Keith and I spent all day today figuring out what the design elements are going to be for the remainder of Beta Phase 2, and I'm really pleased with the list. I think that there will be some good surprises in there, in that we were able to keep some features I'd previously said were cut -- we boiled some features down to their essential essence, making them fit into our scope. AND actually I think this makes them stronger features, too.
Some examples:
1. For 1.0, crests have been cut, but we're wrapping most of their features (plus some new features) into enchants. It just didn't make sense to do two systems that were so similar, so we went with the one with the smaller interface requirements. And a new addition to these is that they'll have some procedurally-generated stats on top of their base functionality, which is a first for AVWW. Very excited about that. We also figured out what we're going to do with what were previously EXP containers, tying them int the whole enchants system, which I think people will appreciate.
2. We've got our model figured out for secret missions, and the model figured out for warping, monster spawners, population patterns, and the like. And there are a few surprises in there, too, such as monsters that will migrate out of their regions as the tier of the continent goes up. I'm really excited about that, too, because it will add a lot of variety while at the same time lessening the load on us somewhat (because combining enemies in new and interesting ways is so core to having unexpected situations, being able to combine types across time periods really helps us reach that point faster).
3. We also got the "guardian powers" stuff figured out, which ties into NPC professions and the citybuilding components. We said that professions and citybuilding had been cut, but we've found a much simpler way to do them that ties in with guardian power usage and which really makes the NPCs more important again (like we'd always wanted). We'll explain the details of this soon enough (it should make an appearance next week), but the citybuilding interface is still gone -- it was ugly and overly complex. How you build buildings again will be based on guardian powers (which we'll explain soon), and you'll see the buildings you construct in the parallax background of the side view of the settlement. We're currently expecting about 30-40 types of buildings for 1.0, all of which should be in place by next week. 7 base kinds of buildings, and then a lot of "personality buildings" that are used by specific traits of specific NPCs. All of this gets at the essence of what we were going for before, without making the game split into two literal pieces. Sometimes simpler really is better!
4. More on this in another thread very shortly, but we also figured out what we are going to do with the whole story-integration aspects and lore. There's a lot of interesting backstory/lore that I know people want answers to, and we promised that the game would include a way to pursue those mysteries. We tried a number of complex models for this to very limited success, so once again we've boiled this one down to its essence: solving the mysteries. More on this in another thread in just a bit.
