It’s been a while! Over the past many months I’ve been busy with a smaller game, a trip home to my family, and figuring out what I’m going to do next. I’ve been pretty certain that I wanted to continue growing Legend of the Void but rather than simply making LOTV3 I felt I needed to do something bigger…
Major Improvements
There are two areas I will be focusing a large amount of attention on for the coming game: Performance and Gameplay.
Performance: It’s no secret that both Legend of the Void 1 and Legend of the Void 2 were absolute beasts when it came to CPU usage. This is mostly due to how Flash innately handles graphics and my own poor programming skills. Lucky for me (and you) the smaller project I’ve been working on was created with the sole intention of teaching me how to handle graphics in a new way which will hopefully increase performance 100x over. No more sluggish combat or having to turn graphics down to “low” just to play. This should make the next Legend of the Void accessible to even more people.
Gameplay: My #1 goal for the next game is to create a combat system players can really enjoy. This will involve overhauling many areas of the game including class balance, skill diversification, character specialization, the turn-based system, and the way characters interact with the battlefield itself. I want to give you as much control as possible over your party. I want the roles of each class to be better defined. I want to give you more skills worth using and remove the junk. I want battles to be much more dynamic. Why are all of these changes so important?
Multiplayer – Be Legendary
Fighting skeletons and demons is all well and good but ultimately lacks the strategic depth you get when you’re battling another intelligent person. Soon you’ll be able to try your luck against thousands (millions?) of other players to see who really is the best at building the most powerful squad in Calderia! Now nothing is set in stone yet, but I envision a system where resources are gained by winning battles which help to craft new armor and weapons, hire new party members, and customize your group to make them unique to you. I have a bunch more ideas on this topic but I don’t want to get into them too much since it’s all still very rough and uncertain.
My hope is that multiplayer will make the game “complete” for players. With LOTV1/2 you battle through the world, collect cool gear, learn new spells, etc but ultimately the game ends and you don’t have much to do with your decked out squad. By being able to fight other people using other strategies you will finally be able to put your squad to the test. You’ll need to try different combinations of classes/items/skills/strategies to work your way up the ladder and get the resources you need to upgrade your party. You want to see how a party of warriors fares against more balanced squads? Go right ahead!
Possible Removals
Along with what I’ve mentioned above, I’m really striving to make the next game as accessible as possible to players. I want to improve the overall clarity of the game. This means simplifying or possibly outright removing certain features to promote a more engaging gameplay experience. Here are some things that may get the axe!
The Overworld: Personally I love the top-down aspect of exploring a world. To me it’s the closest thing we can get to a first-person aspect in such a small Flash window. That said, the next game will focus much less on a detailed story in favor of really creating the best combat gameplay possible via the multiplayer system.
The Blackbox: Why does my warrior do this much damage to that rogue? Why is that monster resisting my spell? How much will this item improve my constitution? I really want to limit these sort of questions in the future by creating a much more approachable mathematical system for how the game handles all of the various numbers. My hope is that it will make it easier for me to balance and easier for you to understand. A win-win!
The Name: “Legend of the Void”. What an ambiguous name! While I’ll likely keep it as a super-title to pay homage to the games history, I will definitely be looking for a more descriptive and approachable name for what comes next.
What do you think?
Are you eager to get battling against the rest of the world?
Are you going to miss adventuring across the countryside looking for hidden treasures?
Got a cool name idea for the next game?
Let me know! Leave a comment below or for a more in-depth discussion feel free to make a post on the Legend of the Void Forums
Oh yeah… When will it be released?
Late summer? Within the year? I’m really not sure. I’m looking to partner with another programmer to help me handle some of the multiplayer stuff but there is still a ridiculous amount of work to be done (100%) so I can’t give any more info here .
