ALfheim Online Development

Hey guys, I’ve updated this post (3/28/2015) with the “Alpha” section of the game! I put the rest of the old post in a spoiler at the bottom.

The objective:
The objective of the game is similar to most other MMORPGs. Beat the dungeons, level up, find/purchase new equipment, join guilds and battle other users.

Maps:
Currently the game has 3 maps (4 including login screen).
The spawning area for Spriggans and Sylphs is called Swilvane. This is a large map with shops and a huge open field filled with lions to train on.

The second map is Gadan, which is where Salamanders spawn. This has a similar design to Swilvane in the sense that the map is filled with beginner mobs (Lizards) and has a town at the center.

The third map is a dungeon map. This map has flying disabled and your goal is to get to the end of the map to beat the boss which drops chests.

Chest System:

Boss mobs drop chests. There are two kinds of chests: Regular and Legendary. Here is the process that happens when you kill a boss.
[ul]
[li]Boss determines if it will drop a chests/chests (multiple players)[/li]
[li]If yes, boss chooses a chest type for each player that killed it[/li]
[li]Boss chooses a drop for each chest from its pool of drops[/li]
[li]Chest is spawned[/li]
[/ul]
With a regular chest, you simply open the chest and it will have a small chance of giving the item inside. This is usually about 15%. With a legendary chest, you can buy a key for 10R$ that opens a chest and guarantees a drop, or purchase the Infinity Key gamepass that lets you open unlimited chests. The infinity key costs 45x the price of a normal key. It’s worth it in the long run however the single keys are good for users who do not have lots of R$, or are simply trying out the game without investing too much money.

Guild System:
The guild system lets you pay 300R$ to make a guild. You enter a name and an image for the guild. You can then invite or exile players in your server into/out of your guild. Guilds are great for doing dungeons because large guilds tend to know who they’re allies with. Your guild logo appears beside your name in chat, and above your head.

Spells:
There are currently 3 spells ingame. I won’t take pictures right now, but this is what they are:
[ul]
[li]Fireball. Fires a fireball that does splash damage when it hits something.[/li]
[li]Wind Blades: Fires 3 wind blades with 0.3 second intervals between each blade, allowing you to readjust your aim.[/li]
[li]Illusiatory Pulse: Fires a pulse that deals damage. This spell has a random casting time between 1s to 2.5s which makes it hard for opponents to predict when you will shoot.[/li]
[/ul]

Anyhow that’s all for now! Check out the game, it’s live until Sunday March 29th here:

Pre Alpha Development Log

[spoiler]Menu/UI

The menu of the game consists of a button bar, and health/mana bar. The healthbar was based off of the healthbar from the anime.
Here’s the button bar. This comes out of the left side of the screen when M is pressed.

Here’s my edition of the healthbar, as well as what it looks like in the show.

All together, the UI looks like this (with menu open). I also plan to disable the backpack and ROBLOX healthbar.

When you (or another player, or a mob) run out of health, you fade purple and then explode into purple triangles that fade away and float into the sky. Originally, these were blue to keep true to the anime. However after doing aerial combat with my friends, we noticed that this was hard to see overlaying a blue sky. The purple still fits the theme but allows you to see the effect (which I put blood, sweat and tears into) better against a blue sky.

More UI examples are shown in the categories below, that are categorized based on their purpose.

Skills

Skills in ALfheim work by assigning a hotkey to the skill via the skills menu. Once you’ve assigned a hotkey to a skill, you may press that key at any time(walking or flying) to cast the spell (assuming you have enough mana).
Here’s an example of setting a hotkey.

After setting the key E to fireball, I pressed E. A spinning circle animation plays around me for 2s, after which this circle expands and fades, as the spell takes effect. In this instance, a fireball is created and sent flying where my mouse aims. After the fireball hits something, it explodes and deals proximity damage.

The fireball spell relies on dealing damage via explosion. The ball itself does no damage. The fireball can be hit by other magic spells in order to cancel out the spell. Two fireballs hitting eachother will result in an explosion in midair.

Flying

In ALfheim you can fly whenever you are not in a designated dungeon zone. To fly, you simply double tap.

Each class has a different style of wings. The wings consume mana until you run out, at which point they fade away and drop. You use WASD to fly around and aim with the camera. When in midair, you can still use your sword and skills. When casting a skill in midair, your character will face the direction of your mouse. This allows your opponent to predict what you’re trying to do.

The wings are rendered locally using RenderStepped to achieve 60FPS. They have matrices representing animations which I created a player to animate. When you dive, your speed increases which results in your wings folding back and creates a very cool effect.

Mobs

Animations:
Mobs in the game are animated using the ROBLOX Animation Editor which as you may know, I’m a huge fan and supporter of. Mobs will play an idle animation until you get into their Aggro range (varies per mob) at which point a running animation will play. If they are within attack range of you, a damage animation will play. This animation only takes over necessary joints in order to not obstruct the running animation. Basically, both play at once. Going to have footage of this soon hopefully!

Here’s the lion sitting in its idle state.

Final Notes:
I’ll try to update this post as the game is made. We have a map almost done (made by Kythor, which looks ridiculous, detailed 4K x 4K map) and I’ll definitely add video and images of when fully complete. This game has been in development for 3 weeks.

Facts:
-All magic is rendered locally using RemoteEvents
-The game uses FilteringEnabled
-Each territory will be a separate place. Flying over a border will teleport you to the next place.
-The menu expands as you open more and more submenus. The menu is set up to detect if it runs off your screen, and moves itself over if this happens to fit smaller screens.[/spoiler]

Thanks for reading!

1 Like

That is one of the most industry standard games I’ve seen so far on ROBLOX :stuck_out_tongue:

Looks excellent so far. :open_mouth:

Looks great!
There’s one thing though that I really hope will be improved. Please go beyond the simple AI with no animations whatsoever that just charges at you. :X The reason I play no RPG’s on Roblox is simply because I haven’t seen a single game with monsters which are engaging.

[quote] Looks great!
There’s one thing though that I really hope will be improved. Please go beyond the simple AI with no animations whatsoever that just charges at you. :X The reason I play no RPG’s on Roblox is simply because I haven’t seen a single game with monsters which are engaging. [/quote]

This.

And please don’t make me kill 20 exactly the same monsters with only 1 or 2 sword moves in a static and dull forest. This is probably a matter of personal preference, but I can’t think of a situation in which I found any of your RPG’s engaging enough to not quit after a few minutes.
[size=2]I love the environments and innovative things in your games and every time I play them I would love to see it all. I just can’t get myself to waste hours on grinding monsters, especially when other players near me are trying to do the same.[/size]

[quote]
And please don’t make me kill 20 exactly the same monsters with only 1 or 2 sword moves in a static and dull forest. This is probably a matter of personal preference, but I can’t think of a situation in which I found any of your RPG’s engaging enough to not quit after a few minutes.
[size=2]I love the environments and innovative things in your games and every time I play them I would love to see it all. I just can’t get myself to waste hours on grinding monsters, especially when other players near me are trying to do the same.[/size] [/quote]

There will be magic skills, and combat will happen in dungeons that you travel to. Dungeons prevent flying, which makes the mobs fair to fight. As for animated mobs, I honestly haven’t considered that. If I can find a way to do it that doesn’t add ridiculous production time then I think I should.

Why would you remake the part of SAO that every SAO fan wishes wasn’t

but it looks cool
for alfheim anyways

[quote] Why would you remake the part of SAO that every SAO fan wishes wasn’t

but it looks cool
for alfheim anyways [/quote]

Eh, ALfheim wasn’t the issue. The generic overpowered main character was the issue with ALfheim along with lack of plot. The game concept itself is pretty awesome, hence why I’m making it. (GGO not planned)

Looks great!! Character creation is missing skin color options though lol

You should make some monsters fly, and give some monsters ranged (and maybe AOE) attacks. If they don’t have ranged attacks, I could just fly up and keep using spells until they die while taking no damage on myself.

[quote] Looks great!! Character creation is missing skin color options though lol

You should make some monsters fly, and give some monsters ranged (and maybe AOE) attacks. If they don’t have ranged attacks, I could just fly up and keep using spells until they die while taking no damage on myself. [/quote]

Yeah I’ve been trying to figure out how I’m going to balance that. I’m thinking mobs can have ranged attacks like you mentioned. Perhaps a laser similar to how I did it in BLEACH. Flying isn’t an issue because you can’t fly in dungeons. But getting mobs stuck then using ranged spells is sort of cheap. To prevent this, boss rooms will have no hard edges to get caught on aha.

Regarding skin color, that’s actually an option aha. I just need to place skin color alongside class selection, because the character redesign will cost R$ to use. (The show had random gen, but could redesign for a fee. I’m totally not trying to make money hoping you get an ugly character)

Amazing. That’s all I can say… Speechless.

Added animated mobs to the game. Editing the main post to talk about those!

Mobs category added to the list.
Mobs are now animated! This is explained in the OP under “Mobs”.

Updated the post with new content from Alpha. Game got front page within 1 hour of being opened for Alpha, which is amazing. I’ll need to close it Sunday though, to add more content before people get entirely bored. Keep them wanting more!