Valorware Development

Hey all,

We’ve been working on some bugfixes and have a new to-do list going on the forum. It would be great if you could check it out and help remind us of things that you would like added to this list (preferably bugs and undesirables for now, but feel free to post wish lists too!) Just look at the pinned threads in the “Development” section.

Fixing the current buglist will be the first step in the next patch series; some weird bugs have already been found and fixed, like the interaction button not working properly for containers and the strange merchant crashing your game if you click on his corpse after he explodes. Tonight’s main inquiry is going to be looking at that terribly strange bug where some walls don’t have any collision or line of sight processing, despite not having a crack on them.

Hopefully these and other fixes/improvements will be coming soon in 1.53! (I think that’s what number we are on anyway?)

Thanks and cheers,

Charles

Hey everyone. Just thought I’d drop this off…. :D

http://welkstore.com/forum/index.php?/topic/339-9th-dawn-brighter-future/#entry2756

and

http://welkstore.com/forum/index.php?/topic/340-post-expansion-todo/#entry2758

Feel free to contribute and remind me of what sorts of things need fixing!

Hey everybody, I know it’s been a while. Just wanted to give you guys an update on what’s going on lately with Valorware and 9th Dawn.

As you may have read on our forums, our team has undergone some changes, which has had some significant impacts on our development plans. The main thing to note is that some of updates we had planned for 9th Dawn probably won’t be happening any time soon simply due to a lack of manpower and time. Unfortunately, this includes the translation patches as well.

9th Dawn is currently going through a QA pipeline for iOS, however, and will probably also be making it over to Blackberry’s RIM, if possible. We have a PC build put together as well which we are about to release for the same price as the mobile game. Though it doesn’t have the random dungeon mode that I mentioned on our Greenlight campaign, it does have the map editor and easily accessible character files, which will allow you to mess around with your game and saves however you please. These files are also in the exact same format as the mobile files, so you could transfer them over to your phone or tablet (if it is rooted).

Looking beyond 9th Dawn, a new small team is being put together for work on Valorware’s next game: Black Frontier.

Black Frontier is going to be a space exploration/trading/dungeon crawling game where you will have your own character, can recruit a crew, explore an infinite (or near infinite) procedurally generated universe, build a fleet, establish trade routes, explore uncharted planets and mine them for resources or delve into ancient ruins with your crew, scavenge ships, asteroids, and colonies (alien or human!) drifting about in space, fight pirates, and much more. The initial target platforms are Android, iOS, and Blackberry, but if it turns out to be successful enough, there will be no problems getting it to the PC.

A good portion of the game will be menu driven, such as management of fleets, ships, crews, trading, mining, and other such activities, while space exploration, dungeon diving, and combat will happen in their own game modes with RPG elements. None of the details are written in stone yet, and development is in its planning and writing-of-core-engine-components stages, so there is not much more we can say for now, but we will be keeping you updated as always with news on this project.

One more little tidbit that you might like to know, however, is that the plan is to first develop the single player version of the game, and then add in multiplayer support based on feedback that will help balance and shape it into a good state for that. If the game is successful, we’ll be able to use the money from sales to purchase a dedicated server or two and allow people to grow their empires to work with or combat other players in a near infinite universe. That is something that will come with time though, maybe a kickstarter campaign for it in the future!

Hopefully, by correcting some of the mistakes that we made with the development of 9th Dawn, we can find solutions to some of the problems 9th Dawn has and fix it up a bit in the future. I’ll be putting together a forum for the new game in the near future to allow for discussions and suggestions for Black Frontier. We would really like to get the community involved in its development process, as we feel that would help to shape it into a truly great game.

Thanks for following us till now, and we hope you stick around and join us for the next leg in our game making journey.

Help us to try and spread our game on Facebook!

http://on.fb.me/11vJcVe

Like and comment on this post if you find the time to help us increase the size of our audience and give us more power to develop our next game engine! The licenses for the software and SDK’s we use get expensive, so any little bit helps!

Thanks!

Charles

In this patch, we’ve reduced the number of monsters at the water bridge in the desert palace (expansion) as some phones were crashing and unable to handle the amount of monsters in that area. Hopefully this will fix those issues.

Additionally, we have added a new command “setsprite”, so players can set their sprite to whatever they wish besides the default one. Simply enter the command “setsprite” and then another window will pop up and ask you for a sprite number. Human sprites are between 1 and 31, and everything after that is a monster.

Our latest patch fixes a lot of zone and quest related bugs. The expansion quests should now be fully completable. We playtested through the entire expansion twice and were able to complete everything 100% with no crashes, unloaded zones, broken dialogues, or broken quests. Everything played very smoothly, so we’re hoping this will prove to be a very stable release version.

If you do happen to encounter any bugs, please let us know!

Patch will be live on Google Play within a couple hours.

There was a small bug with Renn that popped up because we used a really old dialogue file for him somehow. If Renn won’t let you progress in his quest and Euriphos won’t talk to you (Renn just keeps saying the same thing over and over about going to see Euriphos) use this command:

“setquestvalue”
“9”
“2”

This will push you past that point and you can now go see Euriphos.

We’re patching this right now and it should appear soon as an update.

We’ve hopefully fixed 99% of the map-not-loading bugs in this latest patch. Just waiting on google play to make it live. Been a great day, hope you enjoy the expansion. As always, send us an e-mail if you run into any issues!

Some users may have some extra black space on the screen, or the game may be rendering too small. This is due to an attempt to create a better graphics scaling system to better support screens with resolutions that were either too small or too large. It works perfectly for games with small resolutions, but it seems like it’s backfired a bit on Tablets and phones like the GS3. We’ll be working to improve this in the near future. Sorry for the inconvenience in the meantime!

We’re finding that there is a serious sort of bug which is causing map zones to not load sometimes and instead just display a black screen. Sometimes the entities will load though, so you’ll see monsters and npcs. We’re working to fix this currently, hopefully it won’t take too long to figure out!

If this happens to you, try leaving the zone, restarting the game, teleporting away, etc. Sorry about this!

We just realized/discovered that if you play the expansion with an existing character, you won’t have the new NPCs on the main continent. To fix this you’ll need to use the “resetmapdata” command, but that will reset your quest progress, so that isn’t a good thing to do.

If you hang in there for a bit, we’ll have this fixed up soon. You can still travel to the new places and start doing the new quests. The only thing this will affect is your ability to get one of the final dungeon keys, the teleport stone, and fight one of the new bosses. Should be a fairly quick fix that we can get done before you’d be able to reach those areas anyway, so might be best to just wait.

If you WANT to replay the game with the new update though, by all means go ahead and use the resetmapdata command, haha.

At long last, we’ve finally finished the free expansion to 9th Dawn. Below is a list of all of the changes and additions (that we can remember, haha):

Changes:

• Two huge new islands with tons of new npcs, quests, monsters, items, and secrets. One is reached from Kreyshore and the other from Marseilles, but you have to have beaten the first game’s final boss before you can travel there!
• A new “omniclass” that can be unlocked after making progress in the expansion content. The unlocking the omniclass lets you make a character that gets all of the spells and items from any class!
• New abilities for knights and archers!
• A teleport stone that can quickly transport to towns you’ve visited before (you’ll need to revisit them in the expansion patch to unlock them).
• Some water based monsters.
• Torches!
• Smarter “action button” usage. Automatically opens chests and talks to npcs.
• Two new songs added!
• New debug commands (if you run into problems, e-mail us and we’ll give you the commands and what to input to fix stuff, like broken quests and whatnot).
• Added traps! All classes can use traps and there are eight different kinds.
• Spell/ability descriptions were added.
• Added item pickup messages.
• Hopefully fixed the quest corruption bugs.

We’ve found during testing that trying to update the game on a Samasung Galaxy S3 from the Google Play install to the latest version directly using an APK would not allow you to play as it crashes the game at startup, however installing the game fresh let you play the expansion properly. After doing some research, we think this is just because google Play does some weird stuff with installation and that if you update the game through google play, it should be fine. We’ll find out as soon as it goes live anyway.

If you have any problems with the game on your device after this update PLEASE let us know. We already have a support ticket put in with one of our library developers to check up on the GS3 issue, but hopefully that will be non-issue. We are going to patching this expansion frequently over the next week or so, adjusting the difficulty mainly. We’re just glad to at least have it out for you to start enjoying. If there are any broken NPCs or quests, we will fix them asap so just let us know if you encounter them. We’ll be addressing any problems on a daily basis to get things sorted out fast.

Thanks for being an awesome playerbase and supporting us throughout the process. Now that 9th Dawn is fairly well finished (we’re done adding content and features) we can finally begin working on our next game which is going to blow 9th Dawn so high out of the water that we may beat NASA when it comes to being the first to leave the solar system!

Stay tuned for frequent updates and be sure to tell your friends about 9th Dawn. More importantly, however, be sure to watch out for our development log for our new game! We’re going to try and keep a portion of it fairly well community driven if we can!

As promised, we’ve uploaded patch 1.34 today. This includes:

• Fixed Renn not allowing you to progress in his quest.
• Fixed a serious bug which was a major culprit for crashes. Shouldn’t crash very often at all anymore! :D
• Added a new bonus to shields! Based on your shield skill, you have a chance to completely block an attack (currently works for both spells and melee, for now anyway…). Your shield skill will increase whenever you successfully block an attack.
• Lowered cooldown timers back down a bit on potions and food.

The expansion is right around the corner, so be sure to check in!

Many people have reported a nasty bug with Renn’s quest where you can’t proceed past the very first bit when you reach level 10. We’re going to try and get this fixed up sometime tonight and have a patch out by tomorrow. It’s probably a very simple fix, so hopefully we can get it sorted once we figure out what is causing it.

Sorry about the inconvenience!

We’ve made some bug fixes and are making a bunch of changes to the quests/dialogue/maps. Hopefully we can get everything tested out and working properly by Friday. This patch should take care of problems like Rena or Ellerin not following you, NPC dialogue options getting messed up, and things like getting trapped behind gates that relock.

We’re also planning on adding in the NPC that sells you back lost quest items, just in case you lose one, forget to pick one up, or your game crashes and makes it disappear.

We’ve got two big things in the works behind the scenes. The first is our addition of new alphabets to the game. Currently, we have added support for the Cyrillic, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean character sets and they are working nicely. We’ve got some options set up to allow you to switch between them easily, so now we plan on providing localization for several additional languages beyond those that use the Latin alphabet. 

Secondly, the expansion is coming along swimmingly. We will be adding 56 new monsters to the game, which have already been designed and animated. There are going to be some awesome surprises in store for you guys. Hopefully we can get the expansion out in about a month or so, so here’s to hoping! 

We’ll keep you posted with updates as we go, like usual. See you with our next minor patch on Friday! (Hopefully!)