Devlog ·
New spells for every class, painted icons, ice you slide on and ships you walk aboard
17 commits that day. Written up from the work itself.
A full day: every class got new spells, the game got painted icons, and ice, zones from the builder and ships with decks came into the game.
Every class has new spells, and wizards have familiars. Each class's spells were compared, level by level, with what a class of its kind should have, and the gaps were filled. 427 spells, 12 creatures and 5 conjured items went into the world, under names of the game's own. Wizards can now call a familiar. A familiar follows you, never fights, and lends you an aura. It has a slot of its own beside your pet, so you can keep both. Some of the new spells lower how much a creature wants to come after you.
Painted icons on everything. 1,639 icons, painted for the game and finished at the classic sizes, are now in it. Spells are drawn by family, so spells of one kind look alike. Races, classes and skills have pictures of their own, and the inventory shows your class's picture, animated. New item icons and new spell gems are drawn up as proposals only and are not in the game yet, so those look as they did.
Ice you slide on. Ground can now be made slippery, from a little to a lot. On it you speed up slowly, keep going when you let go of the keys, turn slowly and are carried down an icy slope. You never go faster than a run. Creatures slide on the flat but still stop where they mean to, mounts slide at their own pace, and if you are levitating you float over it. What you see on your screen and what the server works out stay within a hand's width of each other, so the sliding feels smooth. Game masters lay it with #volume add ice and set how slippery it is with #volume set slip.
Zones built in the builder can now go into the game. A place made in the zone builder can be put into the game whole: its art, its own textures, pools, lava in a colour of its own, ice, lamps, signs, spawn points, its fog distance and colour, and zone lines both ways. Doors that are part of a zone's own model now work as doors: they open, shut themselves, lock and take their key. Anything added later from inside the game is kept when the zone is rebuilt. No new zone has been put in this way yet; this is the road for the ones to come.
Ships you can walk around while they sail. A ship built in the builder now sails as that ship, solid all through. You board by a gangway on her side, climb to the raised deck, go into the cabin or down into the hold while she moves, and you are carried along exactly where you stand. Boats without a model of their own sail on their plain deck as before. A shuttle now lies at her first dock the right way round and leaves bow first, and how many she carries depends on the ship. Game masters can list every boat and who is aboard with #boat.
In the workshop. The zone builder gained a check that looks over a zone for anything that would stop it looking like the classic years, each with a button to put it right. It has a designer for spell and weapon effects, with sixty ready effects and the game's own to adapt, and a guided maker for characters and creatures in ten steps. Each of the fifteen peoples now has a building style of its own, with 341 ready houses, shops, halls, gates and bridges between them. These are tools for making the world, not changes you will see when you log in.