Here we go again, and first an apology, I missed a month here. As you can see the releases have still be rolling out but I forgot to sit down and write a dev log - more on that later. Anyway, whats been happening in Tales of Yore? If you haven't already:

Play Tales of Yore

(and support on Patreon if you like)

So, what went wrong?

Yes a missed a month and thats terrible. Especially when people are enjoying the game and want more. The guilt was pretty painful! My excuse? I have a day job and it went crazy! I spent a fair bit of time on one of these.

Mad dash of a week to get a project designed, fly to Ohio, spend a week with the potential customers, fly back for a week. Fly out again for two weeks in Texas building the first version of the product. Come back - crunch like crazy to get the project over the line. Ow my body and brain hurt. However, it's mostly done so in theory I'm back to having more time and hence Tales of Yore wins out!

Wiki Wiki Wiki Wild Wild West (Part 2)

With the little time I had while I was in day job mode, and with some of the evenings while I was stuck in a hotel far away from home, I spent time on some bits and pieces that were easy to do without having my big screen setup and comfy home environment. The first was the Wiki! There has been a wiki on Fandom for a quite a while, some players started it and I wrote some scripts that generate pages on it from game pages so you can use it as a reference for things in the game (those who say theres no guide should probably look harder :)). However, players said that I should be hosting the Wiki on my own site because:

1. They hate Fandom 
2. They think any google ads revenue should be going to the game
3. They think having everything in one place is a good idea

So... off I go and install Media Wiki (what Fandom is based on). Setup is painless, its up and running in 10 minutes. Reskinning it to look like Tales took a bunch of hours. But we're suddenly there:

Tales of Yore Wiki is now at https://talesofyore.com/wiki. Unfortunately theres a few breakages, those scripts I wrote, well they don't work properly against generic Media Wiki (Fandom is running some customised version of the API). That fixed theres one more big one, the dynamic map. I love that theres a map of Yore that you can see the whole world and zoom in etc. Thats a custom piece of Fandom, but yay, thank you Open Source theres an extension to do that!

Website Updates

The next bit I found time to do was updating the main website to fix some issues with good screen real estate usage.  I'm a big fan of keeping things simple (as I may have mentioned 100 times) and this is true of the website too, the mobile and desktop variants were the same - no CSS rules, just a design that worked everywhere. 

However, this is one of the few times I can remember where actually planning for change paid off. When I built the new website - a few months ago - I was certain that I'd want to rearrange things later so everything has been built in simple reusable panels with a view to making CSS very easy later. Now it paid off! 

A little bit of CSS layer and I have a reactive site that looks sensible everywhere. Side note here, the Tales site is one of the few I've designed myself (for my day job I generally use UI designers) that I've been really happy with the look and feel. It's designed to fit the game and I think it works really well.

Bug Fixing

The other thing I could do while I was away being a road warrior, was bug fixing. A stack had built up, things that I wanted to fix at the time but had more pressing concerns. Here's some great ones:

Mounts wander off at Bala - every time someone would leave their mount at the tavern in Bala, The Salty Dog, they'd come out to find their mount had taken a little walk. Mounts are meant to stay at or near the entrance and wait for you, but in Bala there was clearly something more interesting. Turned out to be that some uninitialised data meant that in Bala the target was always 0,0 - so off they went.

Jobs going to the fair - the jobs board have proved to be very popular with 1000s of jobs being completed since it was added. However, what was popular was when the jobs got targeted at NPCs that were in the fair. The fair, for those who don't know, is only accessible during the birthday celebrations. However, it still exists outside of these times, it's just not connected. Generated jobs were targeting NPCs in the fair making it impossible for people to complete the jobs, meaning they had to wait 20 minutes for it time out! OOOOOOF!

Bug in Temple of Balan - this one was reported as an issue in the template of Balan but turned out to be a much bigger issues across the whole world. I find it amazing that even after all this time I'm finding odd cases for sync errors. In this case a change to a tile wasn't always properly time/frame synced with the clients meaning that some people got stuck without being able to see the change. This has brought up another issue with rare cases where position of clients can get out of sync - thats solved too now!

Noob, or Newb, or Newbie?

A criticism I've received a fair bit (in both nice and harsh ways) is that players don't always know where to go next, or worse they feel overwhelmed by the number of quests and activities there are to do. Part of this is intentional, Tales isn't here to lead you by the hand - you're expected to explore, take notes and enjoy the success. However, since the Wiki is around theres always a back stop.

That said it still seems like there too much of a hill for many players to get over. To address this I've started added a few things that have been done over this last period:

Newbie Bonus Timer - Theres now a timer that starts when a player starts the game. During this time they get extra bonuses for gold and experience. This generally makes progress at the start that bit easier.

Quests Levels - Quests can now have levels assigned, which means you can't take quests early on that you're not quite ready for. The net result is that at the start of the game you don't end up with 50 quests in your quest log and wonder what to do first. However, existing players dig not want to be limited later on in the game so this only happens up to about level 25. At that point you can choose to take on harder quests and just have a go!

Wiki links on Items and Quests - Items and Quests now have directly links to the wiki associated. This means if you get stuck on a quest you can just leap over to the wiki immediately. This to some people is "cheating" but to many it's just part of an MMORPG these days.

More explanation and Guidance - The start of the game now has a much more on-rails approach. As soon as you've done the tutorial you're pointed off on another easy quest - to deliver a sandwich. After that another of quests that guide you through learning to kill bosses and how to use rewards. I'm hoping this helps more than anything else. 

Theres more coming on this front but thats for another dev log. 

Social Media Madness

So I got it in my head my game needed to be popular. 

I started out the game without a care in the world -  not wanting anything but something to build. The result was that the game is "different" - it's not trying to attract players like crazy so it doesn't need to bend this way and that to match expectations of the average MMORPG player. Somehow this got lost and the need to be "successful" crept in. So... marketing! Must market! Must do social media! 

I think I went crazy for a bit. I tried manually updating regularly. Then trying other people's videos, even though they weren't all very good or in keeping with what I wanted Tales to be. I tried automated posts and generated content that spammed people's feed regularly. What a pile of nonsense! I even, to my shame, joined TikTok. I know I know. What happened huh?

I've come to my senses finally and stopped all this rubbish. I'll post what I like and the game will be what I want it to be. I like the new art I'm getting because its cool. I like telling people about the game but I'll do it my way and not subscribe to the hamster wheel that is social media marketing. To quote one of my favourite artists at the moment (replace music with game):

Yeah, but, my music's not commercial like that
I never chased numbers, statistics or stats
I never write hooks for the radio
They never even play me, so why would I concern myself with that?
But my music is really connecting
And the people who find it respect it
And for me, that's enough
‘Cause this life's been tough so it gives me a purpose I can rest in

Ah Ren!

More to Use, More to Do

Finally this session I've added a lot more monster drops. Why? Well thats quite interesting actually. The players that min/max the game have worked out that if you want to gain experience the best way is to mine. This is particularly good (and better than combat) because the resources you get from mining can be used to craft items further - and because the game lets you continue crafting even if you're idle - you can mine all day while you're awake, and let the game craft while you're away. For interest, this is by design. The game is intended to be part active and part idle.

For players that want to go kill monsters theres no such benefit, or there wasn't. Now most monsters drop some items and shortly I'll be adding in recipes that use these items for crafting. So there will be the option to fight for experience instead of mine, and in theory, it should be just as effective!

Hopefully I can get back to normal now! Thanks for reading as always, and if you have any questions or thought please drop a comment!