What a busy summer for most of our team. Between work, school and trips, my personal time for MF was hit and miss. Still, there was a steady bit of progress on the project. Let me give you a short update on what we completed, what's left and where we are headed. Development Our Discord public channels may be quiet, but the private team chat is always buzzing. There have been 471 updates to our code in the last 30 days alone. This trickled down into 41 new fixes/features. Since our last update in April, there has been 1291 updates, 375 new features/additions. Recently Implemented Features Internal Tooling - a complete overhaul of how we define gameplay components in the background. This means we can design new items / recipes / plots / or even NPCs, directly from our internal development website. This had to be done through text files previously, leading to a fair bit of complexity. Now, everything is stored neatly in a dedicated website toolkit. Craftable Schematics & Architect - purchasing houses in-game now requires a craft-able schematic item. Whether you are a citizen or a politician, you will first need to craft (or buy) a schematic of the building. This leads to a new crafting profession, the Architect. Being an architect is a complex, time and resource intensive job. It will require a huge amount of dedication, but the rewards are great. Not only are buildings necessary to progress your town, they are also one of the most expensive items to produce. We see the architect as a profession for dedicated players who love to pour time into understanding complex recipes. Subscriptions - players will be able to donate to the project, unlocking rewards in return. Because our donations are strictly non-pay-to-win, we needed to code a unique plugin that lets us reward players with things like dialogue options or lore items. Crafting Leaderboards - being the first person to discover an item comes with a reward. Players who uncover a new recipe will be globally announced, stored in a leaderboard, and their item will say it's first of its kind. We plan to use this later down the line, handing out awards for our most dedicated crafters. Dungeon Designer - a custom built piece of software. This allows us to create dungeons out of tiles, stitching new explorable places in minutes as opposed to hours. We are planning to release regular new dungeons for players to enjoy post-launch. Having a designer tool makes this feasible. Weapon Itemization - we completed our basic armour and weapon itemization. We will launch with Swords, Long Swords, Zweihanders, Maces and Daggers. Each weapon type comes in 5 different damage sets, meaning 25 unique weapon playstyles at launch. This is excluding weapon quality and legendary weapons! Dungeon Blocks - our NPC script functionality has been extended to blocks. Now we have things like illusory walls, poison traps, invisible bridges and more. Boss Mechanics - we started playing with some unique boss mechanics. Each of our signature bosses will have completely unique fight mechanics. Part of the encounter will be learning through trial and error - trying to figure out what obliterated your party and how to overcome this. With 12 dungeons at release, this should be quite a ride for those who enjoy the combat. We are currently working on Architect Itemization - I finished the first 2 tiers of the architect profession. There is 3 more to go. It's taking a lot of time, as the profession incorporates many of our mechanics. Recipes will need rare gathered ingredients, political imports, boss drops and items obtained in "production facilities". Meta Events - we are hoping to launch with repeated, public events. These will be scheduled, scripted encounters with some of our NPCs. Players will need to gather together and defeat bosses threatening the environment. Except instead of the boss being statically spawned in a dungeon, the boss will come to you! Imagine a quest campaign on steriods. Each event will be quite different to each other and they will happen regularly, delivered automatically without our staff. We see these as end-game content that's fun and repeatable. Crafting Specialisations - players will be able to progress through crafting guilds. This will let your character specialise in a discipline, unlocking rewards like legendary recipes. Our goal with this is to encourage players to pick a "theme" for your character and be known for a specific craft. If you want to go for a hybrid specialisation worry not, you still can. Production Facilities - you will now be able to craft and build a range of production facilities. These are buildings that generate rare resources over time. Ingredients like Sandstone or Ebony will need a dedicated production facility. This means part of the crafting gameplay will now be building up your own personal production empire, or partnering up with other players who have their own production facilities. Because these will be quite expensive, you'll be able to make a decent chunk of change running these buildings and selling their products. Crafting Facilities - not every crafting workbench is equal. Advanced items (like weapons with special damage) will need a high-end workbench. These are found in crafting facilities, expensive buildings crafted by an architect and built by the town's Prefect. Players will need to cooperate, chipping in to grow the town's production facilities. Building a new facility will essentially unlock a new "era" for the city, giving its crafters access to new recipes. Release It has been a long journey. There's nothing I'd like to see more than a successful release. That said, things take time. We want to make sure there is enough content to keep players interested. If you'd like to help MF release faster, the best thing to do is hop into our Discord / Forums and discuss our features. This keeps our team motivated, setting our eyes on release. We will do our best to release by the end of the year, but bear with us! Bonus Stuff Whenever we work on a gameplay feature, we try to plan it out beforehand. As a result, we have hundreds of design documents. Many of these are internal ideas - they are likely to change and some of these never make it into the game. Here is a little peek behind the curtain into some of our designs. Architect Progression (in development, may change): Planned Weapon Sets (launch + early updates): Planned Armour Sets (launch + early): Reputation Progression:
