“You Got Achievement!” Or a little about the online game Lost Magic

    As you may know, Blizzard guys, who are not ashamed to be with any development team, delight their players with fake announcements of innovations every first April. On the last day of the fool, they showed a new feature for their flagship project, World of Warcraft, called peen-o-meter. “Piskomer” (in a free Russian translation) is a slightly phallic universal indicator of player’s coolness, designed to once and for all let online game comrades understand who is in charge.

    The most interesting thing is the analogue of the peen-o-meter, but in WoW itself it has long existed, its name is the number of game achievements of the character. It seems that similar systems existed in some games before, but Blizzard managed to bring achievements to perfection. I myself remember, before joining any serious group, I was always interested in the achievements of future partners, while following the old wise principle: "who has less, he is incapable, and who has more - that nerd."

    It’s now that achievements are shoved even into small crafts on flash, but you must admit that in the old days many games really lacked them. And although in others achievements have nevertheless appeared over time, they, like any system screwed to the side, have not come out ideal. Needless to say, from the very beginning of work on our online game we laid the foundation for the ability to create almost any achievements, without restricting the imagination of game designers in anything!

    Further we will talk about “ambushes” that we were not ready to encounter during the development process, so if games interest you only from the “front” side, welcome to follow the link to look at the project from the inside and get a nice addition to your profile - Habroyuser Achievement. Achievement will be yours immediately after completing the first quest. By the way, the practice of giving unique achievements to readers of worthy network resources for us is not only an occasion to lure people, but also a factor that allows players to find "their" brothers in network interests.



    Lost Magic was conceived as a project “in spite” of social networks and casuals. We wanted to make a classic, rather “hardcore” browser-based RPG, not forgetting to adopt the industry best practices. From the very beginning of the development, the following priorities were identified: high quality visual component and direct participation of the whole team in creating the game world. With such an introduction, the project was doomed to a fantasy setting, but we prudently left a loophole for ourselves and introduced into the legend a connection with modern Earth. This decision made it possible for all members of the team to run wild without being constrained by the “elves” framework. So in the game appeared zombies with chainsaws, electricity and many strange mobs. For example, huge hare-like monsters created under the impression of the notorious Hares of fate. The official name of these little animals is Lucatlogi.



    The content of the game is conditionally divided into 4 “tier” 's (I don’t even know how it is in Russian): the first to fifth levels are held in the “nubat”, then the opportunity opens to hang out in locations for levels 6-10, and so on. In the first taer, we teach players mechanics, give them plenty of fun to play with, and the leitmotif of the entire zone is the fight against the undead, whose quest chain effortlessly throws up the necessary amount of experience and ends with the first dungeon in the game.

    The creation of this “instance” was the greatest challenge for us during the entire development of the project: we wanted five third-level players to pass part of the crypt with some dexterity, and a total clearing of the location would require a group of level 5 fighters. After the dungeon appeared on the game server, we had a lot of surprises: the “triples” didn’t want to go there, but the “fours” quickly adapted to “abuse” game mechanics and farm all available bosses in pairs. A couple of days later, fifth levels dressed up in the same crypt appeared, which not only learned to gut the local solo content, but also mastered the non-stop farm dungeon, despite a four-hour entry delay. This gave rise to several types of commodity-money relations in the game that we did not foresee: a “locomotive” in the dungeon,



    Upon entering the dungeon, members of the group are assigned a unique ID and a four-hour timer is activated. But those wishing to farm quickly came up with a simple and ingenious plan: a couple of third-level players get an ID, and about an hour before the end of the “lock” they sell it to high-level, who quickly collects trophies from poor bosses and turns out to be “clean” again. Thus, the most persistent “fives” received uniforms almost entirely in just a day. I can’t say that the first experience came out lumpy, but, of course, we will take into account a lot in the work on new content that is beginning!

    Not without difficulties of a technical nature. Initially, it was clear to us that in exchanges, hits should be timeouts, i.e. the player should not suffer if the opponent’s Internet has fallen off, or he decided to watch a new movie from chagrin, without bothering to finish the battle. The combat module was sharpened for this, so all the work came down to a little refinement (removal of user data in a static method) and a script controlled with supervise.

    Everything went fine until the game administrator decided to use an old database record to establish a new monster. For timely exchanges, everything worked like a clock, but with a timeout there was a hitch - since the script was not restarted, it used data on drop-down items a week ago. Particularly distracted players became happy owners of various items that fell purely for test purposes. The golden quote of that day: "I go into battle and go on gluing wallpaper."

    It was after this that the script acquired the verification of the svn version of the code, and died in the event of a mismatch, and supervise lifted it back and reported it to the control via email.

    Recently, the iron rule “it’s better to make it difficult first and then simplify”, which has become an iron rule for us, was also worth the nerves. In one recent update, which we do on average once a week, things started to wear out in battle. And although the most sensible players could easily calculate that for a complete breakdown at least 500 fights would be required in any way, after this change in the game locations a mass panic and calls for illegal actions against developers began. The same story came out with a drop in the drop of “healing” bottles from simple mobs. Now we act with caution and try to protect the psyche of the players. By the way, the next update is scheduled to give an opportunity to repair things - there is no doubt, there will be glee and celebration on the streets of our virtual world!

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