FW Dev-Log

Thursday, April 20, 2006

Offical Dev Log #1


Crafting: (The Best of both worlds)

The FreeWorld: Apocalypse Portal’s crafting system will be friendly toward hardcore and casual crafters alike. We understand that true crafters need to build things from scratch and we also understand the needs of players that only have a few hours to play here and there. Below I will describe how we plan to deal with both of these issues and more.

1) HARDCORE CRAFTING: I know all of you hardcore crafters out there hate it when a crafting system is as simple as buying a sword blade and then hooking it to a hilt. In FreeWorld: Apocalypse Portal you will be able to build things from the ground up. Lets go over a task as an example. Hmm… lets see… Which task… making beer, yeah that’s a good one.

Steps to making beer:
1)First the crafter will need to have a farming skill, they use there farming skill to grow hops and barley.
2)Then after you have grown hops and barley you will need to mill the hops and barley to prepare it to be used in the beer making process.
3)Then you will need a glass blowing skill to make bottles for the beer
4)First you will need to collect sand to melt down into glass
5)Then when you have the glass you blow it into beer bottles
6)Now you will need to have a brewing skill
7)Combine your milled hops and barley with water and a few other ingredients
8)Then after the mix ferments you pour it into the bottles and you have beer
9)Sell beer to players that use “drunken brawl” skill

All of the crafting will be this complex. This was only the simple task of making a bottle of beer. How many steps do you think it would take to make a sword?

2) CASUAL CRAFTERS: now to some of you the above process may seem a little to extreme just to make a few beers. Well, FreeWorld: Apocalypse Portal will be set up for the casual crafter as well. The steps may go like this:

1)Buy milled barley from NPC
2)Buy beer bottles from NPC
3)Buy other ingredients needed
4)Use brewing skill to combine ingredients and bottle after fermented

So, if it were so simple why would anyone want to craft it from scratch? Well, NPC will charge a premium from their goods, so a bottle of beer would be a lot cheaper if you made it from scratch. You can also combine the two methods above to make the process cheaper but go faster.

3) Will crafted items be better then basic NPC items? YES!
We do not feel people should take there time making something thats not going to be better then the stuff you can just buy off the streets. Crafted items are not the best in the game, but they will be better then anything you can get from a vendor.

The way it is balanced is like this
1)Basic NPC merchant items are at the bottom
2)Then Crafted items are better then them
3)Then Rare/Quest only items will be better then crafted items

This will make it worth crafters while to make and sell their goods.

I could go on and on about crafting, but I think ill leave it at that for today. Hope you enjoyed the dev. Log and always KEEP FREEWORLDING!!

Monday, April 03, 2006

The Sound of Music #1

Art Spotlight: Previews of inside art info Our composer Wilbert Roget II (which we can proudly call our award winning composer after this last Gang awards at the Game Developers Conference) is hard at work to bring you new music for the next version of the game. Unlike the last version of the game which had no combat music this new version will be full of it! One thing i always hated about combat music in games is its the same old track over and over, but not in freeworld. There will be different tracks for all the different walks of life in the game. I decided to post a few samples for you to listen to. These are all in .ogg format so they may not play on many of your media players, but they are support by WinAmp and Infranview which are free to download (just search google).

Here are 2 selections: (for best listening select the loop feature on your media player)

Small Creatures: Click Here

Gigantic Monsters: Click Here

More will come soon!

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Crafting Crazy #2

Art Spotlight: Previews of inside art info
In this second installment of "Crafting Crazy" I bring you 4 new crafting location model renders in their raw none textured form. These new renders also include the player model rendered in the scene to show scale based on the size of the player. There are many more crafting models to come so make sure to visit and see them.

Here they are:

Brewing: Click Here

Blacksmith: Click Here

Alchemy: Click Here

Tailor: Click Here

New Blog Features & Make Over

Random Thoughts: Things that are not about the gameI added "Fan Sites and forums" and "Supporting News Sites" sections to the blog side bar. This is to show some love to the sites that have given so much to us. If you have a site that supports freeworld news and would like your site link added please send a link request email to Draconus AT freeworldonline DOT com. I also added a poll to the side bar to see what people like the most in a MMORPG. You can vote up to one time a day and I'm really interested in seeing the results. If you vote "other" then feel free to leave me a comment and let me know whats on your mind. I'll add other polls in the future.
***EDIT***
After adding the few new features i kind of went crazy and re-did the layout. I think it looks much nicer now :)

ENJOY!

Friday, March 31, 2006

Crafting Crazy #1

Art Spotlight: Previews of inside art info
Even though our modeler Mark Ashton (Aka meyitzo) says he does not really care for crafting in any games, he is sure a craftsmen when it comes to modeling. In the new version of the game crafting will play a major role and its Mark's task to bring the crafting locations to life in the form of models.

I thought you guys would like to see a preview of these locations in there raw model forms before they get textured up.

Spell Crafting: Click Here

Leather Crafting: Click Here

Jewlery Crafting: Click Here

Fletching: Click Here