Project MMO(NSTC) Devlog #1

To whom it may concern,

ProjectMMO(name subject to change (honestly if you have a better name, feel free to post it)) has been made during the rpgMania jam III back in march this year, it is a passion project of mine and is still under active development, so this devlog might be a bit longer as a lot has changed under the hood.

First a small intro to what projectMMO actually is, as I've noticed earlier that it could be a bit confusing

ProjectMMO is a singleplayer action rpg that is set in a world of an MMORPG, in other words, it's a game within a game. Imagine you are playing an MMORPG, but it is offline and all the players you would usually see in the world are fake(AI), you can group with them just like you would be able to with real players, tackle dungeons, fight bosses, gather materials, craft equipment and potions, "PVP" and so on. Well that is the dream, in reality the scope of the game is incredibly big, while I am making progress slowly but surely, there are still a lot of systems left to be implemented, a lot of art to be created, content to be made, a lot of work for a single person.  With that being said, any feedback you might have is welcome and appreciated

A lot of changes were made during this time, to those who decide to read it, I'm going to try to make this as easy to read as possible

The basic attack

• The basic attack has been reworked, previously it was connected to the sprite and honestly a big pain to make, 4 frames per direction for 8 directions, resulting in 32 total frames for just 1 weapon was too much work considering that I'm planning on adding different weapon variations to the game, now the basic attack is just 8 frames, a big improvement and in my opinion it looks and feels much better, 
• The staff weapon was reworked, it is no longer a ranged weapon but rather works just like the sword and its ranged attack was moved to a passive skill
•  a new weapon was added, the Bow, which was previously cut due to the huge amount of frames required to animate it, while balance isn't really on my mind at this point, the bow was way too broken, so its damage might be a bit weak currently
• and last but not least, a small quality of life change, you can now hold LMB to attack, I don't remember why it wasn't working like that from the beginning

Skills

• Whirlwind has now an animation, due to time constraints of a game jam, some shortcuts were taken, while the change looks simple on the surface, it was actually a real pain in a.. to implement, as it required refactoring a lot of the character animation code, but now it should be a bit more simple to create unique animations for skills that need it
• Skills now inherit from a base class, previously the skills all had their own script and I had to manually write the logic for all the skills separately, again, a lot of time has passed, so I don't remember why I didn't do this from the start, so in other words, creating new skills is a lot easier than before, with that being said, a lot of new skills were added to the game thanks to this little change
• A small game design change relating to skills is that they now have some requirements to learn them, previously all you had to do to learn them was have enough skill points (SP) available, this led to a quite a problematic way of playing the game, at least when I was testing it, the optimal way to play was to put all your attribute points(AP) into your damage stats (STR/INT), this change tries to fix that problem and so far, it is. My goal is to give the player the freedom to create their own build, in this case, there was too much freedom which led me to restrict it a bit in order to provide more interesting choices, now the player is given the option, whether they invest into more damage or in some other attribute to get a new skill. Even with this change, the problem still remains, it was just moved later into the game, which a problem future me will have to deal with
• Healing skills now also heal all friendly targets, this was a small change made during this jam, more on it in the enemy section

New skills

NpcPlayers

• They can now cast skills just like the player, previously all they could was basic attack
• They now choose a name randomly for a list
• Their AI was improved but more on that in the enemy section

Enemies

• Added a new enemy "Goblin king", this was my first attempt at making a boss fight and I wanted to see how much work was required to make one, for now, it's in an acceptable state, it was designed as a 1-on-1 fight, although in the future it will be completely reworked, as the plan is to implement a party system which will allow the player to group up with npcPlayers
• Added enemy groups, thanks to the feedback I got when the project was first released during the RPG Mania jam, some enemies will now be in groups, meaning if you attack 1 of them, all nearby enemies will start attacking you, AOE skills just got a lot more fun to use
• Added a slime mini boss, this was created during the jam, while I was planning to make it more similar to the goblin king, with more mechanics and designed to be a 1-on-1 fight, the scope was a bit too big again, considering I had a lot of systems that had to be implemented. Due to it just being a bigger blue slime, I decided to place him in the world and see how the npcPlayers would fare against it, and as a developer, it was quite fun watching my little brain dead AI fight the slime. It didn't go well, they were too dumb to beat it, so I decided to help them a bit, I made the player healing skills be able to heal them, previously the heal and holy nova skill could only heal the player, and it was quite fun, trying desperately to keep them alive, so I also added a new healing skill "Holy ground" and it was definitely going somewhere, the AI was still a bit too dumb and keeping them alive was quite hard, I played around with their movement logic and was able to create something decent, where they would avoid the enemy attacks but as a result, it was now even harder to heal them as they would run all around the place, so I decided to backpedal a bit and gave them a 1/3 chance to have the new movement logic, so now the npcPlayers will either be really dumb and sit in all the mechanics but will make healing them a lot easier, or they will try their best to avoid all attacks and run all over the map

New systems

Some new systems that were added during this jam

• Gathering materials, you can now do some more stuff in the world other than killing, while it is currently missing content, thanks to how it is designed, adding more materials will be a piece of cake
• Consumables, on the surface it might not be a big deal, but it was quite a lot of work, making consumable items, having them be stackable, and persist in the world after changing maps, honestly, deciding to keep maps in small chunks rather than in a single open world, has me doing a lot more work, as they would usually just get deleted on changing levels
• Quest system - Finally quests are being added to the game, this was a system that I kept procrastinating on for quite a while, something about implementing it just felt daunting, currently the system is quite limited as I wanted to get it done before the game jam ended, as a result, there are only collection quests available, once the game jam is done, I'll start on expanding it
• UI has been completely replaced, it's definitely an improvement over the old UI, but it will still be changed in the future, once I have a better idea on how it should look
• Crafting system - most of the crafting system is finished, for this jam, it currently works only for consumables, but expanding the system shouldnt be too difficult, so again, once the jam is done, I'll start on expanding it

Thank you!

And that's it for the devlog, honestly if you managed to get to this part, you have my gratitude, as I said before, if you have any feedback, please feel free to share it, be it negative or positive ,doesn't matter, any kind of feedback is welcome and quite needed, I understand that there isn't quite a lot of content in the game yet, I'm more focused on implementing the required systems, once they are finished, adding content should be relatively easy, but for the sake of the game jam, I had to put into the game what I had, no matter how unfinished it is. After the game jam is over, I'll start working on adding a bit more content and making the map bigger, currently the maps are sliced into small parts, which works for some games, but not for this, being able to constantly change maps and seeing everything reset really breaks the immersion.