2018-05-30 21:40:39

maybe have a random drop item called a "birthday candle" that you can turn into something special in a wizard shop or something for a free upgrade. Not sure if that's doable. Maybe instead have a very rare encounter of something like "birthday goblin/genie" or something like that. It's identical to a very weak monster in stats but when you kill it you get exactly 100,000 gold, effectively giving you a free present upgrade for a wizard shop.

Not sure if this is doable, but you could also have either birthday present post office quests that have really high rewards or have presents in the wild that drop good equipment either as being weird monster encounters or being items you could "open" when you win a fight?

Not sure what, if any of those are feasible for you, just some ideas.

2018-06-02 17:20:26

also, been traveling around the wildnerness. sorry for the double post but could you tell me again where the arch into the premium area is?

2018-07-16 19:58:08

Sorry, be struggling with a new machine. There should be a "tri-form arch" in most major towns and cities. That is the gateway into the premium content area.

Had an e-mail from a fan who, as an aside, said she like to explore areas and wished she could explore the real world like in 6 Swords. So I've been playing with some geographical data sources. We may have a new area soon based on a real world location!

2018-07-16 20:09:00

that would be cool. Another thing that would be cool is alternate progressive worlds. For example, the basic free world is Roman gods and such. What about something like the basic world we could go to but instead it's a Norse, Japanese, or Aztec world. Or there could be a world where the monsters are skewed a certain way, such as a world where there are lots of dinosaurs or a world that has a lot of undead and lycanthropes, thus making a more ghothic horror setting.

Also, maybe other planes of existence, such as the plane of fire, or the astral plane or something here and there.

I love the game, it isn't me critiquing, just enthusing about what could be done.

also, how is the monetization working?

2018-07-18 17:06:59

The monetization is going as expected. Which is to say, I might be able to buy a latte at Starbucks. I did it for the promotion, and, for two weeks, I got a bit of a boost on numbers. Probably not that much of a return on the time invested, but at least I can keep saying I've tried everything and not passed on any opportunity.

So, the new area is going to be ... drumroll ... Ireland! It's a nice geographically self contained spot with an interesting enough fantasy history. I'm just hooking it up now. Fey grove features (standing stones, etc) that appear in the premium area will now have an extra room in them that will teleport you to the "magical mystical wonderland" of Ireland. The geography will generally correspond to that of real world Ireland, and many of the towns and villages will also align. It's not perfect, since we don't have the resolution for doing Cork harbor and stuff like that right. But it will give a feel for the place. Some of the pubs might even have traditional music playing. And, when you are done, the fey groves in Ireland should teleport you back to where you came from in the premium area.

Hopefully this will be out this week. But I've got a million things going on between now and Sunday, so it may slip till next week. But I'm already thinking ahead. Maybe I'll do Iceland next and make it like Jotunheim with gateways too and from it via the Giant Halls. Once I've got the programming structures down it should be relatively easy to do the other cool ideas you have.

2018-07-21 18:50:07

awesome, just heard about the release to Ireland and just got into the premium zone. I'm the Partnership of Federal Fighters, but there is no need to grandfather me in. I paid for a subscription and I already know I'll like it so don't worry about a discount on that group if you don't want to.

also, I had a few ideas for locations or future world maps I hadn't brought up yet.

1. ghost towns: deserted towns. in other environments this could be ruined cities or desolate estates. They might even be burned-out homesteads or something for small ones.
2. evil towns: towns that are led by evil humans so you fight primarily elves, dwarves, bandits, dervishes, and the like. It would rerpresent an evil society or a society where evil characters had taken over.
3. Pangea: A world Map accessible through the dinosaur valleys or maybe very rearely through animal dens, would have fewer towns and cities and more prehistoric animals than normal.
Ice Age Continental Europe: Passages could be found in some sort of ice dungeon or maybe at random in the tundra areas. takes you to a map of ice age continental Europe, lots of prehistoric animals, but not so many dinosaurs and savage-themed humanoids.
Britain: just hop over an island, perhaps the entrances here could be in castles. or forts, lots of human enemies and dragons. Perhaps some mythical britian mixed in there and you could have places like Avalon and Camelot.
Japan:  get through there in shrines, (specifically shrines) and this area has more aquatic monsters and dragons than other areas, and in keeping with the belief that katanas were so great,  better weapons are for sale here than usual or good weapons are cheaper if there isn't a way to make the selection better.
You could also have farms: These would exist near roads and more often near settlements of some kind, however, with monsters about, there is always a chance you find one ruined. When they are not ruined, they sell potions or food or something for low prices, or on the other hand when they are currently burned down due to a recent monster attack, they are 2-3 room dungeons with 1-2 encounters that should be fairly easy. These dungeons aren't so much to challenge as to provide atmosphere.

Antarctica: get through here in some sort of ice dungeon or cave, this area is most known for low amounts of cities and being a map that is heavily tundra and mountains for those who prefer what lives there.

The Moon: This could be accessed by odd fey dungeons, maybe devil or demon dungeons, or a wizards tower like what I suggested before, maybe even being sent here is something you could buy from the wizard shops.

You could also  go to the realms the gods live in or the afterlife realms of other religions, such as you could go to Ysgard for the Norse or Niffelheim. Or you could find yourself on Mount Olympus, in hades, or in the valley of the night with the Egyptian gods. You could even make access to these require for example having gold medals in relations with say, 3 gods of a pantheon or more. Thus if you wanted to go to Mt. Olympus, you'd have to have favor medals with say, Minerva, Mercury, and Pallus, or any combination of other Greco-Roman Gods. Perhaps there are super-dungeons here, either ones that are really hard, really large, or have incredible rewards. Or you might get rewards from your gods in person by doing "exalted quests" where you have to have gotten super-favor with a god and then come to them on their home turf. I think it would be really neat to do minurva quests in temples, but I'd really love it that if I made Minerva happy enough, I'd get asked personally to help.

if you wanted just for fun, other planets, Mars would be mostly badlands and Desert, Venus would be mostly mountains and volcanic terrain if you have any or could make it. Mercury would be similar to the Moon, and then if you really wanted to go nuts, put a few of the major moons of the gas giants. In this game, just go 50s sci-fi on them and just use the same monsters, but more or less manipulate the climate amounts based on statistic about the world. I'm a huge edgar rice boroughs fan so even on Mars you could call the towns and cities after people or places in the Barsoom series.

I know almost none of those are on your priority list or probably even are feasible, again, just giving wacky suggestions that sound cool to me and think they might to your players.

2018-07-21 20:18:46

Hello, I have a few bugs to report, one of which is keeping me from completeing a bounty and clearing a dungeon.

The first of these is somehow your code got messed up again and my characters aren't taking out multiple foes with really weak opponents, they are levels 8-9 so I think they ought to be doing this.

second: There are some problems with your goblin warren dungeon. I've only seen one and it is in the premium area so not sure whether it is just that one or whether it is common to rooms of that type in all goblin warrens. love the dungeon type but because of some game-crashing bug I can't get wherever the boss fight is.

When I try to go into certain rooms in the goblin warren, the game crashes and I get a weird message that looks like

Java system error Illegal exception War Room due south."

The room in question is the room I am going into and the direction mentioned changes depending on what way I am going.

I can not enter the queen's room, the warrior barracks, the warlord's room, or the king's room in the goblin warren dungeon I am going through and I get nearly identical error messages whenever this is triggered, kicking me out of the game in the process. The goblin warren I'm Doing is really close to Bokobel castle (guessing on the name and is 3 or 4 squares west of it directly. I Provide this information just in case it is the individual dungeon and not the goblin warren type of dungeon itself.

Also again, the bug that is hurting me in combat with weak enemies in large numbers is back again as well.

2018-07-22 01:13:27

Great ideas. Let me catch up and create issues in my tracker for them.
I've been working on the Goblin Warren recently. I know where you mean. I keep forgetting that it's live. I should have marked it beta until I'm finished. My bad. Props to you for working at it this long. This weekend is crazy but let me see if I can finish it tonight and do a run through and debug the problems. I've been working on my content editor so I can, hopefully, crank out more custom content like this.

2018-07-25 04:16:57

Sorry, this problem has ended up very thorny. I've got the basic crashes sorted out. But now no matter how many monsters I kill in a fight, if I don't kill them all, the next round they are back up to the same number they started in. It's driving me crazy.

On the plus side, I've created alternate dimensions for each of the basic terrain types. I just have to work out an in-game gimmick for each one to have you sent there. That's far more interesting than working on this bug but I'm trying to be disciplined and fix this annoying bug first!

2018-07-25 14:47:16

ouch! I didn't even know about that bug with the monsters. In the goblin warrens I always took out everyone in the first round of combat, often not even needing to use my last two guys so I didn't notice.

well keep us posted and tell us when you've fixed the problem.

2018-07-26 01:47:19

As is often the case with bugs, you can struggle for days, and then one tiny piece of information surfaces and you now know the one-line fix. Bah. So I've patched and uploaded it. The Goblin Warrens should be playable now, although I don't have a fantastic treasure at the end yet.

Part of the problem was that the feature has a custom monster, the Goblin Hero. It wasn't resolving that correctly, which caused your java exceptions. When I fixed that, I hit the other problem, where the monsters just kept coming back. At work we call that "peeling the onion". You fix one problem, only to find another one hiding underneath. You never know how many layers you have to peel to actually fix the problem!

Next I'm seeing if I can find interesting ways to wire in the single terrain dimensions. Possibly also adding Irish Music to the Pubs on the Irish map.

2018-07-26 02:20:20

Not sure if you should have straight-up single terrain maps, but something a bit leaning one way. For example, not just tundra, but all the cold climate terrain types.

off to test the warrens, and I'm sure there are others out there for when you make them more complete. I'm at least going to complete this dungeon. It's a pretty easy one being worth only 1000 gold.

But keep us posted, it is a great game.

2018-07-26 03:08:17

have to give you an update,

for some reason none of the goblin warrens areas register a boss fight so I can't clear the dungeon,

also the thing high-level characters are supposed to do with really weak stuff isn't happening right now. For example how if you are fighting kobolds, strong characters can take out several at a time. right now they are only killing one at a time instead.

2018-07-26 16:52:02

Hmm. It appears you got assigned the Goblin Warren as a bounty thing. I didn't anticipate that. But, I see how the computer did it. I guess custom content is going to either need boss markers or else it is going to have to not be assigned bounties. So, ha ha, complex things interact in complex ways. Created issue #398 to fix long term. Short term I should just put a boss marker in. I want to look at it tonight anyway and maybe scrap the custom Goblin Hero monsters and try to use the generated Goblin Lieutenants, Chief, etc.

I did do a bunch of general bug fixing last night. Trying to work through my technical debt. One of which was the regression around high level fighters hitting large numbers of low level creatures. I laid waste to an ungodly number of merchants while testing! I was going to roll it out later, but things are quiet now and the build should be stable. So I've gone ahead and pushed it to product. It should be there for you now.

2018-07-26 17:18:10

I just got done playing and hadn't seen any major changes, except some of the way battle was reported in a battle with orcs changed.

instead of saying "Miracle kills orc, Pinkne kills orc, Rudolph kills orc," and so on, it said "miracle, Pinkney, Rudolph (the rest of my team) kill one orc." I only experienced that way of reporting  once and can't remember if orcs are weak enough for that, so I'll report back to you later on that one.

also, been doing missions for Neptune and found a little quirk or two in the system when it told you to go out and kill demons.

As you know, having designed it, the temple gives you the coordinates of where you need to go. However, it is a bit of a hit or miss thing when you arrive where you are supposed to fight the monsters. For example, I had the coordinates exactly right to go into a pentacle to fight some demons but had to stomp over the same spot four or five times making circles before it showed up.

Also, there is just some code placeholder for the description of the pentacle rather than an actual description..

Also, on one day of the lunar month the new moon still shows up as Moon_phase_8 rather than "new moon."

but loving some of the stuff in the premium zone and am going to continue working for Neptune until I get the Gold patron badge from him. Then going to move onto another deity. Provided that gold is as high as badges go. Wanted to do Minerva and thought my relationship was higher than it was but couldn't enter the missionary area and the areas attached to work for her yet.

2018-07-26 19:12:43

update: indeed the problem with high-level characters not taking a bunch of attacks to weak opponents has been fixed.

The appearance of the pentacles to fight demons though is problematic. I'm right on top of where one is supposed to be and I'm wandering all around it but can't get it to show up this time.

2018-07-26 20:54:04

I put in a fix to compress the boring Bob kills one orc. Betty kills one orc. Etc, etc. But I wasn't able to find a suitable combat to test it in. But now you have tested it for me! Yay! That is as expected. The multi-attack feature only works on creatures less than one hit dice. Orcs are one hit dice so they don't collapse.

Sounds like the missions are having a caching problem. I've created issue 399 to track that. I think I have a 15 minute timer on the cache. So it might be if you tromp around for 15 minutes it suddenly appears. So I need a way to either flush the cache or populate the cache when I populate the back end data.

The MOON_PHASE_8 problem should have been fixed with this morning's update. Issue 395. Let me know if you see it again, and I'll re-open it.

Technically there should be a platinum badge for every gold badge. I originally put those into StarLanes as a sort of "no one will ever get this". Until, of course, players started clocking them up! The general progression is you have to do something 5 times to get a Bronze, 25 times to get a Silver, 125 times to get a gold, and 575 times to get a platinum. (Some tasks have multipliers on them.)  So platinum is really quite up there.

2018-07-26 22:04:19

It does seem to be a delayed reaction getting these places to show up where they are supposed to, and it seems to be the case with both pentacles and hermitages. Was just about to write and say I had the same problem with a hermitage, but after a check on the game it was there.

I think it might have something to do with actual time online too, but not sure how long. Because I took a shower which took like 40 minutes (I take long showers) and came back but it wasn't there for a bit. but then got off for just a couple minutes and came back and it was there.

Just a question, with the patron badges and some others. It says I have the silver humanoid slayer badge which I won today, as well as the bronze patron of Neptune, but it doesn't show those on my "about" section, and I'm pretty sure there are others that aren't showing up either.

Also  how do I tell what achievements are about or how close I am to getting another. For example, I want to get more stuff from the Neptune Patron stuff, but don't know quite how that works. let alone how to even see it on my characters.

2018-07-28 05:05:51

Iceland is released! Giant halls now have a room that will send you to/from the Iceland map. Alexa is better than I expected at pronouncing Icelandic city names.

I'll be looking at the latency problem with missions as the top priority bug next. As for your divine standing, I've created an issue #406 to add a confessional to temples where you can go and find out your exact standing with your god. Great idea!

2018-08-02 16:37:42

New update today. I think I've fixed the hermit/demon mission problems. Please report how it goes.

Minor feature: it will now tell you when you are near oceans or lakes. Makes it a bit easier to navigate.

Medium feature: The premium area, and the mono-terrain dimensions now have vortex storms. You can see them a bit off, and if you approach, you will get sucked and and transported to another dimension. It's one way to explore the multi-verse. If you are in a mono-dimension and get tired of it, head to an exact longitude and latitude intersection and you fill find a dimension arch that will teleport you back to the last dimension you were at.

2018-08-02 17:08:30

hi,

just wondering, do the alternate dimensions that connect to the premium world, or Ireland and Iceland have similar features to the premium area such as the expanded temple features and wizard towers and such? It seems that since they are only accessible to premium players there is no reason for them not to be.

Also was thinking about a few modifications that could be made to cities. City dungeons or unsafe parts of the city. A lot of Dungeons and Dragons games have you going into the sewers, exploring derelict abandoned buildings, or tangling with criminal gangs, so have some dangerous areas in some cities or dungeons that can take up parts of cities?

Just thought that might be cool.

2018-08-02 22:11:58

Yes, the alternate dimensions should have many of the same sorts of features as the Premium area. I'm trying to change my terminology so that they are all part of the "premium content area". I'm trying to use Enuma Elish to refer to the main world of the premium area.

Right now they are a little same-ish. I'm working on putting in some distinctions. Such as having a session room in the pubs in Ireland where you can hear some traditional Irish music!

I started creating a classic dungeon generator a while back. You know, twenty foot by twenty foot rooms and so forth. But it got a little bogged down so I took it out. It certainly would be an option for cities, but I would have to do some programmatic jiggering for that. As computer data objects, cities are kind of large as they are. So I would have to think about how to partition that.

I had started working on a companion game called Six Thieves, which was all about city adventure focused on the thief character class. The world was, literally, a city with forty to fifty roads in it, and several thousand buildings to explore. Mostly thief like breaking and entering, sneaking about, picking locks. Combat was, mostly, "I give up", you get taken to jail, and pay a fine. But I choose to go deep rather than broad and instead of developing that further I chose to focus on making 6 Swords richer. I had hoped to start making revenue on 6 Swords so I could afford some more people to work on the different concepts, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I've put a call out for interns or apprentices, but I have no budget to pay them. I can only give them experience and recommendations.

2018-08-02 23:20:38

well here's hoping things get better, I've been telling my friends about you and I hope things get better.

2018-08-06 02:17:54

some bad news for you Joquinta,

something went wrong when you fixed the missionary-related stuff and now when I tried to go into the missionary room in the temple. it said

Jave Handler Iellegal exception error due south

(I was going sout to enter the room.

As I've mostly been using the Neptune temple missionaries to guid my randome wanderings lately, stopping until this problem is fixed. but just let me know once you've fixed it.

Bookrage

2018-08-06 03:01:30 (edited by nolly 2018-08-06 03:03:51)

After 20 minutes of trying to equip a +2 Sling without success, what is the exact phrase I am supposed to use? I had no issues prior to buying new Sling stones. I've tried Equip +2 Sling, Equip Sling, wear +2 Sling, wear Sling etc., but it keeps trying to equip my Sling stones, which continually gives me the message that I don't need to equip ammunition. I noticed this started happening once Sling Stones were above the party's Sling in their inventory. Do I need to sell all of my Sling stones to force Sling as my only item with that word, or is there an easier way such as saying equip missile weapon.