Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Celebrating Creativity: Part I

Not unlike a lot of MMORPGs, Wyvern has always attracted creative people who lent their imaginations to this wonderful world Rhialto and others tried to create. The drawings, graphics, maps, music, websites, and stories they put together, whether for the greater development of the game or simply for fun, enriched Wyvern immensely.

Unfortunately, not all of it has survived to this day. Websites were taken down, hosting services collapsed, and people simply neglected to make sure their work remained for the Wyvern community to enjoy after moving on from the game. Some of it has been preserved thanks to services such as the Way Back Machine, but it didn't all make it into those archives and those things that did can be pretty hard to locate unless you know what you're looking for.

I thus decided to put together a series of blog posts that celebrate that lost creativity. However, even my ability to dig these things up is somewhat limited, so if you have access to anything that I wasn't able to include or can contact someone who does, let me know and I'll put it up in a future posting.

Wyvern Art Board


Arisu is a great talent whose art has helped to beautify Wyvern over the years. Among her many contributions to our little community was an Art Board that sadly wasn't promoted a whole lot (it really deserved a mention on the Wyvern homepage), but it did receive a fair amount of attention around 2004 and 2005. Basically, she would post some drawing or graphic she had created, usually with Wyvern in mind (though not always) and people followed suit.

I'm not really sure what happened with it. I think there was some problem with existing accounts and then some time later you stopped being able to visit the site at all. Of course, it didn't help that there eventually became less players around to do art. Regardless, I would love to see a day where Wyvern is active again and a new art board is able to flourish. In the meantime, here are some high points from the old one:



For many more images you can have a glance through the archives. Just be warned that it would be rather difficult to see everything as it's all fragmented throughout various save dates. To compile the above slideshow I had to literally go through every save date of every page the Way Back Machine had for the art board and even then, there are some things that are hard to view/not saved at all. Ideally, all the data is sitting somewhere waiting for Arisu to properly find a place to archive it so that it can be easily viewed. Failing the realization of that hopeful fantasy, you'll just have to make do with the Way Back Machine.

If you can manage it, try to see if you can follow the story about the Shoggoth invasion. It was told by multiple people through various pictures and comments. Needless to say, it was a rather inventive use of the board and it's a shame that people never got to do more things like that when that particular storyline concluded.

Epilogue


The above blog post was written and compiled several years ago and saved as a draft along with a number of other draft posts that I had been stockpiling. I was originally planning to release daily blogs for a (roughly) one month period after we reached the stage of my three part development plan that was to involve trying to grow the playerbase.
I then thought I could release a surge of new posts when Wyvern returned, so I wrote this and other additional drafts in the few month period between the game going down and my announcement that I was retiring.

Looking back on those drafts now, there's a lot I probably won't ever release since they talk about then future plans for Wyvern and particular ideas of mine. However, I recently thought of this post and it seemed appropriate to finally make it live given its focus on community work. I hope you all enjoyed it. As mentioned above, it did indeed take me quite awhile to put this altogether way back when but that's nothing compared the work that talented Wyvern artists put into enhancing the imagination behind our little 2D pixel world.

Cheers from your friend and tormentor,
Arilou Lalee'lay.

Monday, February 4, 2013

10 Year Anniversary Retrospective - Part II

By now, I'm sure you all know that to people who work on games, "soon" really means "when we feel like it." So, is it really any surprise that when I told you guys to "check back soon" for the follow up to the last part of the anniversary retrospective, you wouldn't be able to read it until a year later?

I would have had it for you "sooner," but it's difficult to reminisce about how you spent all this time working on building things to help push the game forward, only to have the game go down a month later and remain offline for such a long stretch of time. Especially when the response, at the time, was that it would be back up "soon," so what was supposed to be a one week break from blogging instead became a month, which became until Rhialto got the game back, which became on the next anniversary since it looks like the game will be down quite awhile longer (aka, it will be back "soon").

Although, actually, kudos to me as I finally got around to writing this 10 months later and am just scheduling it to be published on February 4th. So, really, I should get an award or something for completing this early. Maybe a nice plump halfling wrapped in elf skin or a... what's that? I'm rambling? Well, duh, I don't refer to this blog as my "mad ramblings" for nothing, but okay, fine, I'll move on to the retrospective if you insist. *mumbles incoherently*

fae Wyston Graveyard

The fae Wyston Graveyard is an important piece of Wyvern's history as it's one of the game's earliest dungeons. Sadly, it was also one of the most unbalanced. In addition to having way too much loot for its difficulty, it handed out far too much experience. Like most early maps, there were spawns for random scrolls, spellbooks, rings, armor, and rods just sitting near mid-level monsters. Originally, you could even get an artifact spawn without having to fight the boss, but Rhialto took some of that treasure out and put the random artifact spawn in the inventory of a beefed up version of the Arch Dracolich in 2003.

That wasn't its only problem. Sadly, at one point, it also earned the honor of containing the map that gave out the highest amount of experience because experience goes up for every spell a monster has and the graveyard had a bunch of Floating Eyes and Skulls grouped together. (Fun fact: I know this because Rhialto told me so after informing me that the map with the second highest amount of experience belonged to me. Whoops!)

Rhialto eventually made some tweaks to how much experience these monsters got, but it was still too much and progression was far too simple. There were just four very small maps that were loaded with monsters and players loved to farm them. Thus, high level players would run through it in a couple of minutes and come away with easy experience... and a still rather easy to obtain artifact. Due to this, we ended up blocking it off with boulders and then having it removed entirely.

You can see the original four levels and the above ground graveyard map on your right. Most of you who have been around long enough to have been able to go there probably went after we updated many of the game's graphics in 2003, but I decided to use the old ones instead to show you how it looked when people first started going there. The game didn't even have different color staircases back then, so even dark and spooky dungeons had to make use of those white ones.

After closing it off, I immediately started working on redoing it and got as far as the first couple of maps. My initial idea was to make this huge group dungeon that started off with the same easy bunch of undead monsters from the original map, but quickly became challenging and ended with Morgos as the boss. However, plans for an even harder Morgos dungeon came up and, although I never got very far with that one either, planning it out diverted my attention. Before I could get back to the graveyard, an old wizard showed up and signed up to redo fae Wyston entirely. Rather than make them work around my graveyard, I shelved the project, thinking that maybe one day I'd get back to it and put it in Minath Elion or Alaria.

The wizard in question left again and nothing much ever came of it, so I'd occasionally think about going ahead and redoing it as fae Wyston needed to have monster maps again. Unfortunately, other things always took precedence. Then our 10th year anniversary was fast approaching, and I wanted to not only provide new content for people, but provide content that celebrated the game's history and what better way to do that than to give fresh life to old maps? I had a bunch of projects that I wanted to complete, but the Minath Monster Arena ended up preventing me from getting to everything as it was a huge time sink. Fortunately, the graveyard made it in under the wire and it came out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

It's now a large, 50 or so map dungeon (to be fair, some of those are duplicate puzzle maps) with three mini bosses, two bosses, several puzzles, a couple of tricks, new monsters created for the anniversary, a non-streamlined form of progression (meaning you don't just go down one square map after another until you reach the end), and some nice rewards (artifact armor FTW!). As you probably know, there's no Morgos in there as I decided to build on the original dungeon, rather than replace it with something completely different. There wasn't much to work with, but I tried to keep the general look. Thus the simple dirt + cave wall combo, my use of only the original gravestones, and many of the same monsters appearing throughout the dungeon. An interesting little tidbit you might not know is that the Arch Dracolich at the end of the original dungeon was called "Shog," which is why he was surrounded by Shoggoths. For anyone who has gone through my redone version, you'll probably recall the points where I expanded on that.

Here's another interestingly little tidbit: I was in the process of expanding the graveyard when the game went down. I've long wanted to make a dungeon that can only be accessed by completing several other dungeons. It's something I've mentioned in-game, on the forum, and probably in this very blog. I briefly had the idea of redoing the Minath Elion ruins with something like that, but as I would have taken forever to do that, Teshuvah redid it instead. Then I briefly had the thought that maybe one day I'd make a west Minath Elion ruins, but that wasn't going to happen either.

This idea popped into my head again while working on the anniversary, but obviously I wasn't going to have time to make multiple dungeons. So I made some notes and shelved the idea until after the anniversary, whereupon I made eight additional above ground graveyard maps. I don't reveal unreleased content much, but here's the original map that you guys got to see, plus an additional eight that I intended to link to it.


My plan was to put up the whole graveyard and, every now and then, release another dungeon, equal in difficulty to the first one. I have the basic idea of where I wanted to go with each dungeon written out and some are harder to make than others since, as to avoid being repetitive, those require things that don't exist. Therefore the likelihood of me ever finishing this was pretty low as it's rather difficult to get others to make specific art and code for your areas. Hence, why that other Morgos dungeon was placed on the back burner (our selection of high level undead and demon monsters was too limited for me to feel like I could do it justice). But I could've done a few over a period of time and maybe another wizard would've liked to contribute a dungeon or two. In the end, even if it took forever to get around to completing all of them and the boss the dungeon, at least there would be more dungeons to train in.

By the way, since I mentioned Morgos so much, here's a factoid about him: The system by which I used to get him to drop other versions of himself was an idea I originally conceived for a vampire, of all things. I thought it would be really neat if I could have one that shifted into different forms (wolf, bat, and snake) before returning to its vampire form and when you defeated that, I wanted him to turn into an unbeatable mist that would flee from you. I never really had a place for him at the time, but the idea came back to me when I was making Morgos into a monster and I actually figured out how to accomplish it without needing any special code. It therefore seemed fitting that I'd finally make that original vampire as a mini boss for a dungeon that I initially wanted to make for Morgos, and I think it turned out to be a rather interesting encounter. Needless to say, I love inserting non-traditional surprise encounters into my dungeons.

One more thing: In my last blog post I talk a bit about Amita and during the course of discussing its multi-map maze, I made reference to some really hard mazes that I was developing. Well, these future graveyard dungeons are what they were for and, like I said then, maybe I'll share some details about them down the road.

Uncompleted Plans for the Anniversary

As mentioned, I had planned to redo more than just the fae Wyston graveyard for the anniversary, but I didn't quite complete everything in time. What exactly am I referring to, you ask? Well, there were little bits and pieces, but the main things (that I care to write about) involved the Ziggurat, Moon Quest, and world maps. At a later date I may share some images from these and other projects that I did not complete in time. (Some may even work their way into the game when it returns as they were close enough to done that I was able to complete them before the game went down.)



The Ziggurat has long needed to be redone and was thus something that I had been planning to get around to for awhile but didn't have much motivation until the anniversary came up. In my version, I shifted the entrance to the top of the structure so players have to descend multiple levels, comprised of different rooms, complete with hidden passages, traps, and a few surprises. When players reach the bottom, they have to navigate their way to the boss room, which is hidden somewhere in the middle.



The Moon is not something that I really worked on in the lead up to the anniversary. I planned the whole thing out and made sections of it ages ago, including the redone Alaria Inn and some other maps that you haven't seen. Ultimately, I got bogged down with obtaining special code for it, but I had always very much wanted to save it for the 10th year anniversary as it would have been fitting for the game's first quest to return on that day. However, I could have either bugged Contrare to work on/fix code for it or bother him for bonus XP hours, costumes, and the MMA. It was the right choice, but  I am kind of bummed about it as I think the Moon Quest would be fun for players who like challenging quests.


The world maps haven't been updated in ages. The one on the website is still cluttered with places that have been removed and it's missing some of our recent additions. Meanwhile, the in-game one could do with a new coat of paint. As a result, I got Legolas to send me an easy to edit version of the website's world map, and I had set my sights on sprucing up the in-game world map to boot. However, at the last minute, Rhialto came through with those old New Verden maps that I used to show everyone what the starting town once looked like and changing everything to use the old graphics was so tedious that it ate into my world map work.
 
It's not particularly exciting, but you may be interested to see that I wanted to expand the map eastward to accommodation a desert expansion.


This isn't an actual shot of the world map. Rather, it's from a smaller test map that I made to see how it would look before deciding whether it should be copied over or not. However, it's pretty much on par with the "final" version. I filled the new expanse with some buildings that wizards could either make dungeons for or replace with something of their own (they're pretty much just place markers so it doesn't look empty). I also made a small oasis in the middle that I hoped could be replaced with a proper oasis graphic and would, at some point, have an area to go along with it.

You might be asking yourself why this matters if it was going to be updated without any new maps. Well, the point was to give wizards more room for desert areas that they might like to make in the future. If a wizard wants to make one as is, there just isn't any place for it and so it either would have been attached to Bandar Gaah and Jbel or they would have had to ask if a new landmass can be made for their area, so they might be discouraged from pursuing a desert area. Plus, I think it works better for stories if we can refer to a large desert expanse.

Initially, I wanted to make it even bigger, extending further southeast, but I didn't want to expand the overall size of world map too much and it wasn't necessary at the time. I figured I could always add on to it later if wizards filled that desert space up, but it probably would've been awhile before that happened.

Player Screenshots

Along with the amazing MMA video that I featured in Part I of my retrospective, Vesrayech was nice enough to provide the following screenshots. All but the last are from the party.


Unfortunately, Vesrayech was not using the Webstart client, so he didn't have the updated orb graphics in that final shot. However, I provided an entire view of the map in my previous anniversary post, so you can go back and see how it is supposed to look if you want.
 
If you have any screen shots of your own from the big day that you would like to see featured in the next part of this blog series, let me know.

To be Continued

Check back "soon" for Part III of Arilou's anniversary retrospective. As I'm sure you've figured out by now, "soon" most likely refers to whichever comes first: the game's 13th anniversary or when Rhialto brings the game back up. In the meantime, be sure to check out Part I if you haven't already and if you have a question about the anniversary that you don't want to wait to see if I answer on my own, leave a comment.

Sunday, January 13, 2013

Arilou Turns Ten

It's hard believe, but it was ten years ago on this day that I was promoted to the rank of junior wizard in a little known game called Wyvern. Although the game has twice gone down for long periods of time since that day and I have since retired from it, I have consistently been affiliated with the game, in some capacity or another, for that entire time. I've done and seen a lot along the way, but as I did in my five year anniversary blog, I'd like to use this space to just reflect on my early days with the game.

If you go back to the last anniversary blog of mine, you'll see me discuss the development of my first area, Forgotten Oak. I had actually been planning to mark this date by releasing at least the redone village maps for that island of lost souls (fyi - in my plans for the area, the island map would be done away with and also replaced with dozens of individual maps that you would have to traverse much like Amita, only on a larger scale). However, since that's not possible with the game being down and all, let's talk a bit about my second completed area; Amita.

You may not know this, but although Amita is the second area I released, it's actually the third that I worked on. My second attempt at an area was a quest for the golem temple that's to the east of the Forgotten Oak village. I spent about two months working on it and got to almost 200 maps before realizing it was absolute garbage and decided to trash the whole thing. Ultimately, it was an important learning experience and while I still had a ways to go at that point, it helped me when it came to future projects like Amita.

Ironically, though, Amita is something I put together in about 26 hours in response to a discussion on the wizard forum about how we needed more low level content. The end result was 37 maps (it has since ballooned to over 250 maps - I kid you not) including six Orc Tower maps that I had previously worked on with the intention of putting directly on the world map (it was to appear on the land mass that later housed Terrim, but I re-purposed it while working on Amita as I realized how well it fit). Believe it or not but that simple tower was actually ahead of its time. I had been noticing how common it was for people to get trapped in multi-map monster areas, as anyone who has played for any amount of time has, and so I decided to create this tower that starts with a non-claimable map and then diverges into five monster maps (east, west, north, up, and down). To illustrate this I combined the maps together in one image:



It may not seem like much, but it was something different and I was able to build on it to make it a lot more interesting at a later date. If you go there when the game is up, you will see that each of those side maps now has multiple maps and there are paths leading from one to the other so a player can find their way out by progressing forward if their path backwards is blocked. I never did get a chance to release a redone version of the top or bottom floors, but the kobold basement has become kobold tunnels with lots of little paths in the general shape of a spiderweb. So that same multi-path motif continues into the rest of the tower's maps. It looks a lot better now, (see the below image of the entrance for comparison) but I'm disappointed that I didn't originally take the time to properly measure all the maps so that these side rooms and hallways all fit together like puzzle pieces. This especially became an issue for me after I finally fixed Amita's main maps so that they could come together properly when I made those sign maps for it (it had bothered me for awhile, but working on that map gave me the push I needed to make it happen).



Speaking of Amita's central area, obviously it didn't always look as it did now with forest paths and districts having their own maps. Originally it was this big 40x43 map that you can see below (note: not all graphics are the same as the ones players saw when Amita went live and, yes, I know you can see what's behind the hedges, but it's not a trade secret so don't worry about it). I don't know why, but when designing it I felt compelled to start drawing a wall in the upper portion of the map and I suddenly asked myself why there would be a city wall in only one portion of this forested village's map. I had just previously read a book about a city with inner walls that was meant to separate the wealthy from the near rebellious rift-raft and that's when it hit me that this would make a good basis for my own story and Amita's plot took off from there.

Next thing I knew, I had the gatehouse and the secret tunnel in place. Then I started dropping plot points about how the villagers hate the merchants, how there's hostility between the peasants and the guards, (hence the two taverns) and how people have been using the tunnel to escape the harsh rule of their tyrannical "king." It's interesting because I was trying to get away from Forgotten Oak's dark design with both the area that I scrapped and Amita. Instead, I ended up with was something that appears light and happy on the surface, but is dark and oppressive if you look deeper. I have found that this is a common motif in my work as a paradise itself is just not interesting. There needs be some intertwined madness on, or bubbling just below, the surface.  Otherwise, what's the draw for people to want to learn more about the area they're in?



Getting back to map design, I think we can all agree that Amita has come a long way since it's early days. Although, I actually started seriously updating it toward the end of 2003 as I made an account to further test the area to see if there was anything I could tweak. I was hoping just to get a feel for anything that might be annoying for new players so I noticed, for example, how irritating it was to die in the merchant houses and then have to go all the way down to the hospital to heal and then go all the way back up to continue fighting. So I added fountains to the church. I also noticed how annoying it was to have to go through patches of tree terrain, especially that patch just southeast of the church. So I began to wonder how I could maintain this forest look and, at the same time, make it easier for people to get around the village as it's a low level area and they don't really have to deal with that in Davos or New Verden. Then it hit me, like a ton of bricks, that I should split that one map into a whole bunch of maps, which I very quickly did and then put online without any fanfare. Ironically, it's not easier to get around as there's now a lot more space to traverse and new players often get lost (causing me to eventually put mall style maps of the village all over the place). But, it looks awesome and it's a whole lot more realistic.

I don't know why wizards had never done this before. Instead, wizards would generally make really big town maps and since large maps were a problem, Legolas would sometimes suggest that people make them smaller by splitting them in two. That's what ended up happening with Coran. It was a single big map and so Zifa took the top half, copied it into a blank map, deleted the bottom half in the original, and added teleporters between them. Zifa put a lot of detail in that city, so it doesn't look like a big box, but most towns did because that's what they were.

The first thing everyone would do when making a town was create a big blank square or rectangle and start filling it in with wild abandon. Part of it may be laziness as it's easier to keep track of, but multiple maps just "feel" great in-game. There's such a scope to them that it that makes you feel like you're really exploring a majestic fantasy city or a wooded fantasy village when done properly. And it looks really great when you take all those maps and put them together in one big image. You've probably seen the small version of that for those direction signs in Amita, but one day I'll probably put a larger version up on my website. In the meantime, here's a look at just the slums so that you can compare it with the original version of Amita's main map.



All in all, Amita is my favorite of the areas I have created and my closest to being completed. Not that you can ever really declare an area completed in this type of game as there's always the possibility that new ideas will cause you to add on to existing content. But, it's not too far off from my current vision. I had planned to release some redone maps along with completed guard housing maps, maps for the logging operation that is the reason behind a select few's wealth, a small quest series, some additions to the PK Forest, and I wanted to filter some more mini-quests into existing and planned maps. It may sound like a lot, but I had been expecting that I could get it all done by March 16th, 2013 (ten years to the day that Amita was made public) and jokingly announce that I finally completed an area.

Alas, the second Great Downtime put "a bit" of a kink in that. However, even though I'm now retired, there exists a certain amount of completed unreleased content that I can throw up on the server when the game comes back (assuming, it doesn't go open source or anything). So if you're fan on Amita, you have that to look forward to.

Factoids

-That rocky path was actually inspired by my grandparent's property. There was originally a house there that had a stone pathway leading up to it, but it burned down and they rebuilt it further back. However, since they no longer had enough matching stones to reach the front of the house, they moved a few right below the front porch and let the rest of stones be taken over by grass. Anyway, one day I was there playing cards with my siblings and father while my mother was working outside when suddenly, my mother came in to declare that she had uncovered one of these rocks. Having grown up with a love for the idea of digging up the unknown (and thus wanting to be either an archaeologist or paleontologist) I was legitimately excited and went right out to help her dig up the rest while my siblings and father basically responded with a collective "meh."

We didn't end up uncovering them in order, (and we never did finish) so as we were doing this there were breaks in the path. I liked that uncompleted image so much that when I went to make Amita I wanted to recreate that, but we didn't have anything resembling those stones. As a result, I just used the stone terrain until, one day, Legolas commented on how he didn't like the look and I concurred, telling him what I had envisioned. The next thing I knew he presented me with those stone road graphics that are remarkably dead on to their real life inspiration, which is a testament how awesome Legolas is. Anyway, I happily went about placing them throughout Amita and made sure to maintain the breaks as the idea is that there once was a completed road here, but it has hasn't been properly maintained and therefore grass and dirt has overtaken parts of it.

-Amita's similarities to where my grandparents lived (in the latter parts of their lives) doesn't stop with the stone pathway. It was very green and lush with a few evergreen trees on the property and it was surrounded by woods on all sides. If you go down to one of the meadows, there's a path leading to a creek just like there's a path leading to the creek in Amita (although the one in real life is much, much smaller). The real life creek doesn't end in a pond, but actually neither does the Amita creek. Nobody knows this, but in my head the creek actually continues on underground.

-Wrath of the Fey isn't the only quest I had planned for Amita. I have a write up (and some partially completed maps) for a four part quest series that throws you into the plight of our villagers as a way of exploring more of the area's backstory. Each individual quest has its own name and the series of those quests is called "Trouble in Paradise" which is a play on the idea that Amita looks so wonderful of the surface but some really horrible things are going on there.

-I used to play this Sega Genesis game called "Light Crusader" that was about a knight who returned home to find the kingdom he served was going through a hard time. To make a long story short, villagers were disappearing and nobody knew why. Well, you would go around talking to the remaining villagers and all the while this very sad music would be playing that, at least from memory, kind of reminded me of the church music that Wyvern has. So, when I heard that I knew that's that was the music for Amita. When I listen to it, I conjurer images of a guard knocking a peasant into the mud, a mother weeping as her child is taken off to be trained as a soldier, and a family shivering in the cold because their house burned down. Basically, all these really horrible, sad, depressing things. Therefore if you ever wondered why I chose that music for Amita or if you thought that I put no effort into the selection... well, here you are.

-Amita actually means sister in Latin. The reason I selected this is because I thought that it would be great if Amita was built to be the sister village to New Verden and now it's this closed off enclave that, frankly, is no New Verden at all. But, also, an interestingly little bit is that I decided to create a little theme around this and use Latin words for many of the names of NPCs throughout the village. I picked words that represented something about them so, for example, Panis means bread. Unfortunately, I didn't realize some people might misconstrue that at the time, but luckily only a select few players have ever brought it up (and one wizard).

-Since the ogre chieftain map hasn't been available in the orc tower for quite some time, you may not be aware that there's actually a note there from the Oaken Village sorcerer responsible for luring the orc hoards to the island. In the letter he promises that orc tribe a reward if they come to the island and join other tribes in the besieging Oaken Village. So, there's a nice little tie in there.

-There's a lot of hidden little bits within the village that you're probably unaware of it. I love Easter eggs in games and there were actually quite a few in Wyvern's early content that are fun to look for. So, I threw a lot into Amita. Hint: Certain trees might have something carved on them if you look closely.

-You may not have been around long enough to remember, but there used to be a gateway on New Verden's west wall that led to the path that led to Davos. Obviously, that means that you would arrive in Davos from the east, not the west as you have undoubtedly become so used to it. Well, I had actually designed Amita with the intention that when you got to what is now Davos' entrance, you would come to the path that leads to Amita (this, btw, is also why the creek ends like it does as I couldn't have it continue to the edge of the map and then not re-appear in Davos). However, Rhialto immediately began speaking about finding a place for it on the world map, so I didn't even bother mentioning that and an icon was then created/placed a little bit south of New Verden. However, some time later, Legolas came to me with the idea of putting them all together with the tutorial in the center. So those three villages ended up together after all.

-Have you have been to the maze east of the orc tower and been frustrated to no end while trying to navigate multiple maps? Well you're not alone. Few have ever completed it since its too complicated for players new to the game and it doesn't reward experienced players enough to encourage them to try it. But, yours truly has been caught in its web even though I designed it. As you may or may not know, the trick to the maze is unlocking items hidden within it in a specific order and, when working on it, I made a little hand drawn map detailing what order players had to go in to aid me when putting it all together.

When all was said and done, I got this idea that I should test it as a player would to get a feel for how difficult it truly was as wizards hadn't been linking together multiple mazes like this and so I didn't have a solid reference for what I was putting players through. As a result, I didn't use any of my wizard powers to help myself get around and I turned that hand drawn map over. Big mistake! I completely forgot the order and was stumbling around for who remembers how long going back and forth through the maze trying to randomly figure out where I had to go to next and I cannot begin to tell you how out of my mind with frustration I was. So, for those few of you who have taken up the challenge, I want to let you know that I feel your pain and am so very sorry.

That said, I'm not so sorry that I can say that I would never have put anyone through that again. In fact, I had planned to utilize and expand on the idea of linking together maze maps in future areas. I won't go into that now, but perhaps I'll blog about one of my more evil unseen designs in the future.

Have a question regarding Amita? Ask me in the comments.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

10 Year Anniversary Retrospective - Part I


February 4, 2001. That, my friends, is the day that Wyvern was opened up for public testing. I would like to be posting this in the cabochon.com news right now, where I could maybe say something about how far we've come now that we're at the eleven year mark. Unfortunately, that can't happen, but it does make you wonder the progress we would have made in the last year had things gone differently.

When planning the big celebration to mark our 10 year anniversary, I tried to not only to create a single, fun day long event, but to make something that would move the game forward again. Without getting into a whole long backstory, we had spent the previous year and a half working on balance and bug fixes, which provided, shall we say... challenges for our loyal players to adapt to. But as we got the major issues worked out, we had begun to slow down, leaving only some "tweaks" here and there and large scale projects (like enchanting and random dungeons) on our list before we could move forward entirely.


Now, when I say "large scale projects," I mean extremely time intensive things. Therefore, it would've been a little longer before we could get on with the fun stuff. But you guys had been so loyal to the game throughout all that that you deserved a a break. Thus, the event I created was centered around permanent content that you could enjoy long after the day was over. Below, I'll review that content and give you some behind the scenes information to go along with it.

Costumes

Ah, costumes. Such a simple concept and yet, such a Salkand (Har. Har. Har.). Originally coded and introduced to the game by Janica as a wedding dress and tuxedo these little things have been a pain since day one.

First, they were rather buggy. Not only did they hork the images of our poor giant and naga friends, but they set your gender to match whoever the costume was intended for. While it may have led to some amusing moments, such as the time Airick shook his fist at whatever anonymous tricky wizard setpropped him as "female" (before we figured out costumes were the actual cause), it also made it pointless to ever create gender specific content.

Second, Avalon's introduction of a plethora of Halloween costumes actually created quite a controversy. It had become so easy to change your image and you had so many options that players began to complain that it devalued the work they put in to attain their HOF image.

As a result of all that (and some other things), costumes disappeared from the game for quite awhile. But they can be a lot of fun for players, so I thought that if we could get a bug free version up and running and devise some way to limit their use, we could bring them back. Thus, I asked Contrare if he could code something that limited its use to only one day of the year (and fix the bugs). This request almost got shoved to the "not enough time" pile, but he pulled it together at the very last minute and I do believe they were quite the hit.

They also would have led to some fun times ahead. I always wanted to have automated holidays in Wyvern. Every year, on a certain day, new content would become accessible. You walk into Stensele and a celebration is going on or you walk into New Verden and a portal through time appears that takes you to our old style New Verden. We didn't yet have the code to do that with areas, but once a year costumes were the first step. Next we could have created the above mentioned content and filled it up with special items like obtainable costumes, so although it may seem sad to only get to be a little Wyvern once every February, you could've had the chance to be who knows what in {insert month}.

One other thing I had in mind for future additions to this concept were costume rooms. I don't know how feasible this would have been or if other wizards would have agreed that this would have been a good idea, but it was on my list to see if we could set a map to allow you to wear your costume all year round. That way you could create parties to show off the various costumes you collected, and perhaps it would create a greater incentive to create parties in the first place (something that doesn't happen much since auction houses replaced emote rooms as the place to hang out).

Minath Monster Arena




Above is a video Vesrayech created of himself trying to conquer the redesigned arena. It was nice of him to put the work into getting it together and uploading it as I really wanted people to able to see what the changes entailed after all the work that went into it. You can compare it with the old arena by viewing the following videos:

MMA by Kohora
Minath Monster Arena by Irano (currently not available due to Google Videos shutting down)

I'm extremely pleased with how it turned out. It had some bugs, sure, but Contrare was working up until right before the anniversary and the bugs were hard to spot with one wizard testing it at a time. (Who would've thought you'd all end up in the same arena maps? lol). Overall, though, I think players enjoyed it and most of the bugs were fixed by the time the game went down. I think there were one or two left on the list, and we still hadn't been able to settle the player statue issue (bummer!).

For me, this was the most time consuming thing I worked on. (Although making the old New Verden come alive was by far the most tedious.) In fact, it sucked up so much of my time  (I spent the better half of January consumed with it) that there were a number of other things that I wasn't able to get around to or complete.

Contrare and I had previously discussed his plans for redoing the arena and I offered to help him with the map aspect at the time, but it was put on hold since our focus was still on bugs/balance. So it was nice to have a break to work on things like this and all the work allowed Contrare to redo the code in such a way where other wizards could use it in creating their own arenas. With that, who knows, you might have one day seen an Alaria Monster Arena or a Havisfel Monster Arena... okay, probably not, but the possibility would have been there moving forward.

As for the Minath Monster Arena, Contrare wanted two main things out of the redone maps: he asked that they be rounder and bigger in order to give players more room to run around, cast spells, and avoid their foes. Based on that, I came up with the design seen in the above video and I incorporated rotating barriers in all but the boss levels, which have just two obelisks. (Fun fact: if you "look" at the obelisks, the description reads "a strangely water-soaked, granite obelisk" in reference to a certain monster that rises from the sea).

I also decided to create a unique map for every level, which upped the count from 32 to 50 maps (some were reused in the previous design). Further, I instituted themes (forest, town, caves, grave, abyss, and underwater) that each lasted between 8 and 15 levels and culminated in a boss type fight that was designed to be a little harder than the level that precedes and follows it. Originally, I wanted to create a swamp theme, but we didn't have enough monsters to fill that out, so the Abyss got extended a bit. Had I done this, I probably would've made level 50 the demon boss level and had the chicken and actual boss be bonus levels. I also considered adding things like a dinosaur bonus level (Rhialto originally talked about including them in the previous redo) but ultimately rejected the idea.

It may seem like no big thing, but the real killer was matching themes with the objective of creating an ever increasing degree of danger. I had to swap themes around (e.g. I thought placing the underwater levels right before the final boss would create the idea of him being woken up from under the sea and rising out of the ocean, but the demons were just too powerful not to appear last) scrap/redo levels, and create whole new monsters to specifically fit certain levels. Some monster images I had been saving up and others I finally got around to watering down from their First Day of Summer appearance. It worked out nicely, though, as I not only got to use them for the arena, but I was able to introduce them into the random lists at the same time so you guys were able to encounter new enemies throughout the game.

Additionally, I worked to eliminate problem monsters that appeared in the previous design. Meaning, no more air elementals, diamond golems, or will 'o wisps. They were just too hard for certain classes and/or races to beat, which is fine in the general game, where you can group, avoid them, or wait for a summon to kill them for you without a clock ticking, but they don't work so well within the competitive nature of the arena. Of course, the arena is by no means balanced to give each class and race a truly equal opportunity, but it is better.

Before I move on, I'd like to end this discussion of the arena with the below image of the entrance. Out of all the maps I designed for the arena, this is my favorite - I've said it before and I'll say it again... I LOVE those tiles of Binyamin's!



To Be Continued

Check back "soon" for part II of the anniversary retrospective. Coming up, I'll dissect such additions as the fae Wyston graveyard, the suggested playing time system, the original New Verden design, and more. I'll also be posting player comments/screenshots and I'll give some details on the things I wanted to have ready in time for the anniversary but wasn't able to complete in time.

Saturday, December 31, 2011

Wyvern: Year in Review

For the last two years I've done a "Year in Review" news post for Wyvern, detailing the important news of the past year and linking to the full articles so that returning/new players could catch up or so that regular players could quickly go over it and see if there was anything they missed and wanted more information about. They took quite a bit of work to put together, especially the 2009 version (that beast took a number of hours to conquer).

I originally conceived of this idea shortly after the game came back up following what is known as the 15 month hiatus. It seemed like Rhialto was going to be more active from this point on and that updates and news posts would be forthcoming as a result. Therefore, I figured I could do a big blog post at the end of 2008 catching everyone up. Unfortunately, things didn't work out that way and there weren't really enough highlights that year to make it worthwhile. It seemed like the same would be true the following year, but that changed a few months in and the news began to flow so rapidly that people couldn't keep up. Thus, "Wyvern: Year in Review" was born.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to put up a news post this year, but I thought I'd continue the tradition as a blog post per the original idea. So for your reading pleasure here are the highlights of 2011:

Celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Wyvern we brought to you a fun weekday party that introduced a lot of new content to the game. Out of this day, we saw new maps, new quests, new monsters, a new [and only somewhat buggy] Minath Monster Arena, the return of costumes, and artifact armor. We then followed this up with a "suggested playing hours" feature that would allow players to get extra experience while training throughout the game during specific hours of the day.

Such updates were the first steps toward focusing a bit more on attracting players to the game after spending quite a lot of time working on balance/bug fixes that hampered players during the bulk of our work. We still had more work to do to balance the game, but with most of the quick fixes taken care of, work would have continued more slowly in the future and therefore we wanted to also spend some time keeping all of our very loyal players entertained until we could be finally be done with old balance problems and turn our complete attention to building the game up.

Following these exciting two updates, Rhialto announced a temporary downtime for March 7th... and with that we end this edition of "Wyvern: Year in Review." *cues dramatic music as the camera pans out - I now begin to fiddle with my shirt in an attempt to remove my mic while the credits role*

Sunday, September 18, 2011

More Tales From Little Arilou

Awhile back I posted a childhood story of mine that I thought some of you might find amusing since it showed that, even at that age, I was writing about people being eaten. Well, as luck would have it, I just recently found a story book that I had completely forgotten about and, long story short, I thought some of my might get a laugh or two out of this one as well.

I don't know what age I was when I wrote this or even what it was for. However, in the original booklet, each paragraph was on a new page and each page had some illustrations that I had cut out and colored. Therefore I would assume the assignment was to create a children's book. Unfortunately, there's no grade or teacher comments on it but, as I'm sure you will agree, if this masterpiece didn't receive an A, I was robbed (robbed I say). Anyway without further ado, I present to you said "masterpiece."

The Little Snowman That multiplied.

Dedicated to all my readers.

Once there was a snowman who was as small as a mouse. Nobody know how he came to be but, he is believed to be a robot. The only thing is he doesn't have any wires inside him. He is made out of real live snow.

One day three children came upon him. The children's names were Joe, Ellen, and Ken. Joe and Ellen were cousins and Ken was their best friend. The three children found the snowman deep in the woods. The children just about lost it when they saw the walking snowman. But, the snowman talked to them and the three kids became friends with the snowman.

"What's your name?" asked Ken.
"I have no name of my own," said the snowman.
"Then we shall call you Jack," said Ellen.

Suddenly, Jack fell into polluted water. He had a big problem. He couldn't stop drinking the water in the lake. He was growing bigger and bigger. The children heard a loud P O P and then, water & snow filled the kids faces.
"Oh no," said Joe. "Jack has now multiplied into two."

The two Jacks quickly gulped up the water. The children pulled the snowmen away from the water but, then, the two snowmen started to suck the water out of Ellen. Ken and Joe pulled the Jacks off of Ellen. Then the snowmen ran out of the woods. The kids were so shocked that they didn't know what to do.

Finally, after a few minutes, the kids ran after the snowmen but, they couldn't find them. So, they went home. They went outside after being in for about half an hour. When they got out there were at least one hundred little snowmen and they all had sharp teeth. One jumped on Ellen's neck and started to suck the water out of it.

She finally got the thing off of her neck. More snowmen jumped on her and the two boys. The snowmen knocked the children down to the ground.

The creatures jumped off the children and started attacking each other. Within minutes, the snowmen had killed each other.

"They got too mean," said Joe.
"Yae," said Ken.
"Let's go home, said Ellen.

The
End!

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Wyvern Videos Segment 2

Welcome to another segment of... *drum roll* Wyvern Videos! Please, please... try to contain your excitement. It's been awhile but for your viewing pleasure, yours truly has compiled another selection of Wyvern videos for you to browse through. Enjoy [or die].



Hentoko Graveyard by Ssalkand



Wyvern LQ Gauntlet by BlazerV60



Wyvern Ancient Vesimas by BlazerV60



32 RD Levels by ICUTUUU



Wyvern Promotional Video by Ssalkand




Hades by ICUTUUU



Wyvern BlazerV RD by BlazerV60



Mykenubie's Ultimate Downfall by Ssalkand



Wyvern on Lag by TheRealCrytearea



Have a Wyvern video that hasn't been included in any of these segments and you want me to mention it? Leave a comment with a proper link and I'll be sure to keep it in mind for future segments.