U 1.0 Update?

[PeachMonster57]

Just wondering if we could get a little update on the progess you guys have made :) been a while since weve talked to each other hehe ;)
Love you pookie <3

[docphong (GER)]

Baron oh Baron,
give us a glimpse of things to come!

[The Baron]

Hey mate! If you missed it, here is a little bit of informal news https://www.reddit.com/r/BladeAndSorcery/comments/153wug9/how_its_going/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

[Cobra Commander]

don't want to read or use reddit, please post the update here. thanks. Don't want to be forced to make some pathetic reddit account..

[ShadowSorcery]

Originally posted by French Toast:

don't want to read or use reddit, please post the update here. thanks. Don't want to be forced to make some pathetic reddit account..

you dont need a reddit account to just read. stop being a crybaby

[Marionette]

Posted here so people can read it.


Hey guys, a little informal news for you to pass the time; I was holding out and holding out on doing a news because (months ago) it seemed 12.3 was gonna drop any day, so I was thinking I may as well just hold for that. But since it has been going on and on and the patch release seems unreliable due to tech issue delays, I decided to post a little informal news anyway.

So what’s going on and how’s it been going you ask – Since the last U12 update the guys have been mostly working on 1.0 stuff, but there is also a U12.3 patch in the works in parallel. The reason for the patch is to address a few bugfixes, but also addressing some big Pico issues.

When U12 mod manager dropped, we suddenly learned of an issue that for mod manager to be allowed on PICO devices it would require special authentication and this was not as easy to implement as Steam / Oculus. This would require players to receive authentication via email (like when they send you an email code to verify). This didn’t seem too bad as we had an in-game keyboard already and all that, so seemed like it would be work but no biggie. But mannnn, it was way more work than expected. There were lots of technical head scratching issues and we had to work with modio on resolving this. Modio are new to VR, so they are learning all the nuances of the platform themselves.

Finally we got that resolved after a lengthy amount of back and forwarding with modio. A silver lining is that after this ordeal it seems both modio and Pico are invested to change some things on their ends and make this authentication thing not an issue for any other VR games going forward. So other VR modding games that use Pico and/or modio will benefit from this.

Anyway, that is what some of the guys were working on for ages. Finally it looked like we were all good for a patch release and then outta nowhere, 12.3 wouldn’t launch on Pico… It was getting that same error that Quest was getting a month or so back where it was having trouble due to the size of the game assets. Nightmare!

The good news is these issues are finally behind us and 12.3 is close; the last step is QA, just double checking it to make sure there is no grievous issue. So that is where u12.3 is. Really sorry to Pico players… I know you guys have been without the mod manager all this time and for real we were working hard to fix this. I must say that Pico players have been super cool and chill about it all, so thanks for that and I appreciate you guys!

In other 12.3 stuff there is a fix coming to a startling discovery we made that most of you guys likely wouldn't have even noticed. Some folk here on Reddit pointed out to me that Adammantium’s Mod Manager was not showing up in a mod manager search despite it being uploaded on modio, and it also showed up on the website. This was curious and led us down a rabbit hole to discover why, only to make the shocking revelation that there were a bunch of mods were not showing up in mod manager search…. In fact, only the most recently uploaded 100 mods were showing up!!! That means everything older than the latest 100 were getting buried!

This issue didn’t get on our radar in the beginning because when U12 went live it was only around then that modders start uploading mods, so most mods were under that 100 limit and thus showing in a search, or possibly just a few of the oldest mods were getting buried (like multiplayer mod) but no one really noticed because the impact was minimal. But now that there are hundreds of mods on modio it is more obvious and so it is lucky we discovered this bug now before too much time passed as it would have been the case that going forward 100s of mods in the future would have been unsearchable in mod manager. The cool news about this fix is the next time you go into mod manager after 12.3 you will likely see lots of new (technically old) mods that had been buried!

More good news for 12.3 modding is some optimizations were made that seem to dramatically reduce loading times for mods. On a little test Lyneca was doing, it seems to be saving about 1 second per mod, so that loading time increase for mods is approx 40% which will surely be felt!

Last of the 12.3 news is for Nomad players - there are some hopeful prospects that 3 star dungeons should not crash anymore as we reduced Nomad’s memory usage and fixed some memory leaks. It is looking good, but we will know for sure when you guys all try it.

So that is the u12.3 patch that has been dragging out for months, but if you think that is not juicy enough, don’t worry! As mentioned, 12.3 was only one small aspect of the recent devtime and it was just a couple of the guys that were bouncing back and forth on that. In fact the majority of the Warpfrog team have been working on 1.0, the final crystal hunt update. 🙂

When will it be released? I don't know! The original goal / ballpark was end of year 2023, but I think it is a good safe bet to say that is not happening, just by looking at the workload and being objective. It seems like it will be 2024 and all I can say is we have all fingers crossed that it could be earlier 2024. The more work we get done, the more we will able to narrow the ballpark I think.

1.0 is all about Crystal Hunt! Crystal Hunt sometimes gets referred to as "progression mode" which makes sense, but you might sometimes hear people saying it is a "campaign mode" or "story mode" - if you hear this just be careful because it may be a bit misleading; there wont be any story in the sense of it being an RPG that is open world with dialogue or anything like that. Instead any story element will be through lore.

To expand on what it is -- Crystal Hunt is going to be the final update to B&S so that it will be a full release game. There may be more small free updates after 1.0 that add new features to the game, but it's not fully decided yet so 1.0 should be considered end of early access full release. Doing expansion packs for B&S will also be tbd because we really wanna dev a new game too, so I think will depend on fan interest.

1.0 will be our biggest update to date and the new Crystal Hunt game mode will be available as a gamemode. B&S was always meant to be sandboxy and "not gamey", but there are plenty of folks out there who like objectives, motivation for playing a game, and some sense of completion that a full sandbox "make your own fun" experience doesn't really offer. One of the biggest tomatoes thrown at B&S is usually because of the sandboxy nature of it, and usually it is in the form of "just a tech demo" (my reaction) in reference to the lack of a gamey mode, so this mode will be more for people who like to have direction; you could say it is "dungeons with a point".

In Crystal Hunt the player will be doing dungeon runs in Outpost as you know them, as well as in a whole new biome dungeon, the Dalgarian Dungeons. (if you are wondering what is "Dalgarian", that is to be revealed!) On these runs you will be collecting loot (gold, chalices, etc) and crystals. You will be able to buy and sell weapons and armour in a shop with loot and unlock skills with crystals.

In the beginning, the player is a no magic, weak character. The skills you unlock will pad out your character and give magic abilities. In theory, a player who invests a ton of time in crystal hunt could unlock everything and by the end their character would be like the OP avatar like in sandbox. However most players will prob not max out every single branch of the skill tree, so they will prob have more specific build characters.

Lore will be present in the world to find and uncover, both directly in the game such as through notes and texts, or indirectly such as through inference. What I mean by "inference" is imagine you enter a ruin and see a gladiator pit, you might assume this civilization had gladiator sports. Or if you found a ruin full of religious symbols, you might assume they were religious; that type thing. The environment tells a story.

The lore itself may be about the world of Byeth, Eraden or other kingdoms, or referencing the actual Crystal Hunt plot itself, etc. Here is where it gets muddy - although Crystal Hunt will have a goal laid out, a plot, and an ending, I am super apprehensive say you should expect a 'story' because again, I feel like that implies it is like an RPG with dialogue etc, which it is not. With regards story, I would prefer everyone to set expectations low and be pleasantly surprised I think.

There is also a whole bunch of things not talked about in Crystal Hunt that we can save for later. If you are wondering why save for later, well one is because we are not fully finished so we wanna be sure it is good to go before revealing,

and two...

Besides Crystal Hunt, Sandbox mode will remain exactly as is with everything unlocked from the start and you will have a separate sandbox character. I am not 100% sure the plan on mods for crystal hunt, but I'm nearly certain it is gonna be just to allow mods albeit adding a "hey, mod away but heads up you will likely spoil crystal hunt with mods" message. I'm certain there will be day one cheat mods that will unlock all crystal hunt stuff or nuke the balancing by adding lightsabers and so forth and this will make the whole progression thing moot, mark my words, lol. But that is the player's business.

So with this development underway, a huge amount of emphasis is on game design right now; B&S is cursed a bit in that we decided to add in the progression mode after the fact, as an afterthought. This means we are game designing backwards in some regards. It is also hard to game design a game that refuses to be “gamey” and this makes our game designers' lives so much harder than working on a traditional game. I am sure I have been a pain in the butt for them lol. But since that anti-gaminess is one of the core tenets of B&S we are trying our best to retain that in Crystal Hunt and find that balance between a “gamey mode that still feels like B&S". It’s going well and the guys have come up with lots of creative solutions to things, but it is a lot of work!

On the environment team, the guys are kicking ass with the new Dalgarian Dungeons. It’s still very much assembly work and only a handful of rooms so far, but even from the assemble you can see their vision. The Dalgarian Dungeons have a much grander scope than Outpost and contain new features that will hopefully add surprise and intrigue to players’ first dungeon runs. Work continues as always on pushing the PCVR graphics as far as we can, so there is a lot of tech R&D there.

Elsewhere in 1.0 there is a ton of dev work going on that I can’t talk about in too much detail yet. 😛 One I can mention though is a huge amount of work in being done on the skill tree, and I think most people are going to be surprised by that. I can’t spoil things but all I will say is we are definitely trying our best to avoid boring stat upgrade skills, so avoiding skills like +5 health, etc. Ambiguous, I know… But most news will come in the big “Road to 1.0” Steam news because at that point we will hopefully have more work done than just the bones so I can speak with more confidence, and also hopefully at that point we will have screenshots to share etc, so hold tight.

In Warpfrog studio news, all is well! Kospy is away on vacation at the moment but the team are working away autonomously. We have done a heck load of hiring since around Christmas, so there is a lot of change in the studio right now as we get bigger. Paradoxically, adding more people to the team does not necessarily mean faster dev progress, and in fact it can be the opposite sometimes as more staff means things being more unwieldy! Adding more people means you have to retool as new teammates need time to get used to the project, and there needs to be more organization and coordination than the old days with like 5 people in the studio and you could get away with someone saying “ok I’ll just jump on this feature and get back to you in a few months when it’s done” lol.

However on the flipside, a bigger team means you can reach higher in scope for things, and that was exactly what we needed in order to achieve Crystal Hunt and reach that next level. We are trying out a variety of new workflow systems and still tryna truly get down a good flow for the team, but I think we are getting there. We are in it for the long game too, so we are also looking at a bigger team with the notion that following Blade & Sorcery we will be making more games. It is gonna be great when we get to go into that fresh project with an already experienced and settled team.

That’s it for now guys! Just wanted to share a little news while we wait on 12.3 which will hopefully be any day now.