April 2023 Game Update

[dayrinni]

Hello!

I wanted to give you an update on how things are going in ATS over the past few months!

Lunar Sages
Lunar Sages are nearing completion. All their mechanics are completed, and the early access folks are doing testing (both general testing and nailing down a few oddities). I am working on writing the combat flavor messages, ability flavor help file text, and the website page. If I had to guess, perhaps 3 to 4 weeks until release.

Lunar Sages are a medium difficulty class and they were designed that way because they will be a popular class – both for our current players and any new ones. However, that doesn’t mean they don’t have interesting game play systems! They have a waxing and waning system with the moons, ability to teleport to the moon, cast powerful Eclipse spells, and most of it: become the Lord of the Moon! Yes, you CAN put your face on the moon! Zelroth rejoices!


Class Balancing
Actinate and I have been working on class balancing. Actinate is focusing on fighters right now. Long term we are moving to a more standardized damage system for all classes. Abilities will have 7 damage tiers. Each tier is simply more powerful than the one before it. You can think of these a “weak”, “strong”, “extreme”, etc. Each damage tier will take into consideration your attributes and weapons (all classes will get wielded weapons). The numerical values on abilities now won’t be manually set like they are today. For example, today we key in like a range for “Fire Shock”: 10 to 14. Now, we can just say “DamageTier1” and we are done. All changes will automatically update if we decide Tier1 needs to be 20 to 30 instead of 10 to 20. The changes are dynamic too – we don’t need to copyover.

Focus System
We are also trying to move away from the Focus system. Going forward, unless there is a great need for a focus on a class, they won’t have it. Too many times during the design of a class, we always hit road-blocks in the focuses and ended up trying to fit a square in a round shaped hole. This then had a domino effect with the players and the “bad feeling” of a class. As such, we are trying to remedy that by not including them in future classes (ironically, Cosmic Herald suits the focus system well because they can focus on their scythe or cosmic horror transformations more haha). For example, Lunar Sages do not have a focus.

We may remove focuses from current classes and roll their focus abilities into the base class in some way. We are still deciding what to do. If you have any thoughts, feel free to DM me or chat about it in some way in Discord!

Content Creation
One of the main challenges we have is creating in-world content, like rooms, npcs, items, quests, and so on. We are trying to remedy that by using Chat GPT more. Having Chat GPT write descriptions for rooms is fantastic and we will be using that going forward. It isn’t perfect, but it is fast, easy, and I’ve developed a simple templating system that will churn our descriptions like no tomorrow. I need to integrate it into the game such that it can easily write descriptions automatically instead of the Chat Room in a Web Browser. I will be working on this over the next few months after Lunar Sages release and in parallel to the other projects! I will integrate Chat GPT more in the game for other things like items in the future.

Overall, and not only in the context of rooms, Chat GPT is really impressive and solves so many of Actinate’s and I issues with making content. Today, the time to make content both general content and any RP content, is just too long. This prevents us from doing RP. It takes a long time to make areas. It takes a long time to make items. It takes a long time to make <thing>.

You may see a common theme in the previous sections here: make content creation, balancing, and so on, easier and less time consuming. The end goal here is to be able to RP more and make cool RP content faster. The game has always been about doing cool RP that’s exciting fun, game-changing, and getting cool rewards from it. Every character is impacted differently from each RP event and we want to be able to do that! This is one major pillar of what ATS is about. If we can improve all aspects here, we can run more RP – both game wide and personal – much easier and make more of an impact (fun) per player. That’s the end goal: The end goal! It is: leverage tooling, make design decisions that make our lives easier (ie: removing focuses).

Thank you so much for playing and being a member of the community. Thank you to the Paterons for their monthly pledges. We signed up for the monthly Chat GPT Plus program and are using the pateron pledges for that. Additionally, using Chat GPT API calls in the game cost money as well – the paterons pledges help with that!

As always, if you have questions, comments, concerns or wish to discuss anything more, just reach out!
Dayrinni
Actinate