you can press ',' (Comma) and enter smart_move("exchange") - the Code will take you to him!

[ 2019-02-03 06:22:42 CET ] [ Original post ]