Nightmare Zone progress
It's been a few weeks since we last wrote you a Nightmare Zone blog. Since then, we've made quite a lot of progress. In fact we're not far off the point where we ship it to Mod Reach for testing, and let him try to break it. QA testers love breaking things, and Reach is an expert. Anyway, let's look at some of the features we've added since the last blog...
Hard Mode
In the last blog, we wrote that we'd created monster definitions for the Hard Mode bosses, but they were exactly the same as the Normal Mode bosses except with "(hard)" in their names.
Since then, we've actually given them increased stats to ensure they're up for the challenge. We went through a few rounds of feedback followed by a few rounds in the ring in their hard versions to ensure they're suitable and it should make for some very entertaining fights. By fights we mean deaths and plenty of them!
This has also allowed us to do some more work with the reward system and points for killing the various bosses. It didn't seem right that you could just fight, say, Count Draynor repeatedly. We want to reward you for getting further through the Endurance and Rumble dreams. We've therefore skewed the points toward the higher end, increasing as you progress further. We've also ensured that if you've only done a handful of the applicable quests you can still get some rewards, although to get the best rewards you'll want to have done all the quests we mentioned, and survive to the end of the Endurance dreams. In Rumble mode it's slightly different, but the harder the creature the more points you'll get.
Tools for the job
Some of the bosses have special requirements governing how they may be fought. For example, the Dagannoth Mother is vulnerable to only one kind of damage at a time, the Tanglefoot can be damaged only with secateurs, Elvarg will toast your face if you haven't got a suitable shield, and Chronozon requires you to cast the four blast spells.
We didn't want to force players to carry lots of specialist equipment into the Nightmare Zone with them. To get around it, the game will supply critical items that you need for the fight. For example, it'll supply anti-dragon shields if you're due to meet Elvarg, secateurs if you're due to meet the Tanglefoot, a suitable pickaxe if you're due to meet the Slagilith, some death runes and elemental runes if you're due to meet Chronozon, etc. Items supplied by the Nightmare Zone will not work outside it.
Some quest bosses can be fought in any way you please, but require you to have specific items in your inventory when you kill them. Examples include Agrith-Naar, Count Draynor and the Black Knight Titan. We've deliberately removed the item requirements from the Nightmare Zone versions of these bosses; you'll still have to do all the hard work fighting them as usual, but we won't force you to load up your inventory with hammers, stakes, Excalibur and Silverlight just to deal the final blows.
When you cast a spell, if you're using runes supplied by the game, you will not receive Magic XP for the spellcasting, but you will still receive Magic XP for the damage dealt by the spell. You're welcome to bring your own supply of runes instead if you'd prefer to receive the normal amounts of Magic XP.
A drink to ensure sweeter dreams?
Along with the rewards from Dominic Onion's shop, we promised to create new potions that can be used to boost your stats, but only inside this minigame.
In 2007 the the combat triangle and balancing (or lack of) was somewhat biased towards melee, not just in terms of equipment available and the weaknesses of creatures throughout the game, it went beyond that, even affecting the potions. To even this up a bit, within Nightmare Zone we have decided to add the equivalent of the super range and super magic potions, as melee already have the super attack and strength equivalent. We also like the overload mechanic so we've chosen to include a version of this. It will boost the 5 main combat stats to the super potion equivalent, and will last for 5 minutes. Lastly, having tried the Rumble option including its hard mode, we'll be adding an new type of potion never seen in RuneScape before, an absorption potion. This will absorb damage taken, of any type, up to a certain amount. This'll certainly be useful in situations when you've got several bosses attacking you with melee, range and magic at the same time!
These new potions will be available to purchase with your reward points from Dominic. They will be untradeable and can only be used within a dream. Any remaining effects from these potions when leaving the dream will be removed, to prevent you benefitting in the rest of the game world.
Dominic has a row of barrels where he'll store up to 255 doses of each potion you've purchased when you're not playing the minigame, so you don't need to use up bank space storing them. You'll be able to withdraw as many doses as you like from the barrels before you begin, and when you're done, simply pour the unused doses back into the barrel for next time!
Somewhere to put your money
We did a little play-testing at the end of June, and identified a few usability issues. One of them was about money. Dominic will be charging an entry fee for his Endurance and Rumble dreams, but we don't want you to have to sacrifice an inventory slot to hold the cash.
Furthermore, if you're sharing a Rumble dream with other players, it would be really awkward if you had to collect their share of the entry fee off them, then pass it on to Dominic, then wait while everyone sorts out their inventory, then try and find each other again. Inevitably, someone would wind up losing their money unfairly.
Instead, we've created Dominic's coffer. It's a bit like a one-slot bank that only holds coins; you can deposit money into the coffer, then withdraw it again later. When you enter a dream, Dominic deducts the fee from the coffer. Once you've put money into the coffer, you can purchase your own dreams or join other people's dreams without having to carry money around.
For example, when you're inviting other players to join your Rumble dreams, they won't need to hand you any money at all. Their share of the entry fee will automatically be deducted from their coffer when they enter the dream. This means you don't have to worry about giving people their money back if you kick them out of your Rumble party before the dream begins.
Naturally the coffer will have Bank PIN protection; players won't be able to withdraw money unless they've entered their PIN during that login session. Nor will they be able to spend the money on dreams.
Head-up displays
We realised that when you're forming a party for a Rumble dream it'd be helpful to have a head-up display on your screen showing who's been recruited. The display can also be clicked to 'Kick' players from your party.
In the last blog, we talked at length about how we'd created menu interfaces by finding a half-written parchment scroll and using run-time commands to turn it into a reusable generic menu. In fact we've launched something like that already, for Perdu's shop of lost reward items. Returning to the Nightmare Zone, we've had to do something similar to create head-up displays. On this occasion, we cannibalised the interface that provides the head-up display in the TzHaar Fight Pit, and we wrote a fiddly bit of code to generate a table showing the names of your party members.
The lobby's head-up display will also show how much money you've got stored in Dominic's coffer, once you've entered your PIN to unlock the coffer.
A similar head-up display has been created for use inside the minigame's arena itself, showing how many points you've got, and heralding the appearance of each boss in Endurance dreams.
Have you tried logging out and in again?
A few weeks ago, players voted for us to update the TzHaar Fight Cave's log-out feature so that it would save your progress automatically if you disconnected in the middle of a wave. An Endurance dream is a bit like the Fight Cave, so we thought we should do something similar here too.
In an Endurance dream, the game now remembers each boss you've defeated. If you log out or disconnect, you'll automatically continue your Endurance dream when you log back in, starting with the next boss on your list. The game gives you a few seconds between bosses in an Endurance dream, so you have time to log out between fights.
Spectators
We always promised that players would be able to observe each others' Endurance or Rumble dreams. For this, we've added a Spectator vial to the lobby enclosure near Dominic. When you drink from this vial, you will be asked whose dream you'd like to observe. If that player's in an Endurance or Rumble dream - either as a fighter or a spectator - you'll be taken to that arena to watch the action from the edge.
If you die in a multiplayer Rumble dream, you'll automatically be respawned as a spectator so you can watch your remaining colleagues struggle on without you.
Music
As we said in the last blog, Nightmare Zone's music will be chosen to suit the quests where you encountered the boss in the first place. This is fine for most of the bosses; from 2004 onwards, RuneScape's Audio team (Mod Ian and, later, Mod Bond) would usually write an appropriately lively soundtrack for every quest boss fight. Examples include Showdown, Beetlejuice and Inadequacy. We've identified these tracks and programmed Nightmare Zone to use them.
A few bosses don't have their own tracks. For example, Chronozon and the Witch's Experiment play the music of the locality where they appear: that's Forever and Splendour respectively. In cases where the ambient music is a bit too pretty for a battle arena, Nightmare Zone will choose something more suitable from a list of tracks you've unlocked.
While writing this, we ran into a bug with the music looping option. If the track changes in the 5 second gap between loops, you can end up with a song playing for a few seconds, then fading out and starting over and over again. It's a relatively obscure race condition, but an Endurance dream would have triggered it every time. So we've prepared a fix for that bug as part of the Nightmare Zone project.
What's left??
So what more have we got to do?
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Rewards. It's a fiddly business setting up rewards for a minigame. We'll be sitting down with Mod Reach and some other colleagues to see how long it takes to play through an Endurance fight, or how long we can survive in a Rumble fight, from which we can work out how generous to make the rewards.
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Aesthetics. The head-up displays and menus are currently very plain, as you can see. We'll have to trawl through the repository to see what graphics are available that might improve things.
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Potions. The majority of potions are nearly ready but the new potion overload will require a bit more work.
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More play-testing. We'll be spending time just trying to play with the minigame to see what usability issues we can fix for launch. Sadly we don't have the servers set up for running a beta version of OldSchool RS, so we're not going to be able to invite you to do play-testing alongside us. However, once the game's out, we'll be looking out for your feedback on how to improve the minigame in future updates; you'll definitely get your opportunity to request changes.
- More rewards. We offered some suggestions in a previous poll; while none of them got 75% support, there was clearly a lot of interest in getting something new from the minigame. So in future polls we'll be offering different reward ideas for expanding the minigame after its launch, and maybe we'll find something that 75% of the community will support.
We'll keep you informed of our progress, and let you know when we've got a clear idea of a likely release date.
Mods Ash & Nexus
19-Jul-2013 13:34:52
