Blog #69: Beyond this Hill It Floods Rays of Hope

MumboJumbo

Beyond this Hill It Floods Rays of Hope

 

MILESTONE 4:

This past Monday was the end of our Q4 development period, meaning we were to complete all of our goals for Q4 2013.

• We built the stats for each of the classes by hand, all of which have appropriate appearances for their class.
• We were attempting to create a fairly small version of the low level end of gameplay.
• We chose a segment of the map—roughly 5x5 hexes—that included all the locations we needed: "Chitterwood".
• Currently, we have an escalation cycle for the Ripping Chains goblin tribe (including goblin dogs, new this quarter) and an escalation cycle for the Skull-Breaker ogre tribe (including wolves) running in the three monster hexes we have in the new area.
• We have trainers set up in the two settlements that can allow players to purchase skills and feats, assuming they have the XP and achievements to do so.
• In combat, we've implemented a system where certain attacks or situations put states on characters
• We implemented our full large-scale world editing pipeline. This allowed us to produce in two days, from scratch, what used to take two weeks of manual work.
• We also finished all of the initial POI buildings, put new base clothing, core gear, suits and creatures into the game, and completed concepts for multiple new mobs, world landmarks, and suits.
• added new tools that speed up production for the character team on both animations and characters
• On the tech side, we got a lot of our server tech worked out this quarter. Currently we are we are on 16 virtual hosts now, running 27 hexes with connection servers, routers, launchers, a database and two authorities (chat and escalation).

ALPHA:

 

The question that everyone is asking is "when will Alpha testing begin?" Our answer is early in the 2^nd quarter of 2014! The next quarter's milestone is targeted at getting us ready to begin Alpha testing and we expect that we will start that test in April.

 

FEEDBACK:

 

Over the next several blogs we'll be doing some deeper dives into the current state of the game, showing you a lot of artwork from concept to in-game implementation, getting into the nitty-gritty of the UI, and listening to your feedback and suggestions on everything!