Greetings to everyone and everybody from myself and Spectrabox! Today I’ll be bringing you more information on the ever grand, mysterious and massive update that looms in the future.
2022 has been a long journey of a year. I would like to share with you, as I think you all deserve it, a hopefully concise collection (oops) of how development went over the year, and what awaits ahead of us!
(Since this post is rather long, scroll to the bottom for juicy features + screenshots if you want them first! Please read it all if you have the time, thank you.)
Since even January, we’ve had hopeful and eager aspirations to finish the update in quick time. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) life had other plans. We had a lot of ups and downs this year, and stress was a very constant part of our life. We dealt with many family issues and personal problems. And of course on top of that, we’ve been living with the weight of getting this update out for quite a long time now. It was perhaps, even more stressful, as we tend to constantly push ourselves to levels that we might not be able to achieve (think back to our very hopeful and now seemingly funny aspirations to release the update back in March).
In the end though, we learned so much - and I believe - have grown more than perhaps any other year of our lives.
Since we went dark back in July, a lot has happened, so allow me to share our experience from then to now.
To start, it was a large weight off our shoulders to not have to post a Pic of the Week anymore and focus our entire effort on finishing development. This allowed us to see a bit more clearly, and begin to finalize and decide which features and content would make the final cut for the game. Still, new exciting ideas and features came to mind since then, many of which have already been added to create the perfect final package for this expansion to the game!
Of course, we’ve always tried to keep the picture of a complete epic well-packaged update in our mind as the end goal, careful to not add just any random things that could be added in after the update instead. Truly everything new that we choose to add into the game, is chosen from a careful perspective of weighing its value as a feature and how well it will tie into the rest of the update, all in an effort to create an update that can drop as one big package, complete with a variety of features that complement each other very well and create a fantastic experience for the player.
Anyway, we worked hard for a time, focusing on finishing everything that needed finishing. As it would go though, life spun some new threads and challenges, and we would soon be faced with what were probably some of the most stressful and toughest hardships we’ve had to face while developing FF… Let’s get into THAT shall we? Heheh.
This part will be a bit long, and “splitting” the game may seem like a serious impact to your gameplay experience. Rest assured, we believe this will not be the case at all. So don’t be worried as you read this, as most of this has already been resolved, and surprisingly, the game has turned out - in our opinion - much better off because of the changes we were forced to make.
So, as we continued on with work as we usually did, one day we began to notice some problems while developing the game.
First, let me preface this with that we are used to dealing with Roblox changing things and updating Studio. There were some scares in the past (the worst from before was probably when Roblox was going to change all the terrain textures to new ones, which greatly altered how many of the environments we’ve made looked, as it did for most developers. Luckily and reasonably, Roblox never pushed that update after the developer community pushed back). But overall, nothing affected us too harshly despite being worried about changes. Even before the main problems that showed up, Spectrabox had started to become disheartened by the amount of changes Roblox would make to Studio. He and I, of course, do know those changes were made with best intentions, in an effort to improve things.
Still, all of those changes were quite small potatoes compared to what we eventually ran into. And I want to state that it was not Roblox’s fault that this happened, as we also had many faults of our own that led to this occurring.
Anyway, as you know, FF was already quite a big game. With all the stuff we added in this update, and were continuing to add, we began to worry about it’s size, and Studio holding up. However, for the longest time, the vast majority of the update’s parts, terrain, etc. had been added, and things were still running smoothly. Studio worked fine and so did the game itself. Now, games and their engines are quite finnicky at times, so it’s no surprise that a small update can change a lot. One day Roblox updated Studio, and we began to experience a quite concerning problem with our game.
The first problem was Studio began disconnecting us from our Team Create world that we built most of the game on. At first we shrugged the problem off, as we would only disconnect once about every 30 minutes. Day after day though, the problem persisted, and it actually got worse, where I would disconnect after only 5-10 minutes at times. So, my work on the remaining environments came to a screeching halt, as there was another more annoying factor to this disconnection. It turns out that I had a chance of losing about 5-10 minutes of progress every time a disconnect happened. You see, the disconnection was rather random, and would show up subtly at first (eventually I learned the signs), and then disconnect us fully. Well, when this first happened I kept losing progress over and over, which was quite frustrating. I tried to work with saving backups constantly and auto-saving, but even so, it didn’t save much time. As you can imagine, having to open up Studio every time after a disconnect took a lot of time as well. And even more time if I went into a backup and got what I had just worked on and put it back together in the main world, but of course by then, I would be due for another disconnect.
Obviously we knew this was a big problem and was slowing us down. Spectrabox posted our problems on the Dev forum, but unfortunately for a long time, there wasn’t much help (though we did eventually receive some help from some great members of Roblox staff, the problem still persisted). It was understandable, we were one of the only games experiencing this disconnect, and we had a gut feeling that the size of our game was at fault for the issue. We began to think of solutions and took our time, and unfortunately most of our development efforts at that time went to figuring this all out.
Unfortunately, we soon had another problem occur outside of studio and inside the game itself. We could not get into the game in play mode at all, receiving an odd disconnect error when we tried to load in. This is when our stress really peaked and we definitely went a little bit mad. We posted this problem as well, but alas, we were one of the few who had this problem (though others were having it occur too, more-so than the Studio disconnects). Eventually, through talking with others, we realized the main problem seemed be having a large place file with a lot of assets to load in at once, and something with the Roblox servers had trouble and would cause an error.
So we understood, to our despair at the time, something drastic needed to be done. For awhile we went through days unsure of what exactly to do, but eventually we found the solution. Despite the pain and worry, we knew we wouldn’t give up.
The solution came in the form of splitting the game into multiple worlds, reducing the size of each place and easing the weight off of Studio and the game having to load in everything at one place/time. We knew it was a drastic and scary thing to attempt due to our game’s framework being quite outdated and not designed with multiple places in mind, but we had to do it.
Initial testing revealed that splitting the game up would fix our problems. When things were moved out to different places, we tested and saw that the disconnects, and the errors connecting to the game had gone away! This was a great relief, as we knew we were going in the right direction. Still, that was just initial testing, and the actual splitting still had to be done.
So we got to work at it, Spectrabox doing the majority of the labor (I was still able to work on other things on local files). Eventually breakthroughs were made and things returning to a normal state of development was seeming very feasible. Still, this took a lot of time out of both my development time finishing the game, and even more from Spectrabox’s. Still, as we began to split the game, Spectra worked on other features that needed completing, and coming up with new features for the game with splitting in mind that would make the game cohesive and fun still!
Massive props to Spectra who used the packages feature in Studio to connect all these places. It was a huge effort to connect all the original features and content together so that each world can have access to it (think items/equipment/stats and more).
While there is still some work on splitting to be done, we are happy to say the majority of it is all complete, along with bonus features that make the game better with split worlds (and just better overall!).
FF is now split into multiple places, but they are all connected and you can easily traverse between worlds seamlessly. When you go from one major world to another, there will be a loading screen, other than that, everything will feel much the same.
So the planned major worlds are as follows:
-
The Frontier (Old Frontier and Matumada)
-
Ratboy’s Nightmare
-
Otherworld Tower (No changes here really, just listing it as its own world, as it always has been)
and
- Two new major worlds with new content and areas! These worlds are where the majority of new things coming in the update will be!
Separating the game into these worlds can give you a sense of scale of the upcoming update! The areas coming are so large that we decided that two worlds would be appropriate (one world for the earlier stuff in the update, and one world for slightly more late game areas).
Just the first world, which holds the biggest area/zones in the game, is already much larger than the old Frontier and RBN combined. So hopefully that is an exciting statistic for you, and shows you that we’ve been quite serious about making a really epic-sized update.
-
Well firstly, we’re now well equipped to finish the game without much worry of errors or disconnections, and development can continue on smoothly in both a working Studio and game itself!
-
Each world should run a lot smoother. This is a huge benefit in our minds, as if we went with our original plan to release, mobs would have had to been more scarce and spread out. Now each world can feel more alive and filled with content without fear of slowing down each of the servers.
-
More players on each server/higher server cap. (This still needs to be tested on a large scale, and may come after the update’s initial release, but is likely for at least some worlds).
-
Players will be more centralized. If you’re on the Frontier, all the players in your server will also be with you on the Frontier. No more of half the server being in RBN or vice versa, and one area feeling rather empty. This extends to the “budget” we have for monsters and other content as well, meaning those too will be more centralized.
-
Splitting the worlds now allows us to add new worlds in the future!
While we still have a lot to go to finish the update, we are feeling ready to get to it! I wish I could tell you how long it would take, but we can’t know for sure. As always, being just a team of two guys, we have to take our time and manage our resources. We will work hard as always, and are determined to get the update out in due time!
Just a reminder, the vast majority of content, areas, and features haven’t been revealed and will likely be revealed shortly before or at release.
While during ‘Pic of the Week’ we would often show visually pleasing or exciting shots of monsters, equipment, areas etc. - it didn’t offer us a great platform for discussing new mechanics, QOL features etc. so we’d like to share some of those with you now!
Since FF is becoming so much bigger, you’ll need to keep track of your friends easily!
This is a QOL feature Spectrabox worked on that hopes to remedy any inconveniences that would have been caused by splitting the game into separate worlds. As such, there is now a custom Friends List built into the game to easily access your friends, to see which worlds and which servers they are on. With it you can easily join a friend if they’re not in your current server, and allow/deny different friends to access to your private servers easily! We even added an option to allow friends of friends to join you in your private servers if you wish!
If you’re in a server with friends already, and one of you travels to a different world - you will automatically follow that friend if you travel there as well, so don’t worry about getting separated or having to rejoin your friends every time!
Posties are a new NPC that allow you to transfer items to and from your inventory to any storage chests you own across the entire game (across different worlds too!).
Most require a small fee, but are a great addition to the game. Some Posties are more expensive if they are in exceptionally useful or late game locations, so the player can decide to use them to quickly move their items for a fee, or save money and do it manually.
We feel this is a lovely feature that allows players much more freedom and fun, and much less frustration managing items or trying to find where you put a specific item in one of your many storage chests.
Although confirmed less formally already, Save Slots are officially coming to the Fantastic Frontier!
This allows you to start a new character from scratch and keep your old character as well all on one Roblox account. We know this feature was highly requested, so we are happy it will be a part of the game!
There slots for 5 different characters total, all of which can be reset if desired.
9 new starter classes have been added to the character creator! These classes allow you to pick a specific gameplay style to focus on at the beginning of the game, offering new and unique items/setups that will make a new player’s experience more engaging, fun and specialized to their tastes! These classes are also a great bit of variety for veteran players replaying the game on new save files.
Each class is unique and has different starting gear, equipment, and items!
We think these classes will be a general nice improvement to the beginning of the game. Making it both more fun, and easier for new players to understand the game and get started.
We intend to make some changes and adjustments to the early game to make it more accessible and fun for both new and returning players.
Expect these sort of changes:
- Mining / Crafting changes
- Combat / Equipment rebalancing
- Early game objectives / dungeons
- Redistribution of overworld monsters
There are many other general changes that will affect the early game as well, and this is something we are still fine tuning. We’d like to make the early game both accessible and replayable, so if you have any suggestions on this topic, please message Spectrabox or myself, Gorbachelli!
Well that’s all for now. Thank you very much guys. We appreciate the support as always, and we won’t let you down. See you when the time is right, and the stars begin to align. . . Again. . .
