Dev Blog: Nightmare Zone
& Content Poll 6

Poll Finished – Vote succeeds!

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On Wednesday 12th June we closed Content Poll #5, in which we'd offered to create a new minigame for you to re-visit a selection of old quest bosses. With the vote passing the 75% threshold, we got straight on with the game's development, now using your chosen title of Nightmare Zone.

In the beginning there was... a cow!?

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It's always exciting starting a new project. There's a new development stream to be branched, various tools to be updated to point at it, an internal project codename to be chosen ("nzone"), and other administrative things to sort out. Mod Ash began with the fun bit: creating the minigame host, Dominic Onion himself, mostly using graphics from Lunar Isle characters.

A lot of people had expressed interest in being able to share the Rumble dreams with friends, to stand together against hordes of boss monsters, so we needed a rough sort of party recruitment system. Our ability to modify the map is very limited, but we've been able to spawn a simple enclosure area that will act as the lobby area. When you've set up your Rumble dream, you can enter this enclosure and invite other players there to join your party. Once the party is assembled, the leader can start the game on behalf of the group. You'll be able to attempt a Rumble dream in groups of up to 5 players.

Although Nightmare Zone has no combat level requirement (unlike the Dominion Tower in the other RuneScape) we're expecting players to have done at least five of the quests that unlock these boss monsters, otherwise their Endurance and Rumble dreams would be quite tedious. If you're forming a Rumble party with other players, we'll be spawning only monsters that have been unlocked by every single player in the party; again, we'll need the whole party to have done at least five of the quests. The minigame is intended to favour people who've done lots of quests.

Once you'd chosen Yanille as the site for the minigame, we chose a plot of empty land that's very near the bank, and programmed the lobby enclosure to spawn itself there. On arrival, we then found that this plot of land is the home of a wandering cow. Without a map editor, it's really quite hard to get rid of the cow. So we're leaving the cow alone, wandering around the lobby area. While you're waiting, you get a cow. We're thinking of it as Dominic's favourite cow. Enjoy the cow. Okay, mooving on...

32 is the magic number

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While Mod Ash was laying out the scenery, Mod Nexus set about narrowing down the number of quests from our bigger list to a slightly smaller list, trimming out bosses that were unwieldy or just plain boring (such as Solus Dellagar). Having cut the number of quests down to 32 (which is a nicer number to deal with in code) we were left with a list of 43 memorable and interesting bosses from Count Draynor in Vampire Slayer to The Inadequacy in Dream Mentor. This represents a wide range of combat levels from 34 up to just over 10 times that at a whopping 343!

The remaining bosses are taken from the following quests:

• Vampire Slayer
  
• What Lies Below
  
• Witch's House
  
• Mountain Daughter
  
• Lunar Diplomacy
  
• Dragon Slayer
  
• Roving Elves
  
• One Small Favour
  
• Shilo Village
  
• Haunted Mine
  
• In Search of the Myreque
  
• Horror from the Deep
  
• Shadow of the Storm
  
• Lost City
  
• Troll Stronghold
  
• Fairy Tale Pt 1
  
• Tree Gnome Village
  
• Troll Romance
  
• Holy Grail
  
• Fremennik Isles
  
• Fight Arena
  
• Grim Tales
  
• Recipe for Disaster
  
• Family Crest
  
• Grand Tree
  
• My Arm's Big Adventure
  
• Desert Treasure
  
• Legends Quest
  
• The Great Brain Robbery
  
• Contact
  
• Monkey Madness
  
• Dream Mentor

Mod Nexus made copies of each monster under a new name, so there wouldn’t be any danger of the minigame monsters triggering code from the original quests. In a worst-case scenario, we could have introduced a bug where your quest progress would go backwards! The new monster copies were then tidied up and adjusted so they’d work in our minigame, including sorting out their combat abilities so they use the same special attacks and tactics that you’d have met during the original quest. For example, Elvarg will try to turn you into toast, whilst Flambeed unequips your weapons, the Giant Roc blasts you across the map, and other monsters reduce your stats and so on. This should make for some varied fights given the range of abilities we’ve given bosses throughout RuneScape in the past, and it should certainly keep you on your toes - especially if you get piled by several of them at once!

K-B-D Lair, huh! What is it good for? Well actually...

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After Ash had created a lobby area it was time to sort out the instance and map area you’d be fighting in. We'd said from the beginning that it would be a copy of the King Black Dragon's cave. In the absence of a map editor to create new areas, we needed to copy an existing area that's already flagged for multiway combat, preferably with straight edges so as to minimise safe-spots. The KBD lair ticks all the boxes.

We haven't made many changes to the scenery at all, although we've replaced the exit lever with something a bit more suited to the theme of a Nightmare Zone. The chosen graphic is a potion vial from Dream Mentor, since this minigame has a very similar theme.

Practice Mode

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Next up, Practice mode! Firstly this mode is the simplest of the three we’d planned to offer in theory, but it also gave us an easy way to test that the core code was working properly. Everything from choosing a dream in the lobby area, putting a player in the minigame instance and adding an NPC for you to fight it could quickly be checked with the Practice mode. We checked that you’d only be able to choose certain bosses depending on which quests you’d done and that the NPC fought you in the correct way. Whilst this isn’t exactly a full blown QA test, it’s enough so we can easily see if it’s doing what we would expect, so that we don’t find the problems later when they’re more difficult to deal with or fix.

Endurance and Rumble Modes

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Once Practice mode was working we set about prototyping the Endurance and Rumble dreams.

Endurance dreams are quite simple. Whenever you kill a boss the game looks at which quests you've done, and spawns the next one in the list until either you die or you reach the end.

In a Rumble dream, whenever you kill a boss, the game looks at the whole party to see which quests they've all done, and spawns a random boss from the list. You might get an easy series of King Roalds to splat (although that's not so rewarding) or you might find yourselves challenged by a pair of Inadequacies.

Points mean... rewards

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When you kill a boss in an Endurance or Rumble dream, you earn points calculated off the monster's combat level, taking into account the number of bosses that you'd unlocked. So if you've only unlocked a handful of bosses, you won't earn nearly as many points as a player who's fighting against the whole panoply. In a multiplayer Rumble dream, the majority of the points will be awarded to the player who did most of the work killing the creature, with the rest distributed around the team.

For now, the rewards are the consumable items listed in the last dev blog. We'll be happy to offer additional rewards as expansion updates, in future polls, so please keep on posting your suggestions.


Once you've earned some points, you'll be able to search the chest next to the lobby enclosure to see the rewards menu, and exchange your points for these rewards. As we've often had to explain, we don't have an interface editor tool that works on 2007-format interfaces. RuneScape's file formats have changed gradually over the intervening years, so the 2013 dev tools don't work for Old School RuneScape. This makes it very hard for us to edit existing screens, or to create anything new. Yet a minigame, especially one that offers rewards or lists of boss monsters, definitely needs some sort of menu interface - it'd be extremely frustrating if we had to cram all the options into the chatbox area, like chat options do, forcing you to click through pages and pages of menus to find the reward you want to buy!

Fortunately, in 2006, the engine team did a big update to the game engine's support for interfaces, creating commands that could modify certain interfaces. It's a bit like using Javascript to make a webpage update itself dynamically on the user's screen. We've got those commands, in their original rudimentary form, in Old School RuneScape, and we realised that we could use them to create menus, if only we could find a base interface with the right sort of layout as the foundation for our menu screen.

We spent an evening trawling through the archives to find something that matched the requirements. It needed to have 3 layers: one as the canvas on which everything else would be drawn, one to contain the menu's content, and one to be used for a scrollbar. These needed to have been saved out with unique names, otherwise we couldn't tell the commands to modify them. The interface would also need to be free of other clutter. Eventually we came across something that ticked all the boxes. In early 2007, Mod Nancy had been implementing a generic parchment scroll interface for displaying miscellaneous text. Her unfinished version was sitting in the archive of half-written stuff from August 2007. It wasn't ideal; there was a lot of other clutter, but after a few hours of tweaking we were able to get its layers into the right positions, so we could dynamically add an appropriate background, title and menu content.

This may sound like a lot of faff to achieve a basic menu that doesn't even look very good. Well, that's how we go about trying to create you a minigame with a rewards menu interface despite the lack of an interface editor!

Hard Mode

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Once the 3 main game modes were up and running with the NPCs fighting properly, it was time to copy the NPCs once again and add the “hard” mode option to the game modes. We're still working on that; the plan is that it will behave exactly like the ‘normal’ mode, but will spawn much more fearsome versions of the existing bosses.

For many of the bosses, we'll be scaling their combat stats up to make them tougher and nastier. We'll also be reviewing their combat tactics.

So what’s left?

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• Well, we need to increase the actual combat stats of the hard NPCs. At the moment they’re just the same levels but have “(hard)” in their names.
  
• We need to finalise and balance the points earned from the minigame in the different modes, and also the costs of the rewards you can buy.
  
• We need to finish off the general dialog, chat and informative messages so you can tell what’s going on, especially in a multiplayer game.
  
• For the music, we’ll pick appropriate tracks from the quests where you encountered the bosses in the first place. At present, we're limited to using tracks that already exist in Old School RuneScape since we don't have the compilers required to integrate additional music.
  
• We’ll then hand it over to QA once we’re happy with everything. They’ll give it a proper going over, from the single player mode to the multiplayer modes on normal and hard, to ensure it’s working as intended.

While you're waiting...

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Although we're focusing on finishing the Nightmare Zone, we're still receiving your requests for other game updates. We've identified some simple jobs that we can do without holding up the Nightmare Zone work, and will be offering them in Content Poll #6, starting later this week.

• Players will be able to pay an in-game character to switch their respawn point to Edgeville.
  
• A merchant, standing near the respawn points, will offer to sell you various untradeable items that are commonly lost on death, saving you from having to visit obscure characters to obtain replacements.
  
• The multicannon will be set up and reloaded with a single left-click, instead of requiring you to use items on it repeatedly. Its decay warning message will be made more visible.
  
• Castle Wars - Altars will be added to the respawn rooms. They will recharge your prayer more slowly than normal altars.
  
• Castle Wars - Barricades will have 'Burn' and 'Extinguish' options to help you set them on fire and put them out more conveniently.
  
• Castle Wars - If you present Lanthus with a device from Ava, he will have its ammo-saving effect applied to the capes you wear in that minigame.

None of these features, nor the Nightmare Zone itself, will cause any additional delays for the long-awaited routefinding change. That's a job for the game engine team. They're still snowed under with many other urgent tasks, and the routefinding update isn't the kind of thing they can quietly slip in around their packed schedule. Every feature on the Content Poll #6 list, just like the Nightmare Zone, has been designed such that we can implement it without sending further work to that team.

That’s all from us for now. We’ll definitely keep you informed over the next few weeks as we finish off the remaining work on Nightmare Zone. In the mean time, we suggest you get questing, kill those quest bosses and train your combat so you’re ready for the challenges that await.

Mods Ash and Nexus