Monsters & Memories - An Old School Indie MMO

[Zukan]

Rolling right into another update, the January update just dropped, and as always I recommend you check it on the site here because there more images and videoes than I will be posting here. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

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Hi all!

We’ve rolled into 2023 with the same steady pace we’ve had throughout 2022. One big difference is that we’ve been able to do it with our friends and family in tow.

As we mentioned last month, we had a goal of getting people from outside of the team onto our new Test Server, so that we could work out any obvious tech challenges while starting to gather feedback on the game.

That goal was accomplished, and we’ve been operating in a hybrid New Development & Live Operations mode ever since.

This means that while we’re continuing to create new features and content, we’re also addressing the bugs and feedback that have been rolling in via our /bug tool and the Discord channels we’ve provided our testers.

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Why are we testing so early?
The bug fixes we make now, priorities we identify from real players, and the feedback we gather all make our foundation stronger and should save us time in the long run. Waiting to gather this info later or at the end of the development cycle makes no sense to us.

Also, since we’re making a MMORPG, our thought is that the sooner we build and test the tools needed to support a live service, the better. And this approach will help us build our live ops “chops” well in advance to going live.

We’ve received a couple hundred bug reports and pieces of feedback, and the team has been steadily chipping away at them.

The changes are too many to list here in text.

If you’re interested in seeing what’s been going on behind the scenes, we’ve provided a peak into that work in the images below:

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Character Art & Concepts

• Iteration on Player Character texture style, technical approach, and pipelines
  - We’ll show some of this here, but expect another big iteration to be shown off next update
  
• Iteration on the Human player mesh
• Various NPC and class related concepts
• Class illustrations for future website revisions and Player’s Manual
• VFX iteration
• Bug fixes in support of playtesting

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Environment Art & Concepts

Night Harbor

• Finished gray box of Sagesyde Library interior.
• Finished gray box of Sagesyde Wizard tower.
• 85-90% completed on Spellbinders Spire block out.
• Started cleaning up navigation from the Main gates to Sagesyde.
  - Redirected street flow
  - Temp signage
• Gray boxed new PoI to draw players attention towards Sagesyde and The Necropolis districts
• Building out of interiors for the Harbor District

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Tomb of the Last Wyrmsbane

• Blocked out new rooms in the Ossuary Antechamber area.
• Finished underdeveloped room in the central area of tomb.
• Full lighting, quality and optimization pass of the zone's tomb section. (Cave section not started.)
• Modeled unique torches for Wyrmsbane.
  - Animation for pulling torch created.
• Spike trap prefab and animations created.
• Various Nav mesh and geo fixes to prevent pathing and navigation exploits found during friends and family testing sessions.
• Created stone decal of the current Wyrmsbane symbol.
• Created a banner material for the current Wyrmsbane symbol.
• Various Nav, Geo, Lighting fixes across various zones.

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UI Art
Ability Icons and Backgrounds concepted and created

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Game Design / QA / Animation / Sound / Tech

• Too many changes to list here.
• Scroll through the Patch Notes in the first section of this update.
• If we continue at this rate, we’ll work on finding a better format for this in the future.

MnM Category Added to Twitch
Monsters & Memories now has its own Category on Twitch. Be sure to give us a follow here via THIS LINK.
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In Closing
As always, thanks again for being here!

And a special thanks for all of the Friends & Family that have been putting in some serious hours playing the game, giving us feedback, and writing up bug reports.

It’s been huge for us!

For everyone else, be sure to join the mailing list if you haven’t already. We’ll make better use of it in 2023.

We’ll see you in the next update.