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New Graphics! |
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28 December 06 Things are progressing on Lost Legends 0.201, and one of the major new features is the upgraded 3D graphics system. We've added neat new features like support for Direct3D Shader Models 2 and 3, as well as pixel lighting, normal maps, and all kinds of other cool stuff.
There are more screenshots located here. Happy New Year, thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon! |
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New Features |
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22 December 06 First off, a big thanks to everyone who's downloaded the latest release of Lost Legends! With the latest release put to bed, we figured it was a good time to give you an update on what we're planning for the next releases of Lost Legends. First of all, while the latest version of Lost Legends contains lots of great new features and fixes, it was a good deal of time between releases. So, we plan on making updates more frequently; hopefully no more than a month apart. We will also be updating the web site with game related documentation in the Scriptorium. We've already added basic gameplay information, as well as all the default keyboard and mouse mappings. We'll also be adding additional information on localizing the text of Lost Legends, as well as remapping keyboard and mouse controls. If you're interested in something specific, please let us know. As we move toward building out the whole game, we have many large features planned, as well as many smaller features, tweaks, and bug fixes. The next version will probably be version 0.201, and some of the major features include: * New personality trait system during character creation Beyond 0.201, the major features we're planning on adding in the short term include: * Raising the level cap. Probably to level 20, if not higher Beyond that, we will be adding a number of other cool things including more player races, more starting cities, and item crafting. We hope this gives you an idea of what we're planning. And, of course, we also look forward to your continued comments and feedback in the Avensvere Inn and email. Happy holidays, thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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| Lost Legends 0.200 Released! | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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17 December 06
Lost Legends version 0.200 is now available! Thanks to everyone who helped with their great feedback and reports!
Major features include! New screenshots are available, as well as a complete feature and change list. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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Bugs! |
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13 November 06 All the new features are in. The final reported bugs are fixed. And, the latest version of Lost Legends is finally down to testing and adding new art. Among the major art additions, we're putting in new models, textures, and animations for the human warrior, as well as adding a new playable race. We'll get screenshots up for those soon. In future releases we'll be creating more specific player characters based on what character traits you select. Testing takes some time, but we think you'll be happy if we test first ;) We play the game a lot and try and make it crash or make features break. We also test gameplay to make sure things are working correctly. And, we test with Windows 98, Windows XP, and a few graphics cards to make sure there's no problem there. All this testing does uncover some new bugs, and then we get those fixed and we test some more. So, we're close now. The screenshots coming soon will hopefully tide you over while we get the final testing done.
Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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The New Next Release and Beyond! |
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4 November 06 It's been nearly 6 months since the release of the 0.111 version of Lost Legends. Finally, the 0.200 version of Lost Legends is close to release. Yay! Version 0.200 of Lost Legends includes ... * Nearly a dozen new gameplay features! The original plan for the 0.200 release was to make it out in a few months and add the addition of a first person view to the game. It's not bad, all things considered, that the actual release took only twice that time; yes, we wish it had only taken a few months as well, sorry! However, once we started to dig into first person mode, your feedback, and planning out the game beyond level 10, a few major things became apparent that forced alot of pencil and paper design time. The current character creation system has allowed you to choose a character class and refine the character with skill, talent, and mastery points gained every level or so, or as the result of quests. Unfortunately, these systems are by and large unrelated and once you choose the spells you want to emphasize by spending points in them, there's not many interesting choices left to make. With 0.200, character creation has been overhauled to include more than a half dozen options including race, gender, and class. The balance that we are trying to strike is to keep character creation straightforward, while making it more interesting, and opening it up to allow more choices in the role of your character as the game progresses. And, while not all of these new character traits will be implemented in 0.200, but they will be added over successive releases. The new Lost Legends also includes more character skills like charisma, which ties into the plans for broadening the world and story itself. And, why would one need charisma if there's no one to talk to, right? So, deep inside Lost Legends 0.200 is the infrastructure for the next major post-0.200 version which will have a deeper quest structure, NPCs to talk to, and a world travel system. By broadening and deepening the character experience and the world experience, we want you to still be rewarded and happy with a fast-paced action game, but have the ability to have more interesting breadth and depth in your character and surrounding world. Beyond those changes, the next highest priority feature is raising the character level cap. This has actually been blocked due to the content issues mentioned a couple of posts ago, as well the planning for broadening the character and world experiences. Part of this will include implementation of all spells up to the new cap, as well as updates to item drops, character inventory, and character equipping systems that will expand the range of items available, especially as some will be race or class specific. Multiplayer and first person mode are also among a number of other major high priority features. Overall, we'd also like to make new versions available more frequently. Most of the delay in 0.200 has been down to iterating on design issues, and putting in the infrastructure for new major features. In the future we'd like to go no more than a month without a new release including new or updated gameplay and bug fixes. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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Level Caps |
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28 October 06 One of the frequent questions we get is, "Why is the player character level capped at 7 in the current version of Lost Legends?" It's a great question! And, the answer is both simple and complex. Put simply, Lost Legends is a work in progress. See? That was simple. Yes, yes. I know. I said there was a much more complex answer as well. In the current version of Lost Legends, you select a quest from the world map, kill monsters, gain experience, find valuable items which you may sell along the way, find the treasure at the end of the dungeon, and finally return to the world map for your next adventure. And, when you have enough experience you gain a new character level, allowing you to customize your character with improved and new skills and masteries, as well as fight a wider variety of monsters, and find new and more various kinds of items to use or sell. In a nutshell. More or less. To put it another way, as you take on quests and level up your character, the story and world broadens out before you, allowing you more choice in character customization, more monsters to fight, more locations to explore, and more items to find. But, since we're currently a work in progress (yes, sorry, we're moving as fast as we can!), this expanding universe of stuff currently has a plateau of about level 7 for both existing classes. If you've played a lot, you might notice that level 8, 9, and 10 items do drop from time to time. So, even if you play for hours and hours as a level 7 character (and we know many of you have!), there's still a lot of fun in seeing what you find. Another slightly more uninteresting, and yet very important, issue is that we've had to catastrophically change the savegame format a couple of times already. Doing this means you've lost older characters. It's really nothing but our fault, and it's been a learning process, but by capping at level 7 it also means you haven't lost a huge amount of progress in the game. Anyway, so where is all this going, you ask? Well, a lot of the time over the last several months since the last release of Lost Legends has been spent figuring out how the broadening out of the world we mentioned actually happens. We feel we now have a solid idea how you and your character can continue to have interesting things to do, monsters to fight, places to go, items to use, and choices to make, at least through level 100. We certainly won't increase the level cap to 100 in the next release, but it should be higher, and we do have a path to get there. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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| Small Things | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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9 October 06 It's always the small things that can end up being the most confusing or annoying. Or, turn out to be a much larger than you originally thought. You know the ones. The problems that seem most clear cut and obvious that get taken care of quickly so you can spend time lots of time working on the cool things like dungeons and story and loot. Supporting laptops has certainly been something that went from the "that's easy" column to the "it requires lots of programming" column. Everything's working now (please let us know if it's not), but it turns out that laptops are very unlike home computers. Some laptops have strange screen sizes, some can't really run fullscreen games, most have graphics drivers that can never be upgraded, and all recent ones can change their CPU speed as needed. Definitely unexpected, but now taken care of with a lot of additional programming. Version numbering was another small thing that ended up being confusing. Originally, we were using version numbers that looked like this: 0.1.1.1. Mostly because we'd worked on other programming projects that used similar systems. It confused you, it confused us. Now, we're switching to a simpler system that looks like this: 0.111. There. Much easier to read and understand. Sub-directories in the Lost Legends installation zip file ended up being both confusing and annoying. Some un-zipping programs apparently don't bother to create the sub-directories unless you tell them to. In the new Lost Legends, we've removed the sub-directories to prevent any future problems. And, speaking of installations, the lack of a separate installer program has confused some people. The only installed software that Lost Legends requires to run is Microsoft's DirectX 9 (well, 9.0c to be exact), so we just launch DirectX's installer automatically if needed - unlike most games that would have a separate installer to copy files and run the DirectX installer and do who knows what. Crashes annoy people, and they annoy us too for having made such dumb mistakes in the first place. However, we're very happy (joyful even!) that people who've unfortunately suffered a crash have helped us out by sending in their crash file so we can fix the problems. We also accidently included some weird alphabetic characters in an early version of Lost Legends. It turns out that in the US language version of Microsoft Windows that the characters would just magically do nothing, but in some languages like Greek, they would cause a data problem and crash. Thanks again to those who reported the problem and helped us get a fix out! There's probably more small things in the game engine that we've fixed that I just can't remember right now. If there's any small (or large) things you find confusing or annoying, please let us know! And, there's certainly a number of game play things which we've changed or tweaked, and we'll talk about those next time. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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Where in the world is Avensvere? |
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23 September 06 Things are cooking along on the next version of Lost Legends, and there are many changes from very small to very large! Speaking of very large changes ... You may have noticed that while you can have great fun hacking and slashing through each adventure in Lost Legends, there's a few things missing that make you feel like the adventures don't really relate to each other. So, two of the most basic things we're adding are places to visit to get new quests or just to trade or find the local gossip, and non-playing characters who live in those places. The town of Avensvere is the starting location for your character (as some sharp sighted forum readers may have already guessed). Avensvere is a small town on the located on the banks of the river Marrum at the edge of King's Forest. Founded many hundreds of years ago by woodsmen and hunters, Avensvere's location on the Marrum between the rolling, densely forested hills of King's Forest and the gentler glades of the Eastern lowlands soon beckoned to traders and adventurers as well. From the Avensvere Inn, to the Marrum docks, to the Ox's Forge, and beyond, Avensvere is a town of many places and many faces! Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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Austin Game Conference |
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9 September 06 Just back from a couple of days at the Austin Game Conference. It was a pretty casual event. Not too into making an MMO right now, which most of the talks were about. The speech from Rob Pardo at Blizzard on how World of Warcraft was created was pretty interesting. Vernor Vinge, the science fiction author, gave a speech on where he saw things going, but unfortunately it seemed a bit rambling. They also had a big room with lots of companies selling technology or trying to recruit. The MMO engines like Emergent, Big World, and Hero Engine seemed pretty interesting. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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Welcome back! |
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3 September 06 It's been a busy summer since the last update! I've revamped the web site to make it a little more streamlined, and, of course, I've been working on the next version of Lost Legends. I'm still a little ways away from releasing the new version of Lost Legends, so in the meantime I'll be taking a look back on what things went well, and not so well, in the previous versions of Lost Legends. Each week we'll take a look at a different aspect of Lost Legends, from art, to game design, to programming, to bugs, to making a game part time, and see what worked and what didn't. Then, we'll move forward with changing and new features. Right now, I'm going to head out and try to sneak into the Austin Game Conference. Should be fun! I'll post a recap next week. Thanks for your support, and see you in the dungeon!
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