Welcome to another weekly report!
As usual, it is me, Christian, who’s your host on this tour through what happened at Stunlock last week. However, a lot of work consisted of things we can’t really show yet, so this week’s rendition is a bit lighter than usual. Regardless, I’ll go into some more general issues to start with.
What about the patch last week?
We started prepping last week for some small and quick changes to Jumong but the more we talked about it the more we found that some changes wouldn’t be that quick. Instead we made the choice to make a few more and slightly bigger changes and bundled them all up in the patch that will come this week: https://blog.battlerite.com/patch-0-12-1-0
Dragon Garden – Day
Besides the initial positive reaction, there has been some concerns regarding the general visibility of effects on Dragon Garden. How it works for people who are color blind, in particular those with red-green color blindness, was also brought up. I just want to say that we have heard your concerns and have been discussing how to make it better without compromising too much of the original design vision. Regardless, Dragon Garden – Night should suffer less from these problems.
Gameplay Team
A large part of last week went into implementing and testing the changes in this week’s patch. Our primary focus was getting Jumong’s new kit to work better and in the end we felt it required tweaking some of his core abilities a bit and subsequently rework some of his Battlerites. With these changes Jumong should have less problems with handling early pressure and have an easier time surviving on his own. As Seeker’s Arrow (EX M2) is now compatible with his Steady Shot (M2) Battlerites, it should also feel more valuable to invest into them.
Beyond this, the team has been doing a lot of testing for other things besides the upcoming patch. None of it is stuff we can talk about just yet so I’ll just have to leave that up for speculation right now.
UI 2.0
A lot of work has been put into the new lobby area, where players select a champion, view champion information, customize their champion, invite friends and begin matchmaking. In the concepts below, we’ve put a focus on separating the areas up a little more, so that information flow is more controlled (so, seeing the most important things first and in the right order). We need the new UI to support free to play rotation champions, as well as purchasing champions and lots lots more.
A lot of thought has been put into the placement and layout of these concepts that Katey shares with us today. Flexibility for future features and development is at the forefront of the design goals. Katey states that there is lots more work to still be done, but she’s feeling that the new UI is really beginning to take shape now.
Please remember that these concepts are not representative of the final product, nor the styling that we will see when the new UI is finally in a releasable state.
Art Team
Mostly the art team has continued work on stuff that will have more impressive reveals than our weekly dev blog. BUT, like I mentioned last time, we’re now at a stage with the new player experience where placeholders are being turned into the content they are supposed to be. As such, some concepts for the revamped tutorial have begun to see the light of day. Right now it’s looking like we will be replacing the target dummies in the tutorial with some new and improved training partners. Here are some early concepts for how they might look:
Once again, these are very early concepts and will continue to take form moving forward. The current idea is that these are underlings you fight off in the early stages of the tutorial before progressing to their boss, the one and only, Tourok.
No additional sneak peek this week, so that’s all I have right now folks. Thanks for reading and I’ll (probably) see you next week!
/Christian