Forums: Developer Talk

EDIT: I’ve had a number of responses to this thread and we have established a pretty well-rounded team. We’re probably set for a while, but if want to respond to this thread, feel free. I might not invite you to join the team right away but we’ll be ready to grow more in the future.

How can you help Aethora grow? If you’re interested in any of the following, please reply to this thread:

Mission Writing
Artwork/Graphics – background, interface, tile, etc
Area Design (examples: layout of a town; layout of roads and paths in a forest)
NPC Template Design (minor math skills)
Item Design (minor math skills)

I’d appreciate it if anyone who is interested has at least played the game for a bit, maybe completed a couple of missions, understands both the game mechanics and the setting somewhat. I wrote this a while ago, please give it a read: The Aethorian Natural World. If you think you have good ideas, but are concerned about your writing skills, please don’t be intimidated. Any contributions can be edited by me for grammar, spelling, arrangement, consistency, etc, as necessary.

Please note that this game does not make any money at the moment. It’s free to play, and the server hosting comes out of my pocket (not to mention the coding and writing is all done on my free time). I cannot offer monetary compensation for any help in these areas. We can, however, negotiate some creative in-game compensation (items, gold, whatever). If you would like to donate artwork or writing and feel the need to retain some rights, we can probably figure that out. In the future, there will be some kind of profit model, but for the time being we really need to create a larger, deeper world and story for Aethora so we can attract more players.

Hopilus is just one continent. We can add as many as we need. The possibilities really are endless. Just by playing the game, reporting bugs, asking questions, and contributing to the wiki, players have helped this game out tremendously. Now I’m just asking for a few people to step up and push Aethora to the next level.

done with the Map mate!

I hope you like it:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/borracho/2434957161/

the style i used is way more cartoony than the one in the game, but if you like it i can work on other stuff so it does not clash with it (map tiles, sprites, the postcard images you use for every zone, etc…)

Damn, you’re good. But that’s just my point of view. We do have someone working on sprites already, and likely he will do map tiles as well… but especially those postcard images… in the style of that map… maybe one for each town, instead of the same for all the towns, even…
Let’s see what Sheck says to your map. To give you some criticism besides that I think it looks awesome: The Tiasanian Flatlands, as well as Xinoloux, could use a slightly different color, as now, it looks a lot like water to me. And although I think the Plateney woods should be larger (considering how long the route to travel through is), I have just seen that it is about the same size as on the present map.

Wow, that looks great! I have some more questions for you, but I’m going to send you an email rather than post them here.

Glad you like it :-)

and yeah, static images is what i do best, so i would love to do all the little postcards for each scene (the format is kinda rough since they are so small but i’ll work around that).

Abound the flatlands… yeah i kinda tought that myself when i finished, but no biggie I can fix it in no time (Except that i got to go to clases now).

And about plateney woods being too small, that will take a little longer since i do my drawings on paper first, and yeah the size should be similar to the actual one because I used transparent paper and copied it from my laptops screen with a magic marker.

goes back to the arena

I’m a Digital Multimedia student & tutor with access to all kinds of graphic design software that I am very knowledgeable in I would definitely be interested in some graphic design from characters to item designs to enemies or even map tiles. I spend my work time on the site anyway might as well contribute something. Let me know what you think and if you want samples or anything

It could be good if you post a link so we can see some of your stuff :-)

hi shek

I just chatted with Kranodor and I heard that you may need some testers. I would volunteer for that post.
I’m also interested in helping anywhere else, but I’m not experienced (yet).

greetings

I would like to help in something like item design. Not sure if I’m experienced, but if it’s minor math skills I should be able to grasp the concept cause I’m good at math. Testing could be a possibility for me also. I love this game, and have been playing for a while now (I have some good stuff that I went through extra time to get…Kranodor knows hehe). Anyway, I’d like for this game to become bigger, so yeah I wanna help.

I know you have lots of people that have volunteered for writing missions and stuff, but I’d do that also.

thanks yotta and prov – I’ll send you guys an email later today

Sounds good =D

Might as well jump aboard this bandwagon as well, and offer to help if there’s something I can assist with. I’m not entirely sure how much time I can devote to it, though. But I fancy myself a bit of a writer (if my log is any indication) and I’m a quick learner on most everything else.

Ya know, in case you need another person.

I’d be willing to help design new abilities, revamp some old useless ones (why spend action points to push someone one square for no damage), possibly design a dungeon in the hope area (there needs to be some sort of top-end encounter there).

I also know of some bugs with monster ai in pathing, and stupidity in monster ai when choosing abilities. Half the opponents will frequently use Anticipatory Stance or some one round defensive ability, while the other half will go attack without defensive abilities. When enemies use one round defensive abilities, you can just have everyone gather action points up to 100 and then trounce them when they inevitably don’t use the defensive ability the next round. The only monster’s that should use defensive abilities are ones in a situation where they have <20% defense and <75% health and all enemies have >40% defense.

For instance, wolves are actually one of the most dangerous mob’s in Aethora because they don’t have any defensive actions to waste their ability points on.

I also think none of the buffs or debuffs are powerful enough, except for the ones that drain action points of movement points. Buffs like Barkskin, and rockskin are fairly useless and a waste of mob’s action points. Other buffs like the mindwind one that gives extra action points per turn are also bad, because they don’t give enough.

Why spend 25 action points casting Fortified Will to get 6 action points back twice in the next two turns, and lose 6 health each time? Its very useless.

So yes, I could review/improve monsters, items, abilities, and create new areas and encounters. I’m not really interested in creating missions, but I could create encounters and tag them with a basic mission idea if someone else would want to write it.

Also, ability descriptions should be a little more precise. Its kinda frustrating at first to not understand what some of the more complicated abilities do, like ones that make the monster lose defense on their next turn. It probably took me about 20-25 hours of play before I started understanding how that works. All some abilities really tell you is a number, and its really hard to figure out how it affects your opponent.

Let me know if you would like to work with me, my name is Peter and my email is ashtaar007@yahoo.com.

I have some time this month to work on something, because I’m only working part-time at the moment.

I’ve written a note to Sheck that you applied here. I’m thinking that you might be biting off a little bit more than you can chew, here, but that’s just me. (Believe me, if it was as simple as ticking checkboxes for skills monsters can or can’t use, we’d already have done it. It’s on the list to enable us to tell monsters which skills to prefer (instead of mostly random selection, as it is now) but that’s a coding job, and so there is only one man to do it – Sheck.)

Yeah, I can’t speak for any longterm commitment or anything but I would have fun helping. Thanks for sending Sheck a note.

Hi Smote -

Thanks for taking the time to provide your perspective. We’re currently in the middle of a total action rebalancing effort. Actions have been added to the game in bunches at a time; and only through hours and hours of gameplay can you really know if an action is under or over-powered. So we’ve recognized that we need to take a step back and examine actions as a whole, fixing them, setting more minimum levels, even removing some actions that are duplicative or useless.

We have some new code on our test server that helps out with AI problems. It’s still not as fancy as Kranodor would like it (where you could tell an NPC to specifically prefer certain actions over others) but we have made a lot of improvements. Also, with the action cleanup, we’ll be fixing or getting rid of useless actions, which will cut down on NPCs wasting action points.

I’ll get you set up with an account on our test server. We really could use the help – long or short term. As an all-volunteer effort, we’re all really strapped for time, so things have been slow going lately. I’ll send you an email this weekend.

Thanks!

Great, sounds good. I’m wondering if I could get a copy of the code as well, or a copy of a section of the code, like the ability/item/monster ability ai/monster movement. This would be so that I could write a draft of new code, (provided I can figure it out- only done limited php and java in the past).

Also, on dungeon design, is there some sort of map editor program? Or do you make dungeons from scratch directly in the code? Same with monster/item/ability design I guess. If there’s an editor program that would work too, in lieu of actually getting the code. But if there’s no editor program it would be difficult for me to help effectively without having a copy of the code.

Thanks,
Peter

Ranger Sheck,

Please send me code or some type of engine so I can design new content and show it to you for approval.

Thanks
Peter