At Last: A New Player Tutorial

This week saw the inclusion of a nee player tutorial to the game client.  The tutorial consists of 8 pages designed to clarify the objective of the game, as well as some specific actions to try.  The tutorial is displayed whenever a player is created or the client is upgraded, but it can be disabled from the options menu.


I developed three new magical items for the game: Drums of Panic, Boots of Dancing, Scroll of Dispel Magic.  I will leave it to your imagination to determine which one is cursed.  The items will be available next age.


I also re-did the journal structure.  Before, it saved the entire message i.e. "I began my reign on Normandy in the year 1000."  Now, it just saves the message number and the parameters i.e. "4170_Normandy_1000".  This will cut down on the amount of network traffic between client and server.  I also increased the number of message IDs which could be sent in one go to a client.


Some game balancing changes were also made, notably to the mage spell wish.  Under the old system, there was a 20% chance a mage could wish for 100 towers.  These could then be sold for 3,750,000 gold.  With mages having the most movement points and receiving components each HK I thought this was overpowered.  Additionally, I discovered an error in the chance of success calculation (meant to increase the odds as you decreased the amount) where you could find a "sweet spot" and wishes would always succeed.  Clearly this wasn't what I intended with wish (ask any DM).


Finally, in the game I purchased a city and noticed that the minimum price could be 1 gold.  This allowed me to open up markets for my class and buy troops, essentially for free (the game fills the market for your each HK).  To prevent this I added minimum prices to the markets.  I also continued tweaking the messages with over 50 messages adjusted.