Jun 19 2012, 03:26 PM
"Not a Blog" thread which was ever so popular back in the Mythos days has made its triumphant return in Torchlight II. For those that don't know what this thread was about, it was a large thread, comprised of potential features for the community to discuss with the developers, written by Travis Baldree, the Project Lead of Torchlight and at that time Mythos. Because Torchlight II has passed the stage of development where the discussion of potential ideas is important, Travis decided to elaborate on what Runic Games is currently doing. - Webbstre, RGF
Not A Blog Redux I (July 15, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
So, hey there. It's been requested that I bring back the 'Not a Blog' features that I used to do for Mythos, in days of yore.
This won't be exactly like that. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about potential features, and so on - because we're way beyond that point in development.
Instead, I'm going to try to give you a general idea of what we're spending time on, why we do it, and why it matters. I may have to rename it tl;dr though.
Many folks are anxious to see the game released - many have preordered, and want a date! We've been deliberately vague on this point. My hope is that if I give you an idea of what we're doing, what it takes to do it, and the scale of it, it will make it apparent why that is.
So, anyway. Immediately after the Beta we spent a good bit of time doing the last big changes that we were comfortable doing. We didn't know how long these would take at the outset, because, well, we hadn't done the Beta yet. Most of these changes were in response to feedback we received during the Beta and our own observations. The biggest of these had to do with our skill system.
We've talked about the skill changes in previous posts, but to recap, the gist is that there isn't a 'tree' per se. Skills are made available for investment by level ( just as they were in the tree ), but their unlock level is no longer determined by vertical positioning in the tree, which gives us more flexibility to place them where we want them. In addition, you receive specific bonuses to each skill ( apart from standard investment bonuses ) at every 5 point mark, or tier, which are hopefully a good enticement to continue investing in a skill.
I'll take the Engineer's Machinegun bot as a quick example (subject to change, of course). At 5 points, his shots begin ricocheting. At 10, they pierce, and at 15 they are tripled. So, a level 15 machinegun bot skill has triple, piercing, ricocheting shots. Way cooler than level 1. Of course, damage, and other properties are improved with every point of investment, but there's a bigger jump every 5. I should stress that we didn't REMOVE cool stuff from skills and ball it all up to make the tiers neater. We have tried to make sure that the skills are designed to be cool as is, and just get a notable 'extra' at the tiers.
The other primary change was to move all passives into their own section so that we could unlock them a lot earlier.
In addition to the skill system changes, we had lots of other alterations we wanted to make after the beta. That is, after all, what the beta is for - to find things you want to fix or change, before it is too late. So we did that.
I don't want to list ALL the changes here, because frankly, I don't remember them all off the top of my head - but some of the bigger ticket items were to do with respecs and how we handle them, how we join games from friend lists, detection of low-ping players, and a bunch of other stuff. We made skills queueable, added Function key binding for skills, added inventory sorting, and so on. Justin spent a lot of time working on additional connectivity improvements and workarounds for funky routers. We also decided we wanted to put more work into our uniques to make them much more special, and so on and so forth.
We had some other items that weren't really finalized yet pre-beta that we wanted to get wrapped up too ( item recipes for item combination had some changes to how they function, for instance. We wanted more flexibility in how we could have items cast skills to aid in the creation of niftier uniques )
These changes all took time, of course, and we didn't get back to polishing the rest of the game until we were largely through with them.
There are one or two of these items that are fairly simple that remain to be done ( we want to add a checkbox to new game creation in the lobby so you can force a 'reroll', which will reseed your entire game and repopulate it. Handy. ) We also want to finish setting up our relay server ( a relay server bounces messages between players that are having trouble connecting to one another ), and we want to handle some specific game-fracture cases where two clients in a larger pool lose connection to one another, but not everyone else ( the game has to automatically split them out into their own isolated games )
We finished our primary goals and moved back into polish. There are two main parts to this - skills, and Acts. Skill polish involves making all the tier bonuses interesting, and finishing up the skills that we didn't show in the Beta, and just generally making sure that everything feels good and is reasonably balanced. A pass has already been done to give everything tier bonuses, but some of them are not as nice as we would like, so we are punching them up.
Act polish is the most time consuming. We have currently split and are polishing Act 2 and Act 3 simultaneously.
So, what does that mean? How 'done' are these acts that we are polishing?
All of the acts exist. ( There are 4, but the 4th is quite small in comparison to the previous 3 ) All of the levels are there, stitched together to form a game. There are events, secret rooms, towns, merchants, the works. They all spawn appropriate monsters, boss events exist, quests, etc. The loot is there. The wardrobes. The NPCs. The cinematics. The 'game' exists.
Polish means taking that and making sure that the individual monsters are fun to fight, that their groupings work well together, that we expose balance issues late in the game ( be they from monster leveling, or skill leveling, or what have you ) and correct them. We want the individual monsters to each have a 'thing' that makes them unique, and interesting to fight in the context of other monsters around them.
I'm polishing Act 2 right now ( the Desert Act - we let people play it at last year's PAX - a lot has happened to it since then ). I'm going to guess that I'm about 3/5 of the way complete with my polish pass on that Act. Marsh is deep into his as well on 3. It is difficult to predict how long exactly it will take to complete an Act's polish - a monsters' ability might take as little as 20 minutes to make, or as much as a day in rare, difficult cases. Sometimes they just feel 'wrong' and you have to bang on them until they feel right, or get creative about replacing them with something more appropriate.
Here's an idea of what polishing an Act entails. Act 2 has two distinct halves - each one centered around its own large outdoor region.
The first half of the act has about 28 unique monster types in it. ( the second half has its OWN unique monsters - although a few from the first half reappear ) Each unit has an ability or two (well, they do now ), and they are grouped between the 5 spur areas off of the first outdoor region. There are 2 boss battles and 2 'superchampion' battles ( these have scripted elements, special skills and areas, and a unique look, but are not quite on the same level as bosses )
Polishing for me meant going through all 28 of those monsters ( several of which were newly created where we felt they needed to be ), setting up their new abilities to complement one another, tuning health, damage, attack rate, behaviors, spawn density, in many cases altering or adding to their sound sets, new and cooler death particles and explosion particles, weapon alterations, and so on and so forth. Often as we are polishing an act we find a 'gap' - it feels like something new should be there. So we fill it.
Here's an example of how that happens. In the Vault areas ( we also showed these at last year's PAX ) there are lots of different monsters (Ezrohir) in an area with a decidedly electrical theme. But they didn't really sell that as monsters. They mostly had melee attacks and some ranged stuff, and a few exploding bomb minons. We also had some machine gun and electrical traps in the area, but they were stationary. It felt like we needed more of an electrical vibe. I added a new Ezrohir unit with a shock staff who can shoot bolts of electricity from a distance. We took our machinegun turrets and made mobile versions, which can fire independently of a moving base and follow you. We also added mobile turrets which serve only to spawn 'ezrocopters' - little metallic flying devices that can shock you. Every Ezrohir got a new skill ( some of them more than one ). Some of them are pretty neat and unlike anything seen in other acts. That area has much more flavor now, the battles are more interesting, and it has a stronger elemental theme which makes it easier to plan for in harder difficulties.
The boss battle already existed, of course. We also let people play it at the previous PAX. But its intro was a little boring ( the boss didn't enter in an interesting way ), and he didn't have enough skills and they weren't dynamic enough. Now he has 5 new ones, a cool intro, and various elements of the battle have changed to make it more interesting. Polish.
I'm in the second half of the Act now, doing the same sorts of things. Making boss battles more interesting, fleshing out some more monster skills where they seem anemic, strengthening monster groupings, making sure that events have the appropriate kick when they happen. Marsh is in Act 3 doing the same sorts of stuff.
It's progressing well. I'm really happy with how Act 2 is feeling, and I think it will feel very different and fresh compared to the previous Act ( which is what we want ).
Everyone else in the company is doing the same sorts of things. Mostly, they have the time to add more love because Marsh and I are still finalizing polish on the monsters, bosses, and skills. This lets our Level Design team, for instance, squeeze in some extra rooms, or more neat random events.
Our background team can polish up props that were repurposed and make them unique, or make previously static background elements smashable. They can also add new support props for us to make our boss battles cooler.
Our animators stay busy - because a lot of Monster polish is changing up or adding abilities to them, which goes through our animation team.
Our character artists also stay busy - making better champion variant skins, or helping us fill those 'gaps' by putting together a new weapon, a mesh variant, or what have you.
Erich has been steadily making uniques cooler, and making more special drops for bosses. Those skill-on-item changes I mentioned earlier were done for that reason. You can find uniques that shatter shields, perform skills on strike ( or swing ), or at other triggering events. This allows for much more interesting uniques that are well and truly unique - instead of just more powerful in terms of a given arrangement of passive properties.
Anyway, I'll try to continue to post on a more-or-less weekly basis until this ships to give you something to chew on, so that you won't have the impression that we're all twiddling our thumbs behind our desks - we really aren't. Nor are we feverishly polishing the doorknobs while the house is yet to be built. We tie things up and we move on, and we do it over and over again until we get to the end.
Thanks for hangin' in there with us. We love ya!
This won't be exactly like that. I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about potential features, and so on - because we're way beyond that point in development.
Instead, I'm going to try to give you a general idea of what we're spending time on, why we do it, and why it matters. I may have to rename it tl;dr though.
Many folks are anxious to see the game released - many have preordered, and want a date! We've been deliberately vague on this point. My hope is that if I give you an idea of what we're doing, what it takes to do it, and the scale of it, it will make it apparent why that is.
So, anyway. Immediately after the Beta we spent a good bit of time doing the last big changes that we were comfortable doing. We didn't know how long these would take at the outset, because, well, we hadn't done the Beta yet. Most of these changes were in response to feedback we received during the Beta and our own observations. The biggest of these had to do with our skill system.
We've talked about the skill changes in previous posts, but to recap, the gist is that there isn't a 'tree' per se. Skills are made available for investment by level ( just as they were in the tree ), but their unlock level is no longer determined by vertical positioning in the tree, which gives us more flexibility to place them where we want them. In addition, you receive specific bonuses to each skill ( apart from standard investment bonuses ) at every 5 point mark, or tier, which are hopefully a good enticement to continue investing in a skill.
I'll take the Engineer's Machinegun bot as a quick example (subject to change, of course). At 5 points, his shots begin ricocheting. At 10, they pierce, and at 15 they are tripled. So, a level 15 machinegun bot skill has triple, piercing, ricocheting shots. Way cooler than level 1. Of course, damage, and other properties are improved with every point of investment, but there's a bigger jump every 5. I should stress that we didn't REMOVE cool stuff from skills and ball it all up to make the tiers neater. We have tried to make sure that the skills are designed to be cool as is, and just get a notable 'extra' at the tiers.
The other primary change was to move all passives into their own section so that we could unlock them a lot earlier.
In addition to the skill system changes, we had lots of other alterations we wanted to make after the beta. That is, after all, what the beta is for - to find things you want to fix or change, before it is too late. So we did that.
I don't want to list ALL the changes here, because frankly, I don't remember them all off the top of my head - but some of the bigger ticket items were to do with respecs and how we handle them, how we join games from friend lists, detection of low-ping players, and a bunch of other stuff. We made skills queueable, added Function key binding for skills, added inventory sorting, and so on. Justin spent a lot of time working on additional connectivity improvements and workarounds for funky routers. We also decided we wanted to put more work into our uniques to make them much more special, and so on and so forth.
We had some other items that weren't really finalized yet pre-beta that we wanted to get wrapped up too ( item recipes for item combination had some changes to how they function, for instance. We wanted more flexibility in how we could have items cast skills to aid in the creation of niftier uniques )
These changes all took time, of course, and we didn't get back to polishing the rest of the game until we were largely through with them.
There are one or two of these items that are fairly simple that remain to be done ( we want to add a checkbox to new game creation in the lobby so you can force a 'reroll', which will reseed your entire game and repopulate it. Handy. ) We also want to finish setting up our relay server ( a relay server bounces messages between players that are having trouble connecting to one another ), and we want to handle some specific game-fracture cases where two clients in a larger pool lose connection to one another, but not everyone else ( the game has to automatically split them out into their own isolated games )
We finished our primary goals and moved back into polish. There are two main parts to this - skills, and Acts. Skill polish involves making all the tier bonuses interesting, and finishing up the skills that we didn't show in the Beta, and just generally making sure that everything feels good and is reasonably balanced. A pass has already been done to give everything tier bonuses, but some of them are not as nice as we would like, so we are punching them up.
Act polish is the most time consuming. We have currently split and are polishing Act 2 and Act 3 simultaneously.
So, what does that mean? How 'done' are these acts that we are polishing?
All of the acts exist. ( There are 4, but the 4th is quite small in comparison to the previous 3 ) All of the levels are there, stitched together to form a game. There are events, secret rooms, towns, merchants, the works. They all spawn appropriate monsters, boss events exist, quests, etc. The loot is there. The wardrobes. The NPCs. The cinematics. The 'game' exists.
Polish means taking that and making sure that the individual monsters are fun to fight, that their groupings work well together, that we expose balance issues late in the game ( be they from monster leveling, or skill leveling, or what have you ) and correct them. We want the individual monsters to each have a 'thing' that makes them unique, and interesting to fight in the context of other monsters around them.
I'm polishing Act 2 right now ( the Desert Act - we let people play it at last year's PAX - a lot has happened to it since then ). I'm going to guess that I'm about 3/5 of the way complete with my polish pass on that Act. Marsh is deep into his as well on 3. It is difficult to predict how long exactly it will take to complete an Act's polish - a monsters' ability might take as little as 20 minutes to make, or as much as a day in rare, difficult cases. Sometimes they just feel 'wrong' and you have to bang on them until they feel right, or get creative about replacing them with something more appropriate.
Here's an idea of what polishing an Act entails. Act 2 has two distinct halves - each one centered around its own large outdoor region.
The first half of the act has about 28 unique monster types in it. ( the second half has its OWN unique monsters - although a few from the first half reappear ) Each unit has an ability or two (well, they do now ), and they are grouped between the 5 spur areas off of the first outdoor region. There are 2 boss battles and 2 'superchampion' battles ( these have scripted elements, special skills and areas, and a unique look, but are not quite on the same level as bosses )
Polishing for me meant going through all 28 of those monsters ( several of which were newly created where we felt they needed to be ), setting up their new abilities to complement one another, tuning health, damage, attack rate, behaviors, spawn density, in many cases altering or adding to their sound sets, new and cooler death particles and explosion particles, weapon alterations, and so on and so forth. Often as we are polishing an act we find a 'gap' - it feels like something new should be there. So we fill it.
Here's an example of how that happens. In the Vault areas ( we also showed these at last year's PAX ) there are lots of different monsters (Ezrohir) in an area with a decidedly electrical theme. But they didn't really sell that as monsters. They mostly had melee attacks and some ranged stuff, and a few exploding bomb minons. We also had some machine gun and electrical traps in the area, but they were stationary. It felt like we needed more of an electrical vibe. I added a new Ezrohir unit with a shock staff who can shoot bolts of electricity from a distance. We took our machinegun turrets and made mobile versions, which can fire independently of a moving base and follow you. We also added mobile turrets which serve only to spawn 'ezrocopters' - little metallic flying devices that can shock you. Every Ezrohir got a new skill ( some of them more than one ). Some of them are pretty neat and unlike anything seen in other acts. That area has much more flavor now, the battles are more interesting, and it has a stronger elemental theme which makes it easier to plan for in harder difficulties.
The boss battle already existed, of course. We also let people play it at the previous PAX. But its intro was a little boring ( the boss didn't enter in an interesting way ), and he didn't have enough skills and they weren't dynamic enough. Now he has 5 new ones, a cool intro, and various elements of the battle have changed to make it more interesting. Polish.
I'm in the second half of the Act now, doing the same sorts of things. Making boss battles more interesting, fleshing out some more monster skills where they seem anemic, strengthening monster groupings, making sure that events have the appropriate kick when they happen. Marsh is in Act 3 doing the same sorts of stuff.
It's progressing well. I'm really happy with how Act 2 is feeling, and I think it will feel very different and fresh compared to the previous Act ( which is what we want ).
Everyone else in the company is doing the same sorts of things. Mostly, they have the time to add more love because Marsh and I are still finalizing polish on the monsters, bosses, and skills. This lets our Level Design team, for instance, squeeze in some extra rooms, or more neat random events.
Our background team can polish up props that were repurposed and make them unique, or make previously static background elements smashable. They can also add new support props for us to make our boss battles cooler.
Our animators stay busy - because a lot of Monster polish is changing up or adding abilities to them, which goes through our animation team.
Our character artists also stay busy - making better champion variant skins, or helping us fill those 'gaps' by putting together a new weapon, a mesh variant, or what have you.
Erich has been steadily making uniques cooler, and making more special drops for bosses. Those skill-on-item changes I mentioned earlier were done for that reason. You can find uniques that shatter shields, perform skills on strike ( or swing ), or at other triggering events. This allows for much more interesting uniques that are well and truly unique - instead of just more powerful in terms of a given arrangement of passive properties.
Anyway, I'll try to continue to post on a more-or-less weekly basis until this ships to give you something to chew on, so that you won't have the impression that we're all twiddling our thumbs behind our desks - we really aren't. Nor are we feverishly polishing the doorknobs while the house is yet to be built. We tie things up and we move on, and we do it over and over again until we get to the end.
Thanks for hangin' in there with us. We love ya!
Not A Blog Redux II (July 20, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
Howdy again. It's time for this week's promised Not-A-Blog, so here we go!
Last week I talked at some length about what we're working on right now, what that actually means, and the process we go through to kick this out the door.
This week I want to talk a bit about some of the stuff that was accomplished over the week, because I know people want to hear it - but I also want to talk about scale, and I'm going to use Torchlight as a comparison. The numbers are pretty fun.
So, first things first - this week -
I spent most of my time working on Act 2 monsters (the second half of the Act). I polished 13 different monsters, and added 12 new skills for them. I set up or revised spawnclasses for 6 different regions. I worked on destructible elements for a sewer area. I made several particle systems to supplement these things. I fixed some multiplayer boss battle issues in a previous area's boss battle, and various other bugs as they arose. I partially completed polish on one boss battle. For Act 2, I have about 4-6 more monsters to finish polish on, 4 or 5 more regions to spawnclass, and 3 boss battles left to touch. I also have various champion packs left to add.
Similar things are happening throughout the company. Marsh is churning through Act 3. He worked on 4 sidequests, completed work on 5 monsters (2 of them champs), set up 7 new skills for those monsters, and added two new major special events. He also added proximity based health and mana steal effects and damage reductions, and completed several region spawnclasses. Polish continues on every front - it's very satisfying to see the march to completion.
So, I said I wanted to talk a little bit about scale. To satisfy my curiosity, I dug back through Torchlight 1's assets to get some statistics. We are often asked what the size difference between the two games is, and usually end up talking a bit about how the Act 1 content compares to Torchlight 1. I knew that Torchlight 2 was much bigger than Torchlight 1 - that's obvious - but I was still surprised at what I came away with. Here's a sample.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Torchlight 1 has:
*7 Unique areas (not counting secret areas or Phase Beast areas, or random maps )
*52 Unique monster variants ( this does not count champion variants )
*47 total monster abilities ( this does not count boss abilities - this is for the rank and file )
*9 bosses/boss battles
*About 33 unique wardrobe sets
*About 230 unique weapon models
*About 60 unique player skills ( not counting spells )
*About 330 room layouts for assembling levels ( these are subrandomized as well )
*About 730 item affixes
*About 3080 items ( although this includes the goofy 'replicated' elite items that we used to stretch out the content - so a more accurate number is probably about 2000 )
*15 music tracks
*About 83 monster models ( not counting bosses or NPCs - there are more models than unique monsters because this includes player pets, summons, variants, and a few other odds and ends )
*1860 room pieces ( the raw props used to build levels )
*1612 animation files
*2778 texture files
------------------------------------------------------------------
Torchlight 2 has:
*44 Unique areas (not counting secret areas or Phase Beast areas, or random maps )
*183 Unique monster variants ( this does not count champion variants, of which there are MANY more than Torchlight 1 )
*148 total monster abilities ( this does not count boss abilities or champion abilities - this is for the rank and file )
*27 bosses/boss battles
*About 85 unique wardrobe sets
*About 395 unique weapon models
*About 120 unique player skills ( not counting spells)
*About 1200 room layouts for assembling levels (these are subrandomized as well)
*About 1344 item affixes
*About 5773 items (no goofy item replication!)
*62 music tracks
*About 300 monster models - not counting bosses or NPCs (There are often visual variants to a single monster type, for spice, or champion variants)
*5665 room pieces (the raw props used to build levels)
*5329 animation files
*5444 texture files
------------------------------------------------------------------
In terms of scale, Torchlight 2 is close to 4x the scale of Torchlight 1 as far as assets go, and probably close to that as far as playtime. Ideally, the multiplayer that everyone has asked for will further increase the longevity of the game (we certainly hope so!) These are all new assets as well ( some monsters and weapons return from Torchlight, but they have all been recreated, or in the case of some individual weapons and shields, updated and repainted )
At any rate, wow. That's a lot of stuff. It makes me tired just looking at it, seeing how far we've come - and makes the last push seem that much less daunting.
So, for anyone who has wanted some more-or-less hard numbers indicating the scale of the game, and what you can expect to get for your 20 bucks, hopefully this is interesting info.
Cheers!
Travis
Last week I talked at some length about what we're working on right now, what that actually means, and the process we go through to kick this out the door.
This week I want to talk a bit about some of the stuff that was accomplished over the week, because I know people want to hear it - but I also want to talk about scale, and I'm going to use Torchlight as a comparison. The numbers are pretty fun.
So, first things first - this week -
I spent most of my time working on Act 2 monsters (the second half of the Act). I polished 13 different monsters, and added 12 new skills for them. I set up or revised spawnclasses for 6 different regions. I worked on destructible elements for a sewer area. I made several particle systems to supplement these things. I fixed some multiplayer boss battle issues in a previous area's boss battle, and various other bugs as they arose. I partially completed polish on one boss battle. For Act 2, I have about 4-6 more monsters to finish polish on, 4 or 5 more regions to spawnclass, and 3 boss battles left to touch. I also have various champion packs left to add.
Similar things are happening throughout the company. Marsh is churning through Act 3. He worked on 4 sidequests, completed work on 5 monsters (2 of them champs), set up 7 new skills for those monsters, and added two new major special events. He also added proximity based health and mana steal effects and damage reductions, and completed several region spawnclasses. Polish continues on every front - it's very satisfying to see the march to completion.
So, I said I wanted to talk a little bit about scale. To satisfy my curiosity, I dug back through Torchlight 1's assets to get some statistics. We are often asked what the size difference between the two games is, and usually end up talking a bit about how the Act 1 content compares to Torchlight 1. I knew that Torchlight 2 was much bigger than Torchlight 1 - that's obvious - but I was still surprised at what I came away with. Here's a sample.
------------------------------------------------------------------
Torchlight 1 has:
*7 Unique areas (not counting secret areas or Phase Beast areas, or random maps )
*52 Unique monster variants ( this does not count champion variants )
*47 total monster abilities ( this does not count boss abilities - this is for the rank and file )
*9 bosses/boss battles
*About 33 unique wardrobe sets
*About 230 unique weapon models
*About 60 unique player skills ( not counting spells )
*About 330 room layouts for assembling levels ( these are subrandomized as well )
*About 730 item affixes
*About 3080 items ( although this includes the goofy 'replicated' elite items that we used to stretch out the content - so a more accurate number is probably about 2000 )
*15 music tracks
*About 83 monster models ( not counting bosses or NPCs - there are more models than unique monsters because this includes player pets, summons, variants, and a few other odds and ends )
*1860 room pieces ( the raw props used to build levels )
*1612 animation files
*2778 texture files
------------------------------------------------------------------
Torchlight 2 has:
*44 Unique areas (not counting secret areas or Phase Beast areas, or random maps )
*183 Unique monster variants ( this does not count champion variants, of which there are MANY more than Torchlight 1 )
*148 total monster abilities ( this does not count boss abilities or champion abilities - this is for the rank and file )
*27 bosses/boss battles
*About 85 unique wardrobe sets
*About 395 unique weapon models
*About 120 unique player skills ( not counting spells)
*About 1200 room layouts for assembling levels (these are subrandomized as well)
*About 1344 item affixes
*About 5773 items (no goofy item replication!)
*62 music tracks
*About 300 monster models - not counting bosses or NPCs (There are often visual variants to a single monster type, for spice, or champion variants)
*5665 room pieces (the raw props used to build levels)
*5329 animation files
*5444 texture files
------------------------------------------------------------------
In terms of scale, Torchlight 2 is close to 4x the scale of Torchlight 1 as far as assets go, and probably close to that as far as playtime. Ideally, the multiplayer that everyone has asked for will further increase the longevity of the game (we certainly hope so!) These are all new assets as well ( some monsters and weapons return from Torchlight, but they have all been recreated, or in the case of some individual weapons and shields, updated and repainted )
At any rate, wow. That's a lot of stuff. It makes me tired just looking at it, seeing how far we've come - and makes the last push seem that much less daunting.
So, for anyone who has wanted some more-or-less hard numbers indicating the scale of the game, and what you can expect to get for your 20 bucks, hopefully this is interesting info.
Cheers!
Travis
Not A Blog Redux III (July 30, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
Here we go with another Not a Blog! Sorry for the delay on this.
Here's what's up-
I was out of town Monday and Tuesday for my mother's birthday, so I did a lot of make-up during the late evenings and the weekend. I'll go into the most detail about what I did, because that's what I know firsthand, and a rough idea of what others were doing (although they could go into much finer detail than I can)
I'm close to wrapping polish on Act 2. All area spawnclasses, monsters, and champ packs are 'done'. ( Although I usually end up adding a few new variants for remaining boss battles )
I completed a polish pass on two boss battles. (Well, I'm completing the second half of one this evening, but it should be done for tomorrow )
I have 2 boss battles remaining to complete, and 3 special desert champions for an event need some love. I also need to set up a proper 'collapse' particle system for sand constructs.
I completed polish work on 4 monsters, and added 3 new monster variants that I felt were needed to flesh out the spawnclasses in some areas.
I also added random tornados to the southern region of Act 2 Part 2 that can spring up and damage you, and 'Nether Storms' for another area that I'm not going to go into much detail about.
I switched gears a little to implement a handful of tier bonus upgrades ( i.e. fancier versions of the tier bonuses we already had ) for the Embermage, and those went pretty quickly.
I fixed a random assortment of bugs ( an animated particle bug, some issues with teleportation resistance when applied to yourself, various other odds and ends )
I tuned up various particles, sounds, and camera shakes on some act 2 events to have a little more punch (or where they didn't exist, but should have). I fixed some quest bugs. I updated several old and over-blurry particle systems to make them less spammy.
Other stuff that happened this week - (not a complete list, just stuff I'm picking out from memory )
During the beta we decided that we were going to merge the functionality of Waypoints and Town Portals, so that they were more useful in general. This week Matt got that taken care of.
Now, if you open a Town Portal, you can use it just like a Waypoint - you can jump to any other Waypoint in the act, or the town, or directly to another player or another player's portal. This lets you skip a trip back to town to perform direct player or Waypoint warps and is just nicer overall.
Now you have Waypoint Scrolls instead of Town Portal Scrolls as a result.
Matt also fixed some issues with weapon-skill synchronization when skills are cast by an item in multiplayer.
Matt added random affixes to endgame maps.
Patrick set up a few new 'camp' events in Act 2 with some of the newer monster setups and spawners, and added some cool new visual FX to the unmentioned area with the Nether Storms.
Greg set it up so that recipes at the item combiner can be hidden until they are performed once.
Matt Uelmen put together a lot of new background ambient audio and Patrick integrated that between the areas.
Marsh continued his work in Act 3 and made good progress - (he is working this weekend too) - I'm sure there are a ton of specific details to this but I don't have them in front of me at present.
Erich added some new boss-specific loot.
Continued polish on all fronts in all departments.
To give you an idea about what sort of stuff we are touching - most everything we are changing is media related ( layouts, monster data, particles, abilities, events ), with very little code altered - here are some quick numbers -
Since last Friday there have been 475 Media checkins ( that isn't actually a file count - it's a source-control checkin, and each one can be comprised of a number of files, or just 1 - they are very roughly comparable to a 'task' though ) These can be incredibly trivial ( like fixing a spelling mistake ) or a big deal ( a slew of files related to a boss battle or event, and there are many, many files associated with a given event, from layouts, to particles, to unit data, to spawnclasses, and so on )
There have been only 71 source checkins ( these are primarily bugfixes, and the aforementioned changes for waypoints/town portals and recipes. A task can often have multiple checkins associated with it, and then rounds of bugfixes after implementation. )
In the upcoming week, it is my aim to complete Act 2 polish entirely if I can, and then to do go through all the class skills and do a tier polish pass - then I will move on to help Marsh out in his pass on Act 3. Then we'll both jump to Act 4 and polish the last short stretch of the game together, doing some passes through NG+ stuff as we do ( Matt will be working on that as well, probably while we're still wrapping Act 3 ). After that, well, we're done.
Next week QA will be hitting Act 2 hard now that it is nearly tied off, looking for balance issues and any progression bugs that may have cropped up due to my changes, or obscure network issues with scripted events ( the more complicated they are, the more testing they require in multiplayer )
Hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of what we're up to, and you can get a sense of how far down the field we move each week based on previous posts. I hope it also gives you a general sense of the items that remain to be done before ship. Sorry I don't have a sweet infographic this week! Too busy just workin' on the game.
Thanks all!
Travis
Here's what's up-
I was out of town Monday and Tuesday for my mother's birthday, so I did a lot of make-up during the late evenings and the weekend. I'll go into the most detail about what I did, because that's what I know firsthand, and a rough idea of what others were doing (although they could go into much finer detail than I can)
I'm close to wrapping polish on Act 2. All area spawnclasses, monsters, and champ packs are 'done'. ( Although I usually end up adding a few new variants for remaining boss battles )
I completed a polish pass on two boss battles. (Well, I'm completing the second half of one this evening, but it should be done for tomorrow )
I have 2 boss battles remaining to complete, and 3 special desert champions for an event need some love. I also need to set up a proper 'collapse' particle system for sand constructs.
I completed polish work on 4 monsters, and added 3 new monster variants that I felt were needed to flesh out the spawnclasses in some areas.
I also added random tornados to the southern region of Act 2 Part 2 that can spring up and damage you, and 'Nether Storms' for another area that I'm not going to go into much detail about.
I switched gears a little to implement a handful of tier bonus upgrades ( i.e. fancier versions of the tier bonuses we already had ) for the Embermage, and those went pretty quickly.
I fixed a random assortment of bugs ( an animated particle bug, some issues with teleportation resistance when applied to yourself, various other odds and ends )
I tuned up various particles, sounds, and camera shakes on some act 2 events to have a little more punch (or where they didn't exist, but should have). I fixed some quest bugs. I updated several old and over-blurry particle systems to make them less spammy.
Other stuff that happened this week - (not a complete list, just stuff I'm picking out from memory )
During the beta we decided that we were going to merge the functionality of Waypoints and Town Portals, so that they were more useful in general. This week Matt got that taken care of.
Now, if you open a Town Portal, you can use it just like a Waypoint - you can jump to any other Waypoint in the act, or the town, or directly to another player or another player's portal. This lets you skip a trip back to town to perform direct player or Waypoint warps and is just nicer overall.
Now you have Waypoint Scrolls instead of Town Portal Scrolls as a result.
Matt also fixed some issues with weapon-skill synchronization when skills are cast by an item in multiplayer.
Matt added random affixes to endgame maps.
Patrick set up a few new 'camp' events in Act 2 with some of the newer monster setups and spawners, and added some cool new visual FX to the unmentioned area with the Nether Storms.
Greg set it up so that recipes at the item combiner can be hidden until they are performed once.
Matt Uelmen put together a lot of new background ambient audio and Patrick integrated that between the areas.
Marsh continued his work in Act 3 and made good progress - (he is working this weekend too) - I'm sure there are a ton of specific details to this but I don't have them in front of me at present.
Erich added some new boss-specific loot.
Continued polish on all fronts in all departments.
To give you an idea about what sort of stuff we are touching - most everything we are changing is media related ( layouts, monster data, particles, abilities, events ), with very little code altered - here are some quick numbers -
Since last Friday there have been 475 Media checkins ( that isn't actually a file count - it's a source-control checkin, and each one can be comprised of a number of files, or just 1 - they are very roughly comparable to a 'task' though ) These can be incredibly trivial ( like fixing a spelling mistake ) or a big deal ( a slew of files related to a boss battle or event, and there are many, many files associated with a given event, from layouts, to particles, to unit data, to spawnclasses, and so on )
There have been only 71 source checkins ( these are primarily bugfixes, and the aforementioned changes for waypoints/town portals and recipes. A task can often have multiple checkins associated with it, and then rounds of bugfixes after implementation. )
In the upcoming week, it is my aim to complete Act 2 polish entirely if I can, and then to do go through all the class skills and do a tier polish pass - then I will move on to help Marsh out in his pass on Act 3. Then we'll both jump to Act 4 and polish the last short stretch of the game together, doing some passes through NG+ stuff as we do ( Matt will be working on that as well, probably while we're still wrapping Act 3 ). After that, well, we're done.
Next week QA will be hitting Act 2 hard now that it is nearly tied off, looking for balance issues and any progression bugs that may have cropped up due to my changes, or obscure network issues with scripted events ( the more complicated they are, the more testing they require in multiplayer )
Hopefully that gives you a pretty good idea of what we're up to, and you can get a sense of how far down the field we move each week based on previous posts. I hope it also gives you a general sense of the items that remain to be done before ship. Sorry I don't have a sweet infographic this week! Too busy just workin' on the game.
Thanks all!
Travis
Not A Blog Redux IV (August 4, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
It's Friday! Time for another Not A Blog.
I don't have earth-shaking new news this week or a specific 'featurette' in mind, so I'm just going to give you a dev update.
I'm now done with everything in Act 2 except the last boss - which I hope to mostly complete over the weekend. There will probably be a few trailing animations and FX that get picked up on Monday, but my aim is to be wrapped on Act 2 at that point. This makes me very happy. I think Act 2 has turned out really well, and am pretty jazzed about how very different it feels from the other acts. I was hoping to be done with the whole Act by the end of the week, but didn't quite make it, largely due to some unexpected bugs cropping up that chewed up a good day and a half of time.
We ended up putting together some new art this week for the three superchampions in Act 2 part 2 ( which are part of a boss chain ), and they came out pretty cool. Their previous incarnation was 'meh', and this is a big improvement.
This isn't a comprehensive list of other tasks - but here goes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This week Marsh and I ended up spending a good bit of time doing some bugfixing.
*There was an erratic issue with UI sorting which we found, due to an uninitialized variable somewhere.
*There were some 'dirty pathnode' occupation issues in warping situations that I fixed.
*We fixed an issue with dead boss units on level loads triggering certain events they shouldn't.
*We found a problem with ai-animations not properly updating when offscreen for level owners in certain situations.
*I fixed improper culling of scaled animated background room pieces. I fixed several problems with quest flags not restoring properly.
*We had a problem with magicfind where unnaturally high boosts (which we sometimes use in spawnclasses to guarantee nice items) could pass the max limit and cause unexpected results. I added in protective code which prevents that but maintains the ratio between itemtypes.
*I made it possible for any unit to consistently ignore your pet as a targetable.
*Marsh added the ability to have footstep particles ( he really needed it for one of his boss battles, because it felt lame not to have splashes ). I added some to desert and snowy regions after that went in.
*Some music fading issues with boss battles were resolved.
*I fixed some problems with certain kind of localonly triggerable units pingponging messages in multiplayer
*Matt Uelmen put together a even more cool ambient sounds which Patrick integrated
*Some special modifications were made to the level running up to the last Act 2 boss to make it cooler.
*Erich did some more fishing hole work and some unique work
*Erich did some magicfind balance and made merchants cooler
*Matt worked on NG+ UI stuff and some trailing portal/waypoint UI fixes.
*Achievements are now being hooked up.
*A new unit was made for the last Act 2 boss battle I'm working on right now which should make it much, much cooler.
*Marsh continued to make good progress on his act and fixed bugs
*Everyone everywhere continued with polish.
*Jeff added some more face and hair options, among other things
My plan for next week is to focus almost entirely on skill tree polish for the classes (although I may switch gears throughout the week to help Marsh out on Act 3 )
Thanks all!
Travis
I don't have earth-shaking new news this week or a specific 'featurette' in mind, so I'm just going to give you a dev update.
I'm now done with everything in Act 2 except the last boss - which I hope to mostly complete over the weekend. There will probably be a few trailing animations and FX that get picked up on Monday, but my aim is to be wrapped on Act 2 at that point. This makes me very happy. I think Act 2 has turned out really well, and am pretty jazzed about how very different it feels from the other acts. I was hoping to be done with the whole Act by the end of the week, but didn't quite make it, largely due to some unexpected bugs cropping up that chewed up a good day and a half of time.
We ended up putting together some new art this week for the three superchampions in Act 2 part 2 ( which are part of a boss chain ), and they came out pretty cool. Their previous incarnation was 'meh', and this is a big improvement.
This isn't a comprehensive list of other tasks - but here goes.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This week Marsh and I ended up spending a good bit of time doing some bugfixing.
*There was an erratic issue with UI sorting which we found, due to an uninitialized variable somewhere.
*There were some 'dirty pathnode' occupation issues in warping situations that I fixed.
*We fixed an issue with dead boss units on level loads triggering certain events they shouldn't.
*We found a problem with ai-animations not properly updating when offscreen for level owners in certain situations.
*I fixed improper culling of scaled animated background room pieces. I fixed several problems with quest flags not restoring properly.
*We had a problem with magicfind where unnaturally high boosts (which we sometimes use in spawnclasses to guarantee nice items) could pass the max limit and cause unexpected results. I added in protective code which prevents that but maintains the ratio between itemtypes.
*I made it possible for any unit to consistently ignore your pet as a targetable.
*Marsh added the ability to have footstep particles ( he really needed it for one of his boss battles, because it felt lame not to have splashes ). I added some to desert and snowy regions after that went in.
*Some music fading issues with boss battles were resolved.
*I fixed some problems with certain kind of localonly triggerable units pingponging messages in multiplayer
*Matt Uelmen put together a even more cool ambient sounds which Patrick integrated
*Some special modifications were made to the level running up to the last Act 2 boss to make it cooler.
*Erich did some more fishing hole work and some unique work
*Erich did some magicfind balance and made merchants cooler
*Matt worked on NG+ UI stuff and some trailing portal/waypoint UI fixes.
*Achievements are now being hooked up.
*A new unit was made for the last Act 2 boss battle I'm working on right now which should make it much, much cooler.
*Marsh continued to make good progress on his act and fixed bugs
*Everyone everywhere continued with polish.
*Jeff added some more face and hair options, among other things
My plan for next week is to focus almost entirely on skill tree polish for the classes (although I may switch gears throughout the week to help Marsh out on Act 3 )
Thanks all!
Travis
Not A Blog Redux V - Food Poisoning Edition! (August 11, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
Not a Blog - Food Poisoning Edition
So, I haven't felt my best for the past day and have a been a bit under the weather, but progress marches on.
Here's the recap for this week!
Act 2 polish is done - yay! Barring any multiplayer quest issues or balance problems that are exposed during testing, it's in the can. I went through a round of fixes for multiplayer quest-related issues over the week and things are feeling pretty solid. Matt also put together some new sounds for some of the monsters and bosses. Slick!
I went on to work on the player skill pass. I finished my pass through the Outlander and am about halfway done with the Engineer. I hope to be done with the Engineer by the end of the weekend.
Marsh has continued work on Act 3, and I hope to join him in about a week to help bring it home.
*Matt T added a 'reroll world' checkbox to the multiplayer game creation menu.
*Brock is re-setting stuff up for the latest Steam wrapping
*I added Blindness resistance. Because we didn't have it. And we needed it.
*Made fishing slightly less fiddly
*Did a pass through XP tables and loot tables and fixed some errant values assigned to various units
*Enforced a min size on automap textures so that they look less gross for small regions
*Matt T made characters save immediately after trading
*Fixed some MP random teleportation desync issues
*Passive pets don't draw aggro
*Various bugs were squashed
*Plenty of things I'm not mentioning as I am at home today and can't ask around easily.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, what's coming up, and what remains to be done before launch?
Here's my rough plan - next week, I'll finish with the Embermage and Berserker skill passes. Once completed (guessing Friday), I'll move over to start helping Marsh out on Act 3. In the following weeks we'll wrap Act 3 together, partitioning duties, and then move on to split the last Act ( which is quite small) and finish up.
That's all I've got for today!
For next week, I'll try to write up a few examples of the way tier bonuses work on a few skills, as I'll ideally be all done with those.
Thanks everybody!
So, I haven't felt my best for the past day and have a been a bit under the weather, but progress marches on.
Here's the recap for this week!
Act 2 polish is done - yay! Barring any multiplayer quest issues or balance problems that are exposed during testing, it's in the can. I went through a round of fixes for multiplayer quest-related issues over the week and things are feeling pretty solid. Matt also put together some new sounds for some of the monsters and bosses. Slick!
I went on to work on the player skill pass. I finished my pass through the Outlander and am about halfway done with the Engineer. I hope to be done with the Engineer by the end of the weekend.
Marsh has continued work on Act 3, and I hope to join him in about a week to help bring it home.
*Matt T added a 'reroll world' checkbox to the multiplayer game creation menu.
*Brock is re-setting stuff up for the latest Steam wrapping
*I added Blindness resistance. Because we didn't have it. And we needed it.
*Made fishing slightly less fiddly
*Did a pass through XP tables and loot tables and fixed some errant values assigned to various units
*Enforced a min size on automap textures so that they look less gross for small regions
*Matt T made characters save immediately after trading
*Fixed some MP random teleportation desync issues
*Passive pets don't draw aggro
*Various bugs were squashed
*Plenty of things I'm not mentioning as I am at home today and can't ask around easily.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
So, what's coming up, and what remains to be done before launch?
Here's my rough plan - next week, I'll finish with the Embermage and Berserker skill passes. Once completed (guessing Friday), I'll move over to start helping Marsh out on Act 3. In the following weeks we'll wrap Act 3 together, partitioning duties, and then move on to split the last Act ( which is quite small) and finish up.
That's all I've got for today!
For next week, I'll try to write up a few examples of the way tier bonuses work on a few skills, as I'll ideally be all done with those.
Thanks everybody!
Not A Blog Redux VI - Skills (August 18, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
Hey everybody. Not a blog time!
Quick update for the week -
I'm done with my Skill pass! Hooray! All classes have been gone through and skills touched up, or reworked where lacking. That means that tomorrow, I move over to Act 3 to work with Marsh on getting it wrapped. As per usual, everybody is working like crazy to get this ready for ship.
QA and went through and did a bug purge this week, and the number of bugs we are left with is surprisingly low. Again, hooray!
Now, last week I promised I'd talk a bit about skills, skill 'trees', and tier bonuses, so I'm going to do that now. I've been knee deep in them for days, so this is as good a time as any.
You'll have to forgive some rough-and-ready dev screenshots - these aren't set up for the prettiest backgrounds or best equipped characters.
Firstly, here's a quick look at what a skill pane looks like -
So, as previously, each class has three panes.
Each pane contains 7 active skills and 3 passive skills, for a total of 30 skills per class. Each skill is unique to the class, and there are no shared abilities.
By contrast, in Torchlight 1, each class had around 30-31 skills - 16 of those were shared skills that everyone had, and each pane had only 5 active skills apart from those. There were only 15 unique skills per class. Things are much different now, and the skills have all had significantly more effort expended on them.
The red skills up top are all actives - the blue skills down below are passives.
Skills unlock for investment in reading order - from top to bottom. You still need to spend skill points to purchase them, just as before, but it's a cleaner layout and makes it more straightforward for us to make them available at the level we want them. Now that the passives are separate, they are unlocked at a different (faster) rate, so that they don't have to be tied down based on where actives are in the advancement series.
You can also see on this pane a representation of the 'Tiers' for each skill. Every skill can have 15 points invested in it. After every 5th point invested, the skill will receive an additional 'Tier Bonus' that adds to its basic functionality in a hopefully more interesting way. Passive skills do NOT receive Tier Bonuses.
Beneath each of the red skills you can see a progress bar - this shows your overall investment in the skill. The I, II, and III show that filling that section of the bar will result in a Tier Bonus ( At which point the numeral will light up )
Tier Bonuses are pretty varied between skills - some will be more interesting than others, depending on the skill and what it is used for. The Tier Bonus for a party buff may not be particularly visually spectacular, but we have tried to add new effects or improved utility wherever possible to make it more enticing to put more than one point into certain skills.
Here's a specific example of a skill and the Tier Bonuses that go along with it that you won't have seen before, as we didn't feature it in the Beta or at any public showing.
At the bottom, you can see the Tier bonuses you will receive ( you can also see these separately by mousing over the progress bar on the skill pane ).
Bramble Wall is an Outlander skill that creates an arc of impassable thorns in front of you, which monsters cannot pass, but you can shoot over. The tier bonuses here provide additional abilities to Bramble Wall. After the first 5 points, and enemies within range of the wall when it rises will be damaged ( you can see that damage being applied up in the rank description, as I have unlocked Tier 1 ). At 10 points, the length of the Bramble arc is increased, and at full investment, the Brambles emit poison clouds which will continously damage enemies that draw near the brambles to pass around them.
You can seem examples of the tiers for Bramble wall below.
We try where possible to have visual alterations to skills to reflect what is going on with the bonuses. Some skills may only get a range or angle increase on their tier bonuses. Eviscerate is an example - but Eviscerate at max investment looks a lot different from Level 1 Eviscerate.
Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how our alterations to the Skill system function. See you next week! I'm looking forward to digging into Act 3 (although I'm not planning to talk about the content there - it's all going to stay under wraps until launch).
Thanks, everybody!
Quick update for the week -
I'm done with my Skill pass! Hooray! All classes have been gone through and skills touched up, or reworked where lacking. That means that tomorrow, I move over to Act 3 to work with Marsh on getting it wrapped. As per usual, everybody is working like crazy to get this ready for ship.
QA and went through and did a bug purge this week, and the number of bugs we are left with is surprisingly low. Again, hooray!
Now, last week I promised I'd talk a bit about skills, skill 'trees', and tier bonuses, so I'm going to do that now. I've been knee deep in them for days, so this is as good a time as any.
You'll have to forgive some rough-and-ready dev screenshots - these aren't set up for the prettiest backgrounds or best equipped characters.
Firstly, here's a quick look at what a skill pane looks like -
So, as previously, each class has three panes.
Each pane contains 7 active skills and 3 passive skills, for a total of 30 skills per class. Each skill is unique to the class, and there are no shared abilities.
By contrast, in Torchlight 1, each class had around 30-31 skills - 16 of those were shared skills that everyone had, and each pane had only 5 active skills apart from those. There were only 15 unique skills per class. Things are much different now, and the skills have all had significantly more effort expended on them.
The red skills up top are all actives - the blue skills down below are passives.
Skills unlock for investment in reading order - from top to bottom. You still need to spend skill points to purchase them, just as before, but it's a cleaner layout and makes it more straightforward for us to make them available at the level we want them. Now that the passives are separate, they are unlocked at a different (faster) rate, so that they don't have to be tied down based on where actives are in the advancement series.
You can also see on this pane a representation of the 'Tiers' for each skill. Every skill can have 15 points invested in it. After every 5th point invested, the skill will receive an additional 'Tier Bonus' that adds to its basic functionality in a hopefully more interesting way. Passive skills do NOT receive Tier Bonuses.
Beneath each of the red skills you can see a progress bar - this shows your overall investment in the skill. The I, II, and III show that filling that section of the bar will result in a Tier Bonus ( At which point the numeral will light up )
Tier Bonuses are pretty varied between skills - some will be more interesting than others, depending on the skill and what it is used for. The Tier Bonus for a party buff may not be particularly visually spectacular, but we have tried to add new effects or improved utility wherever possible to make it more enticing to put more than one point into certain skills.
Here's a specific example of a skill and the Tier Bonuses that go along with it that you won't have seen before, as we didn't feature it in the Beta or at any public showing.
At the bottom, you can see the Tier bonuses you will receive ( you can also see these separately by mousing over the progress bar on the skill pane ).
Bramble Wall is an Outlander skill that creates an arc of impassable thorns in front of you, which monsters cannot pass, but you can shoot over. The tier bonuses here provide additional abilities to Bramble Wall. After the first 5 points, and enemies within range of the wall when it rises will be damaged ( you can see that damage being applied up in the rank description, as I have unlocked Tier 1 ). At 10 points, the length of the Bramble arc is increased, and at full investment, the Brambles emit poison clouds which will continously damage enemies that draw near the brambles to pass around them.
You can seem examples of the tiers for Bramble wall below.
We try where possible to have visual alterations to skills to reflect what is going on with the bonuses. Some skills may only get a range or angle increase on their tier bonuses. Eviscerate is an example - but Eviscerate at max investment looks a lot different from Level 1 Eviscerate.
Hopefully this gives you a good idea of how our alterations to the Skill system function. See you next week! I'm looking forward to digging into Act 3 (although I'm not planning to talk about the content there - it's all going to stay under wraps until launch).
Thanks, everybody!
Not A Blog Redux VII - PAX (August 25, 2012) [link]
» Click to show Spoiler - click again to hide... «
It's gonna be short and sweet this week folks -
We are super-buckled-down over here, trying to get everything bolted into its final location.
I've made it halfway through Act3 and am almost totally caught up with Marsh now. He's further into Act 3 than me (I'm right at the halfway point ), but it only took me 6 days to get there, so we are really rolling.
The game is awesome.
As has been mentioned, we will be telling everyone the Release Date next week.
We are still aiming for Summer.
it's 8AM til midnight every day for me until release, (with the exception of 3 days for PAX), my wife has a sitter to help out with the kids, all waking hours go to wrapping this up.
Everyone is working like crazy.
Thursday night I will let you know the release date here in the forums. You guys deserve to know first.
Thanks for your patience, and I hope when you have the game you feel that it was rewarded.
that's all! Hope I see you at PAX.
Travis
We are super-buckled-down over here, trying to get everything bolted into its final location.
I've made it halfway through Act3 and am almost totally caught up with Marsh now. He's further into Act 3 than me (I'm right at the halfway point ), but it only took me 6 days to get there, so we are really rolling.
The game is awesome.
As has been mentioned, we will be telling everyone the Release Date next week.
We are still aiming for Summer.
it's 8AM til midnight every day for me until release, (with the exception of 3 days for PAX), my wife has a sitter to help out with the kids, all waking hours go to wrapping this up.
Everyone is working like crazy.
Thursday night I will let you know the release date here in the forums. You guys deserve to know first.
Thanks for your patience, and I hope when you have the game you feel that it was rewarded.
that's all! Hope I see you at PAX.
Travis
This post has been edited by Fhaarkas: Aug 27 2012, 09:47 AM
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why not see reviews 1st
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