Even if I don't write about it, Death Raiders is still moving forward. Maybe that's the reason, even, heh. Anyway, we're working now on a particularly interesting part, at least from my own perspective, which, may be a little biased. I'll let you decide.
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These horrible graphics you're looking at here, are the game's main city. It will look way more awesome in a couple of weeks, don't worry. So, what's so interesting about it?
Well, until now, most of the management was done through a webpage; there were different sections like the market, the character sheets/inventories, the forum and such. Under the new schema, everything will be done directly in-game. It's not something really "original", as most MMO follow that path nowadays, but the way it's handled, I would say it's at least, a bit interesting. Everything is built and shaped by the players themselves. Or, being more precise, most things.
So, to put it simple, players will be in charge of building and upgrading all the buildings in the town, and will only have access to that content they've "opened". For example, building a Temple to a certain deity will also bring several new objects to the game, and continue doing so after each upgrade of the temple itself.
The idea is to move absolutely everything inside the game window. Everything. From the relatively normal things like the marketplace, shops, inns, guild houses... to even the account creation system. Plus, the way the game it's handled, it's even possible to just enter the webpage and watch other people play; initially, the idea was just to show the town live on the background while you filled the forms, but I guess it's tweakable.
The interface is still pretty primitive (although, working 99%).
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As you can see, there're also some problems with the encoding right now. Well, I can promise those won't be there when we reach the first Open Beta stage.
You might also notice that we've added a zoom function (both images are on a 1:1 scale). At the moment it's working mostly perfect under Firefox, Chrome and Opera. Internet Explorer it's another story. We'll have to decide whether to change dramatically the way the zoom works, or just drop the support for Microsoft's web browser. The zoom is "smooth" at the moment, and bringing support to IE would probably mean lowering the game experience for every other browser. Sigh.
Anyway, back to the city thing. Instead of using a tiled background, this time we're going fixed. Fixed in a way that's still easy to let the city grow (as the "background" image is still done by using something similar to tiles and it's rather change-friendly). At the moment the image is 2048x2048 pixels. That might sound like "not too much", considering that there's even a non-useful zone (all the walls and the grass on the other side). As the size of the buildings is also fixed, I did some quick calculations:
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However, the size isn't decided yet, and it's subject to change, probably doing it soon. Hopefully, we'll have something better to show in a short period of time, or at least, something more pleasant to the eye.
On a side note, we've been working on lots of other stuff, such as new powers and a new way to handle them, some combat tweaks (changed the formula to calculate the dodge probability), added bows, crossbows, some new armors, re-vamped dual-wield combat, and the character creation system... among many other things.
So, well, looking back to these past two weeks now, it seems like we did actually work a bit on the game this Christmas, doesn't it?
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