Archmage Rises - the play-how-you-want mage simulator - now available on Early Access

[adrix89]

A mage should trade like a mage. Use all the cheats in the book. Including flying and teleport spells for trading items he can carry on his person instead of the cart. Also get a damn backpack, or a bag of storage +1, or a dimensional box. Also have more varied item weight and size. Don't just cripple non-caravan trading.
/QUOTE]

If there are enough mages in the world, I think there should be some thought into what a mage-dominated economy would look like, if you treat magic like a kind of technology that affects production, productivity, transport etc. There has to be some notion of equilibrium, especially an equilibrium quantity of mages.

It can't be that the player is the only one to have come up with such profitable schemes, and that this doesn't affect the behavior of everyone else.

I don't think they would care that much. With teleport and flying you can do some minor peddling but you are still limited by what you can carry. And just like the player they are trading their stamina, in other words their time for money.
Trading really is a beginner thing, for a mage of enough power they would either get a cushy job working for one of the lord or holing up in their tower doing research while letting the apprentice sell some potions and enchantments on the side.

Once a mage is powerful enough to do the portals or dimension boxes they are probably already rich enough.
Its only the greedy muggles that care about wealth, and that is certainly something the player can exploit for political power.

However some other mages outside the player should be simulated and what they do. Maybe they would be rivals doing the same quests and exploring the same dungeons?

It can't be that the player is the only one to have come up with such profitable schemes, and that this doesn't affect the behavior of everyone else.

Isn't the player an exile? Most mages are probably a strict master apprentice or part of the academy so they don't need to do anything.
The only reason the player is even thinking of trading is because he has been quite literally kicked out.

 

[Infinitron]

Following in the footsteps of Fallout 4, are we

 

[vonAchdorf]

So he added his name to the logo / game's name.

 

[Konflyto]

Hey, nice thing you talk about DLC before launch. Totally incline! I hate when other developers do it, though.

 

[ntonystinson]

Following in the footsteps of Fallout 4, are we

An update finally!

 

[Infinitron]

Nic and Thomas are at it again in this new guided tour of Build 9 features released today! We go over the mage tower, crafting, treasury, trading, and more!

 

[ntonystinson]

Nic and Thomas are at it again in this new guided tour of Build 9 features released today! We go over the mage tower, crafting, treasury, trading, and more!

When is the codex doing a preview

 

[Smashing Axe]

Nic and Thomas are at it again in this new guided tour of Build 9 features released today! We go over the mage tower, crafting, treasury, trading, and more!

When is the codex doing a preview

It's far, far too early to do a preview, there just isn't enough substance to the game yet. Which makes sense since they've been working mostly on building their systems rather than content.

 

[HoboForEternity]

Good the last time we saw gameplay it looks like a bit barebones and repetitive. A bit tweak into the mechanics (especially those chance based skill checks, looked really bad imo)

of course, content is no pushover either. need to balance each otherr out

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.archmagerises.com/news/2017/1/3/video-update-3-2016-release-date-publisher-2017-builds

Build 9: Oops.

1. I'm sorry we put out a bad build: there are problems with saving and loading. We've hotfixed it twice and need to rewrite the inventory management system to be sure it saves correctly. That hotfix is coming in days.
2. We are now going to be more professional about the build testing, having a battery of test cases we run through testing specific functionality. This will minimize the chance of making a bad build again.

Release Date: Q1 2017?

1. We know we won't hit that and have moved the release date to Q2. But we don't know yet if that is realistic. We're still planning out 2017.
2. We lost about 3 months near the end of 2016.
3. Lost time after GenCon due to burn out.
4. Lost time negotiating with publisher.
5. Took at least 1 month too long on Mage Tower feature. It's a better feature now, but we can't get that time back.

Publisher

1. We've been negotiating with a major publisher from about May to Sep. A great tier 1 publisher who would be the perfect one to work with. There was great alignment between us with a similar vision for the game.
2. In the end they offered to buy out Archmage Rises IP and everything. We determined a number internally, gave it to them, and awaited their top executive meeting for a result.
3. While they really like and believe in the game, they determined Archmage Rises won't sell millions of units. Given the size of their business now they need to focus only on those kinds of titles. But it was real close, one of the VP's contacted me separately afterwards to say how much he believes in the game and encouraging us to keep going!
4. We won't be talking with any more publishers, that was the right one for us and this game. We will continue on the more free, more lucrative, more risky path of self-publishing.
5. We appreciate everyone who has pre-ordered, it makes a big difference!

2017 Plan

1. Nic likes to make small changes, play test and literate on them, and push out lots of real-world releases.
2. Thomas likes to make big sweeping changes, test balance, and release only when they are all perfected.
3. Needless to say there is a healthy tension on how to approach 2017.
4. Currently it is costing about 2 person weeks to create, release, and support a build. This cost is too high to do it frequently, like monthly.
5. To address the two competing goals of making releases to support existing customers and to finish the game for all customers, we've decided to do builds every other month: Feb, Apr, Jun.
6. Video Updates every week of what we're working on. We think over time these will be a cool "behind the scenes" view of indie game dev.

Next Build

1. Economy - fleshed out with AI traders and geography based production
2. Better map - better performance, better layout and roads, larger
3. Better Dungeons - better generation, more history and character to each

Something Special is Coming
Vaelun, the continent the game takes place in, has a deep rich history behind it. It partly comes from the D&D campaign Thomas has been running for years. This drives many of the features, choices, and player goals within the game. Knowing the lore of the world will result in a richer more rewarding game experience.

Unlike other sandbox games, Archmage Rises is chock full of player goals.

Who is the Conclave and why are they in power over the mages? What does it mean to be a renegade? Should the player join the conclave and rise in ranks, or seek out the renegades? All these are meaningful choices in this open world simulator based on the campaign setting.

We'll be sharing the campaign setting and world history as a special thank you for being on the newsletter. Not sure on the date right now, it's a lot of work, but we're close to the end.

And Finally
We read,discuss, and respond to all your feedback. Thanks for those that comment on youtube, facebook, steam, and this website. We appreciate it!

That's it for now. Happy New Year!

 

[Infinitron]

We won't be talking with any more publishers, that was the right one for us and this game.

Paradox? Hard to believe they'd demand "millions of units" though.

 

[HoboForEternity]

We won't be talking with any more publishers, that was the right one for us and this game.

Paradox? Hard to believe they'd demand "millions of units" though.

paradox?

Prepare your butt for DLCs

 

[Infinitron]

We won't be talking with any more publishers, that was the right one for us and this game.

Paradox? Hard to believe they'd demand "millions of units" though.

paradox?

Prepare your butt for DLCs

No, read the post

 

[ghostdog]

Archdevil Rises:

 

[ntonystinson]

We won't be talking with any more publishers, that was the right one for us and this game.

Paradox? Hard to believe they'd demand "millions of units" though.

paradox?

Prepare your butt for DLCs

Ya some of the later ones for Crusader kings 2 were just plain ridiculous cash grabs

 

[dag0net]

Becoming a lich (or for that matter, a vampire) goes against your game principle of lifespan as the limiting factor though. It might be like Dwarf Fortress: the most powerful creatures in the game world will inevitably be vampires and necromancers and they will end up filling all the highest offices.

Yes, i have to limit lifespan somehow. Maybe you could theoretically live forever, but the resource (blood, whatever) is scarce. I don't know, that is why it is DLC. I have to think long and hard about how to do it. How to "break" the game to make that path viable and interesting choice. Maybe by the time I'm done the base game the answer will be clear.

God's don't fight with men.
The 'earthly' resources need not be the limiting factor here, or rather, such things need not be broken, or even changed in any way..how many stories or games have bits in the lore about powerful beings attempting the leap to divinity. "Your Archmage gets bored with eternal life and ascends, game over bro"

There's options anyway.. maybe the awesome power of Character X or Work Y or Artifact Z attracts the attention of creatures from Plane Gabbleduck or Dimension Arkhenstone and your mage is essentially forced into finding a way to ascend to godhood to be a part of the pantheon/bulwark that protects (((Current Realm))) from such forces.

Or like, existing gods (midichlorians) prefer some kind of balance, where they introduce new weapons, forces and creatures into the world to keep the undead/unreasonably successful in check..or using necromancy engages particular risks..or w/e

nehoo, sexy work.gj

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.archmagerises.com/news/2017/1/7/video-update-4-rewrites

Map: Bigger, Better, Badder
Performance tuning is always done at the end because that is when you know best how the thing is to be used. Our map movement was fluctuating between 15-40 fps on our dev machines, and sometimes feeling really sluggish. Nic has now got it over 300fps with some more work to go.

The map feels much better already, but this leads to two improvements:

RUNS BETTER ON LOW END MACHINES
Something we take seriously - we want Archmage to run well on older laptops.

BIGGER FULLER MAPS
For those that have played the pre-alpha that map is not the full game map size, just a small portion for testing. We're going to have a big full world for you to explore, conquer, and save.

2. The Definitive RPG Inventory System?
This is the 3rd version of the inventory system because we have some special requirements for this game that we just haven't seen in any other game:

1. Many types of inventory that behave differently: Personal items, equipment, quest items, trade goods, livestock, food, and more.
2. Multiple copies of items (also referred to as stacks), so you don't see 50 separate torches but torches x 50.
3. History of each item: where, when, and who made it, did they name it?, where you found/acquired it, and if you bought it how much you paid for it (very important for trading)
4. Quality of the item: Wood of quality 80 is different from quality 40, and cannot stack together without losing info. Important for crafting and trading.

I wish I could see how other RPGs wrote their inventory system before I embarked on this. So I'm willing to be the change I want to see. If you are a dev and are interested in a technical walkthrough of the inventory system I'll take the time to do it. If there is little interest, then I won't bother.

Oh, and paperdoll equipping is coming. Just need to get to designing it.

3. Fan Feedback

We read everything you say about Archmage Rises (eventually!). Some of it causes discussion (or debate) amongst the team.

Brindor wrote a very detailed feedback on Steam last week and while we did respond to it in detail on steam, we thought we'd talk about his wish list items in the update.

So yes Character Creation is coming and the ability to hire/boss around NPCs.

Hey Slayemin yer up next week!

Conclusion
This is our first week actually doing a short weekly update. What do you think?

 

[Stelcio]

This is the game I most look forward to since Underrail and NEO Scavenger, which both I'd observed since early phases of development (Underrail before it had demo and NEO S before it had Steam early access, I actually bought it over a year before that happened), so I'd say I have an eye for future gems in development, which bodes well for Archmage.

DAT PRICETAG DOE

I mean the game may as well end up being well worth those 30 bucks, but it hell ain't worth it now, when it's in pre-alpha, made by small indie studio without any track record to show, however reliable and resourceful the developers seem to be. It makes sense for AAA studios to put their preorders on full price, because they already have a hype machine, a fanbase, a track record and proven reliability on releasing games they develop (however shitty they may usually end up being from demanding customer's POV), which can't be said about most indie developers, including this one. So I always imagined that a fresh indie studio would want to increase their fanbase/playerbase substantially during the development to:
a) build a social momentum for the game, make the players spread the word, bringing a steady income overtime,
b) create a substantial test group that will help bringing up any existing issues.

And that's what happened with both Underrail and NEO Scavenger. The former had a very, VERY entertaining demo that bought those who had any doubts whatsoever, bringing many players to try the game out (or just buy it and save for after release) in early access (not to mention the hype it created, especially here), while the latter had their demo updated numerous times (though of course not as frequently as early access build), letting players test the game with its core mechanics along the whole development FOR FREE, and that's on top of more dedicated testing group that actually bought the game and tested its most recent builds. They also were never as steeply priced, with pricetag of $10 during early access phase and $15 after release, both.

Now let's look at Archmage Rises' business model:
a) you can't try the game for free in any form,
b) it costs $30 bucks to preorder the game with access to pre-alpha (and it's not on Steam Early Access for some reason, the pre-alpha is a separate release on Steam - suspicious, because not explained, we don't know if it's for the time being or permanent, we don't know the reasons),
c) it's the same kind of indie game from unproven studio just like Underrail and NEO Scavenger were.

So yeah, every time I remember there's this awesome free-roam mage game in development, I look it up and see that I can't try it out and it costs a ludicrous amount of money for this kind of game at this phase of development. Being an eastern european peasant doesn't help as well, with current $ exchange rates skyrocketing, so this game makes it really hard for me to love it at this point. I mean, this isn't uncharted territory, there are already quite a few succesful games of this kind that made the marketing part right. Not that this strategy is wrong, time will tell, but my prognosis is rather negative, based on mentioned similiar cases and my personal impression. I do wish the game all the best though even if I will have to wait for some time to buy it on discount.

Regarding Steam Early Access, there is a very interesting Reddit post made by Daniel Fedor, the developer of NEO Scavenger, when he was on the fence regarding going SEAG:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1q1hmu/pros_and_cons_of_steam_early_access/
I think the post and the discussion around it may be informative to you, LordYabo , because it's a pretty similiar game (randomly generated, permadeath) with probably very greatly overlapping playerbase with potential yours. I'm sure dcfedor could also weigh in regarding his experience with SEAG now, from few years perspective.

 

[anus_pounder]

Character generation (namely, naming) is an absolute must, so good on them.

That said, this is still vaporware and will likely never come out.

EDIT : My citation is that I don't own the game yet.

 

[vonAchdorf]

Maybe a tiered approach would have been better. Battle Brothers did it, and while I don't know how successful it was from a financial point of view, it left the choice to the customer. They have three tiers (<20, <30, >40).

 

[Stelcio]

IIRC I think Rimworld and Prison Architect were at that price for early access, and they justified it with something like, its intentionally high because we want early feedback from people who are really interested in the game

Different genre, different market.

Also it's a very narrow perspective because whether people pay for the game is not only a matter of interest, it's more like a [interest] * [personal wealth] = [decision] equasion. Wealthy people will buy games they're even slightly interested in because they can afford to pay for a game even if it's worth only few hours of their entertainment. On the other hand there are many people with a pretty low level of wealth from American/West Europe perspective - the perspective that prices are determined from - who may be very much interested in the game, but either consider the price too steep or just cannot rationally spend so much on a game in early access. Considering the fact that in the era of Internet there are HUGE amounts of such people that can be accessed, but are effectively discouraged or entirely cut out from purchasing the game by the price, justifying it by wanting to get only the most interested people to play the game doesn't hold water. In this day any game developer operates on global market, not only in US+EU, so setting the price too high makes you lose both the revenue and the feedback. Not to mention Facebook likes are equally viable, no matter if made from New York, from Kiev or from Saigon.

Maybe a tiered approach would have been better. Battle Brothers did it, and while I don't know how successful it was from a financial point of view, it left the choice to the customer. They have three tiers (<20, <30, >40).

They actually do have tiers, but the lowest one is $30.

 

[ntonystinson]

DAT PRICETAG DOE

I mean the game may as well end up being well worth those 30 bucks, but it hell ain't worth it now, when it's in pre-alpha, made by small indie studio without any track record to show, however reliable and resourceful the developers seem to be. It makes sense for AAA studios to put their preorders on full price, because they already have a hype machine, a fanbase, a track record and proven reliability on releasing games they develop (however shitty they may usually end up being from demanding customer's POV), which can't be said about most indie developers, including this one. So I always imagined that a fresh indie studio would want to increase their fanbase/playerbase substantially during the development to:
a) build a social momentum for the game, make the players spread the word, bringing a steady income overtime,
b) create a substantial test group that will help bringing up any existing issues.

And that's what happened with both Underrail and NEO Scavenger. The former had a very, VERY entertaining demo that bought those who had any doubts whatsoever, bringing many players to try the game out (or just buy it and save for after release) in early access (not to mention the hype it created, especially here), while the latter had their demo updated numerous times (though of course not as frequently as early access build), letting players test the game with its core mechanics along the whole development FOR FREE, and that's on top of more dedicated testing group that actually bought the game and tested its most recent builds. They also were never as steeply priced, with pricetag of $10 during early access phase and $15 after release, both.

Now let's look at Archmage Rises' business model:
a) you can't try the game for free in any form,
b) it costs $30 bucks to preorder the game with access to pre-alpha (and it's not on Steam Early Access for some reason, the pre-alpha is a separate release on Steam - suspicious, because not explained, we don't know if it's for the time being or permanent, we don't know the reasons),
c) it's the same kind of indie game from unproven studio just like Underrail and NEO Scavenger were.

So yeah, every time I remember there's this awesome free-roam mage game in development, I look it up and see that I can't try it out and it costs a ludicrous amount of money for this kind of game at this phase of development. Being an eastern european peasant doesn't help as well, with current $ exchange rates skyrocketing, so this game makes it really hard for me to love it at this point. I mean, this isn't uncharted territory, there are already quite a few succesful games of this kind that made the marketing part right. Not that this strategy is wrong, time will tell, but my prognosis is rather negative, based on mentioned similiar cases and my personal impression. I do wish the game all the best though even if I will have to wait for some time to buy it on discount.

My exact thoughts about the game. I remember writing them when they released the price list how the steep prices could become a barrier. I hope am wrong and the game eventually becomes a commercial success but Stardew valley(probably most successful indie in recent times) costs $15 while No Man's Sky one of gaming biggest frauds costs $60. I love their idea for the game but if am going to just blindly give out $30 to an untried untested company, the least they can do is provide a free demo and if the person believes in their idea he can then pre-order to support them. I mean it even works in their favor, if you play the demo and like it you tell others about it: its free advertising. They have an earlier build of the pre alpha, they could use that for the demo and after you pre-order you get the latest version.
Someone needs to go too their steampage and tell them this. Seems that's the only place to reach them Infinitron

 

[Infinitron]

This week we record our update from Thomas’ new office in his new house, Nic talks map generation, and we respond to Slayemin’s questions from the steam forums.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.archmagerises.com/news/2017/1/21/video-update-6-when-will-archmage-rises-be-done

VIDEO UPDATE #6: WHEN WILL ARCHMAGE RISES BE DONE?

"Hey! When is Archmage Rises going to be done?!?" - Everyone I meet, everywhere

Last Sunday I was at a potluck. The person across from me asked the natural polite question I hate answering: "So when is the game going to be done?"

Scheduling Software Is Hard, Indie Games Harder
In this video update we show how applying some best practices, previous experience, and a little old fashioned flubbery we have calculated a feature complete date for the game!

We start with analyzing the core features:

I then spent roughly 10 hours analyzing the state of the current code base and work to date to figure out what still needed to be finished, made, and designed.

That resulted in a series of SCRUM stories I made up in Visio. To keep things sufficiently "macro" I limited myself to just four bullets to describing the story. While this was often difficult, it was a good practice to keep this a useful scheduling diagram and not a design document in another form. Nic and I then estimated how much effort (in days) it would take in design (idea. layout, content) and implementation (UI, coding).

The next step was to prioritize the features. Sometimes priority is based on pre-requisite, or what has to be in the game if funding got cut and only half of it could be done. This was difficult to decide for "my baby". In the end I color coded them across 5 levels of priority. I then grouped same priority into swim lanes so I could tell if I had put 20 as top priority and only 1 as bottom priority (which I did, but the swim lane showed me I was being silly). When done the ~30 stories were split evenly across the priorities.

At this point we had a good handle on the mountain of work in front of us, but still no closer to a date. WHO will do WHAT and WHEN? This took another 5-6 hours in MS Project to gantt chart out. I didn't have project installed on this laptop and there were challenges to finding my legit copy, so I tried some free gantt solutions (Tom's Planner, GanttProject). Those were a waste of time: so simplistic as to be useless. One doesn't do dependencies driving start dates, and the other won't let you drag and move a task around in the schedule. Then there were problems putting in non-working days by project, split tasks, and multiple resources on the same task (2 people on a 10 day task is 5 days calendar, not still 10 days GanttProject!) In the end I managed to find my Project and get it installed.

Then There are the Unknowns
An Unknown are unanticipated things: bugs (ours and Unity's), impromptu meetings, misunderstandings, rework, finding the fun, illness, new Star Wars film, catastrophic disk failure, etc. And those are just the common ones!

So how many unknowns are there between now and finishing the project?

If you said "It's unknown" you are correct! So we know something bad is going to happen, probably repeatedly, so how do we account for this?

At my software company, across many years and many projects, we discovered scheduling a 5.5 hour day was the most realistic/accurate way to schedule effort vs calendar. My calculator says that's about 68% efficiency; reasonable for a 10 person team. Smaller teams are more efficient (less meetings, less misunderstandings), so we went with 75-80%. The actual way we implemented it was by scheduling "3 weeks on 1 off".

I could have simply added 25% to all estimates, but I did it this way so we have a one week gap in the schedule for testing, polishing, content filling, bug fixing, and possibly pushing out a release. The gaps are easier to schedule around and track slippage than simply adding a blanket %. Second, if your 10 day task says it will end in 10 days not 13, that helps keep to the original estimate you gave. It's a psychological trick to keeping people honest and self correcting on estimates in the future.

This resulted in our grand project plan:

This is the most accurate and realistic date we have ever published.

Now if you find yourself at a potluck with someone asking when Archmage Rises will be finished, you can answer!

"And knowing is half the battle, yo Joe!"

 

[Corporate_Jew_Master]

'yo joe'