We have been busy this week getting things prepared for our next update to the Public Test Realm. Here’s what has been happening this week behind the scenes:
Design and Narrative
- Finalizing NPC population work in Detihauna.
- Continuing NPC population work in Kosa Minor.
- Filling out NPC population in parts of the Sea Dragon Hatchery.
- Adding more sharks and other sea life to the waters around Badia de Cara.
- Finished updating mastery options for Paladin and Dire Lord.
- Polishing work on the Mastery UI for Cleric, Shaman, and Druid.
- Began implementing new Wizard abilities and mastery options.
- Working on the designs for Rogue and Ranger mastery options.
- Additional tuning and itemization work for levels 1-40.
- Building out NPC roster and potential quest hooks for Faerthale.
- Squashing bugs and making tuning adjustments to class abilities based on bug reports, feedback, and observation data from the Public Test Realm.
Worldbuilding and Environment Art
- Atmospheric and visual effects for various areas in Badia de Cara.
- Additional set dressing in some areas of Badia de Cara that were feeling a little sparse.
- Detailed set dressing for Detihauna.
- Optimizing object collision across all of Badia de Cara and the Port of Rulun.
- Tweaks to lighting behavior for underwater environments.
- Continued concepting for modular Elven dwelling kit for Faerthale City and outlying areas.
Character Art and Animation
- Wrap-up work on Badia de Cara NPC models, and picking up a few final things for the zone that have been requested by the design team.
- Updated player swimming animations, including making death by drowning more dramatic.
- Setting up for test run on universal armor meshes to make sure everything works properly in-game.
- Continuing detailed concepts and building blockouts for Lucent, Ashen, and Ember elf customization options.
Programming
- Several fixes for problems that were impacting NPC pathfinding, especially where water was involved.
- Tackling bugs and requested changes from the design team, one at a time.
- Chewing through some back-end data optimization to help reduce performance overhead on the server.
- Preparing for revisions to core server processes to help improve scalability and performance (this is a large effort and will likely take several months to complete, but is required to enable several important gameplay-related features).
- Continuing work on market system UI (browsing/search window, listing management) and prep for data connections.