Vizaris Weekly Update - 42 news

We’ve got a pretty hefty list of changes this week, including a massive overhaul of combat which should dramatically improve the feel of the game. Last week we had some issues with some old code being removed making dolfogs extremely dangerous (even the little one in the tutorial cave), but all of that should be resolved this week.

This week's additions

• Revised Akro Basin - As usual, another game area was updated this week – Akro Basin, which is the area south and south east of the village. Akro basin was one of the older areas (as all of the upcoming areas to be revised) so it has one of the most dramatic updates of any area so far. It was also notably expanded northward towards the village. Once the village is complete, you’ll be able to access the top of the mesa plateau from that canyon.

• Completely Rebalanced Combat - Combat was completely overhauled this week, with player damages and stamina costs, enemy damage, enemy health, and enemy behavior all being significantly modified. The end result is a combat situation which should feel significantly more stable and predictable. More tweaks will be made here and there, but this rebalance clears the table of a lot of clutter that was piling up from the various updates.

• Overhauled Weapons - Weapons themselves also had a major gameplay overhaul as well. Previously we had three weapons of each of the three types (Blade, axe, and blunt), however the difference between these weapons were strictly visual. Not anymore. Now these weapons have been reclassified into ‘Cheap’, ‘Common’, and ‘Quality’, giving you room to progress as you acquire more money.

• Added More Combat Music - We’ve also added a new combat music this week, bringing the number of combat tracks up to par with the number of exploration tracks.

• Rebalanced Dolfogs - As part of the combat rebalance, dolfog stats were significantly overhauled, along with their personality. That should make it a little more fun to fight these little demons.

• Further tweaks to lighting, sun, and sky - Also as usual, there was a bevy of tweaks to the sun, sky, and lighting this week; pushing sunlight to be brighter, and somewhat less orange. In my opinion (the only one that matters, har har!) the end result looks more realistic and ideally more pleasing.

• New Training Dummy - The dolfog in the starter cave has been completely replaced with a new training dummy model which will react to your attacks. I find it quite stress relieving to attack this dummy.

• Updated Starting Tutorial - And on that note, the starter tutorial has been modified to now talk about the timing reticule, as I can imagine that was a bit confusing for some players.

• Music now fades out on death - Not much else to say for this one. Now you can sit in silence and think about all the mistakes that led you to this point.

• Updated Inventory Hotkey Display - The player inventory has been updated to no longer show the favorite and drop hotkeys when no object is selected.

• Added hotkeys to container inventory - R can now be used as a hotkey for take all, and 1 and 2 can be used as hotkeys to swtich between the player inventory and the container inventory.

• New sounds when opening and closing containers - Speaking of containers, we now have new opening and closing sounds for all the containers in the game. This is actually code that has been around for a couple weeks now, but we only just now got sounds for this.

• Revised perfect block and timing bar sounds - The sound for perfect block, as well as some of the sounds for the timing reticule were updated to be a bit more responsive.

• Tweaked foliage colors - Various harvestable plants and nondescript foliage models had their colors tweaked here and there to fit in a little better with the world.

• Fixed: Ancient Dolfog Personality - Turns out the rarely encountered mega sized Ancient Dolfogs had completely broken personalities. An oversight in some of the configuration of the ancient dolfog was forcing all of its personality stats to 0, which basically means it was extremely passive, extremely cowardly, and extremely immobile. Not very good for a creature that’s supposed to be boss-like.

• Fixed: Bugs relating to combat tracing and timing - A significant portion of bugs related to combat traces and the timing bar were fixed as part of the combat overhaul, making weapons more responsive.

• Fixed: Freeze on Certain Keybinds - Our programmer fixed a small error in the code made it possible to crash the game if you tried to rebind a key to a key that already had an action assigned to it.

• Fixed: Tutorial Messages - Those gosh darn blasted tutorial messages in the starter cave were adjusted to only appear once.

• Fixed: Bright Artifacts in the Sky! - A strange bug also cropped up last week which cause bright spots which were nearly as bright as the sun to appear in the North, South, and East. I’m still not sure what caused them to show up last week specifically (UFOs?), but they’re fixed now.

• Fixed: Crafting menu while dead - No more zombie crafting for you, you little rascal!

• Backend: Personality System Refactoring - A bunch of work was done to transition the personality system’s functionality to a new format, with the benefits being the ability to more easily tweak behavior in the personality system, as well as potentially create custom sub-personalities for different NPCs.

• Backend: Item Ownership - Objects, containers, and activators are now also capable of having specific owners (usually NPCs). This is very important for the village, and also very important for this next backend feature.

• Backend: Stealing - The game now understands stealing, and is capable of changing visuals and gameplay based on who owns a specific object, container, or activator. This is of course very important for the village, when combined with other upcoming features, as it would break the game if players could just walk into people’s homes and steal their stuff.

The backend work is the first inklings of a comprehensive upgrade to the behavior of NPCs outside of direct combat. This upgrade will include new behavior such as scheduling for NPCs, a calendar system for the game, guards, stealing, crime, bounty, basic stealth, and much much more.

We’ve refocused on these tasks as the addition of Ro’to Village to the game draws closer, we need these features to fully realize the village. These features will provide the foundations for many new layers of gameplay, and the village itself will become a crucial nexus for gameplay in the near future.

–Luke

Vizaris is an open world, fantasy roleplaying game, with singleplayer and 6 player co-op multiplayer. Vizaris focuses on player choice and freedom. New updates at the start of every week!

You can play Vizaris right now by going to www.VizarisGame.com/play , Every dollar goes to supporting the development of the game, meaning more content at a faster rate. Free press access available! Questions, comments, help, and feedback welcome!