Overworld Ascendent!

The alpha is out the door, and everything is going fantastic! I’ve done a lot of work over the past few weeks around the new stateful database for user accounts and scores, but also fixes lots of bugs and put a lot of polish on her!

The client now defaults to a mobile-friendly layout, with an option to snap to the width of your screen. I am blown away by how effective this is, it basically turns your phone into a mobile Overworld-playing device!

I haven’t written a sentence yet that doesn’t end in an exclamation mark, let’s see how long that stays rockable! Ahem. So also, I just added a load of new graphics from master artist Santi, he’s gotten enough in that I will be behind the game for some time I fear, but no matter. I’ve asked him to look into replacing the level bar, last piece of clunky programmer art playing-facing.

What I did slip in however is the poleaxe, and the archer.

The poleaxe is a level 8 weapon with 1 attack that bestows both cleave and pushback. Sound familiar you say? That’s because that is exactly what the axe weapon was up until now. The axe now loses one level, as well as cleave, filling an interesting mid/late game niche where you are starting to access the raw power of latter-game weaponry without yet talking magic carpets. Certainly, finding a poleaxe will be a boon as much as finding leather armour in the mid-game.

The archer knocks the barbarian out of the level 5 human slot, putting him down at 4. (He is so easy to kite, he should probably be even lower.) The archer is a typical enemy human in all respects (1 attack, 3 health, tracking), except that he is the first creature in the game to boast a ranged attack outside our friend the octopus.

I’m getting close to satisfied with where things are at for what we’ll call “alpha” v1.0. The next serious phase of work that happens (whenever it happens) will be towards a more public beta.

However, there are a couple more seemingly major additions coming, that actually plug quite easily to the existing engine. (Yes I did post them in this poll.) One is a context-sensitive help system that will tell you about any terrain, creature, or item in the game. The other is a metagame that will allow players to win trophies for easily understood in-game goals, and unlock different playable character classes. I say easy in that mucho groundwork exists, in reality we are probably talking a month for each easy. So no rush on that.

Work outside that will consist mostly of content to the game, I have to be careful though because in my opinion it is getting so, so fun that I wouldn’t want to tax the resources of my players by adding anything that would take away from the overall experience, if that makes sense.

If you didn’t get into the alpha yet and would like to, please reach out. I am only admitting people I know personally right now, but you could always get to know me. Ha.