Acheron's Awakening

AA - New feature descriptions

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:21:50 GMT

Based off of the comments I received from the last entry, here are a couple of quick comments on the new game HUD (see the screenshots in the post below for reference).

You'll notice that a green bar now runs along the top of the main HUD. This is pretty simple to explain: like WoW this bar displays your experience and how close you are to reaching the next level. I made this addition to the main HUD based upon input from private testers.

Also new to the HUD is the snake's tail. Aside from displaying your character's level, the circle changes color. When the circle is blue it is safe for your character to logout. The circle turns red when you are in danger (in the dungeon, engaged in PvP etc.). If you logout while the circle is red, you'll drop half of your gold.

This penalty system will prevent players from abusing their ability to logout anytime.

Let Acheron sleep [a bit longer]

Sun, 03 Dec 2006 03:53:33 GMT

Answers to the three most common questions that I've been emailed lately:

Q: Are you still working on Acheron's Awakening?
A: Yes.

Q: When will the game be released?
A: When it's ready.

Q: Will you post some new screenshots?
A:

The advantages of private testing Acheron's Awakening

Wed, 27 Sep 2006 02:16:47 GMT

Private testing has been going extremely well. Based upon the excellent bug reports that I've been receiving from the testers, I've managed to release a new testing compile of the game almost every single day for the past week.

Aside from hunting for bugs and balance issues, the private testers have also been giving their input on the game itself and features that they'd like to see implemented. From something as simple as adding signs to the front of buildings for identification (a Blacksmith sign, Inn sign etc.) to making the HUD more user-friendly, their suggestions often really improve certain aspects of the game that I've overlooked.

For example, check out this older screenshot:

Screenshot from a much older version...

And compare it with this one:

An image from the latest compile (v.28)

Notice anything different? Stackable items such as potions now have an overlay that displays the number of items in the stack. Additionally, shopkeepers now sell potions in greater quanities so that you don't have to buy one at a time.

You'll also notice the bow with the blue underlay. And underlay like that denotes that an item is "Enchanted" (the lowest level of rarity after normal items). If the item were "Rare", the underlay would be green. This new feature suggested by the testers helps to more easily identify valuable items without having to click on them.

Pretty simple stuff, but every little bit contributes to what is becoming a very polished product. Without private testing the initial release of the game would have been raw, unbalanced, and buggy. However, thanks to the dedication of the testers, you'll be fighting monsters instead of glitches on the first day.

Zeidrieck's first day of Acheron's Awakening

Sat, 23 Sep 2006 22:18:50 GMT

Zeidrieck, one of the new private testers has posted a ton of screenshots and an accout of his experiences in AA today in a topic over on the Silk Games forum. For those of you who don't know... Zeidrieck is the extremely talented guy who drew the majority of the awesome inventory icons in the game.

Feel free to join up over at the Silk Games forums to join in the discussion, or reply to this post here. I also have some responses that I'd like to make to the comments from the last AA journal entry, but I'll make another post about those tomorrow or Monday.

Acheron private testing Phase 2 begins

Fri, 22 Sep 2006 11:26:27 GMT

One step closer to release. In the next week or so I'm going to be making the final pre-release posts in this developer's journal that explain the subscription system and several other aspects of the game that I haven't covered yet.

There are quite a few more private testers this time around. If they're up for it then I'm going to have them post their (hopefully) unbiased opinions of the alpha version of the game here. Hopefully their testimony will finally give you someone else's point of view on the quality of the game!

I'm debating having a little bit of fun and giving BYONDers the opportunity to preview the game by the end of next week. Sort of a contest/experiment. If people are interested in this opportunity, then let me know and I'll post the details.

Acheron crisis averted!

Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:32:21 GMT

Whoa... almost ran into a show-stopper bug last night.

Here's the scenario: I was multi-keying on an Acheron server on my computer to test player interaction stuff. The problem was the everytime that I logged in with another key, the server would crash and the DS/DD would close. Bizarre and frustrating! Occasionally instead of just crashing, the entire server froze and output this BYOND Bug message:

BYOND(350.909) BUG: unexpected file transmission (packet_num = 510 (expected = 509),max=623,pid=4294967295)

After six plus hours of testing and fuming, I came to the conclusion that the bug is caused by having too many complex map files. This bug isn't exclusive to the Beta-- even the old version of BYOND was doing the same thing.

The good news is that after a quick session with some of the private testers tonight, we determined that this bug is NOT a problem when remote players connect. This bug only occurs when trying to multi-key from the same computer the server is being hosted on.

This is a BYOND Bug that definitely needs to be fixed, but at least it won't hold up the final stages of AA development too much. Things could have been so much worse...

Silk speaks about Acheron's Awakening!

Fri, 01 Sep 2006 21:40:11 GMT

Scar here, one of the private testers just wanting to post a talk that Balzack and I had with Silk about Acheron's Awakening on the Balzackian Teamspeak server. Check it out!

http://silkgames.com/acheron/aa_chat.mp3

Acheron news and a screenshot

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 21:38:53 GMT

The 40+ bugs of varying severity reported from the first phase of private testing have been fixed. The next phase should begin shortly. I've been pretty bogged down this week with work (I essentially worked a 12 hour day today... ick).

Keep in mind that this game is a massive project, and I'm doing my best to get it out ASAP. I'm taking advantage of no longer being on a deadline for release to polish things up a bit more before it goes public.

Rest assured, you will be playing Acheron's Awakening soon enough. As I've said a million times before- I'm just as anxious to release this game as anyone is to play it. Thank you for all of the support so far!

Oh, and if you have a problem with any of that, then I'll rip your eyes out:

When a player gets "Player-Killed" he loses more than just his honor...

Acheron's Awakening comes out of the closet

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 20:03:00 GMT

I finally unpacked my coding computer and got it set up in my new apartment this afternoon. As soon as I booted it up I ended up playing (not coding) Acheron's Awakening for about an hour before I realized that I had to get back to unpacking stuff.

Major work on the game will resume in a few days, and after another round of private testing or two the initial release should be ready for the public.

I'm excited because the release is definitely in sight, although I don't want to give any specific dates or timeframes. I've got a lot of stuff to do for my job this week as well as getting my apartment set up etc.. I'm just as anxious as anyone else is to see this game released, so I'm going to do everything I can to finish it soon!

Make your own Acheron's Awakening

Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:07:58 GMT

Lately I have been receiving a lot of emails/pages asking me how I coded the HUD in Acheron's Awakening, and so here are just a few libraries to get you started:

Nadrew's "HUD demo" library:
http://developer.byond.com/hub/Nadrew/NadrewsHUDdemo

Very simple and easy to understand library that will get you started with onscreen HUDs. If you have no idea where to start, check this out first!

Crispy's "Heads Up" library:
http://developer.byond.com/hub/Crispy/HeadsUp

Great way to play around with dragging and dropping onscreen HUD objects. It's easier than you think!

Shadowdarke's "HUDmeter" library:
http://developer.byond.com/hub/Shadowdarke/HUDmeter

Should give you a great understanding of how onscreen status bars are created and updated.

Dantom's "htmllib" library:
http://developer.byond.com/hub/Dantom/htmllib

Another way to work with menus... this is what Proelium's browser menu system uses.

Let me know if I missed anything!