Information Tales of MapleLegends

MapleLegends reaches its 8th Anniversary! It's a big milestone, for us. As a community, we've been through a lot, ups and downs. While we finish preparing the patch content, let's have a chat about what we're up to, and what we have been up to, a bit more in-depth than usual.


The state of MapleLegends updates

Let's start by talking a bit about the state of our update schedule, and how it is going to change.

It is no news that we've gone through a good amount of patch delays, or even straight out patch cancellations (we paid Happyville rent for nothing, last winter).
The sad truth is that it's not been easy to manage these updates, especially since when we started adding more and more custom features. When we discuss the plan for the next set of patches/events, we always try to split the workload in ways that seem bearable throughout the schedule; but a lot of the recent updates "hide" their actual complexity until the moment I actually start writing the code for them.

Spoiler

To give a recent example, the reason why Valentines and Lunar events have been split (even if by little time) was because Spaceship took longer to implement than we originally expected. It's the kind of roadblocks that you don't realize are gonna be in your way until the client crashes because you forgot to prevent Battleship Cannon from firing on the Spacesh of obscure little features that this version of the game doesn't have yet.


The custom clock system also took work to implement, but the effort paid off, as we now have a system that we can reuse with new designs whenever we see fit.

Even this coming Anniversary event has a lot of gimmicks introduced that the original client didn't have; as you probably saw in the teaser on Discord, we're adding a new Event-related Axe Throwing skill, that needed to be properly set to work only where we want, and how we want. Someone compared it to Pirate's Grenade skill, which is partially true; but Grenade explodes on the ground, while the Axe must trigger damage on contact.
Little things that one might not think about, when deciding on the overall plan for the future patches, but that can drastically increase the time and workload required when it's almost "too late" to change plans.

Speaking about the Christmas event; there isn't a technical or otherwise planned reason as to why we skipped it, it was just because of me having overdone things in the previous two patches (Annisummer and Halloween), which made me feel burnt out way too much. There was no discussion about skipping the Event, until it was basically out of season, hence why we did not release a statement.
Definitely not an outcome we ourselves would have wished for, especially since the event plan had been fully laid out already, but if anything, it's something we can learn from, starting from time management.

We've been looking into taking this step for some time, and we finally decided to go through with it now: effective from this patch, we will be separating Event-related patches, and Content-related patches.
For you the players, this means that the coming Anniversary patch will have less balance and content updates than you're used to see in our big releases. This can feel disappointing, but on the other hand, we will be having a non-event patch between Anniversary and Summer, which instead will be focused on gameplay changes.
Going forward, we will have a Summer patch, then a non-event patch, then ideally Halloween, and so on. This sequence is not set in stone, but it's the base idea.



The Challenge system and its progress



We asked Rosa to please stop running in place, and we gave her a full revamp that hopefully better suits the game and her location in Lith Harbor.

On a more technical note; we are reaching our final tests of the Challenge system. The current iteration is still limited to the first threshold, but we wanted to bring out our full set of options, with the note that the subsequent tiers will be variation on those themes. For example, the challenge that requires you to scroll items will increase in complexity, and may require more than simply regular scrolls.
There is one extra type of optional challenge not released yet (you may have noticed a lack of Maple world exploration related ones), which requires extra work, although it will not require its own extra testing time, and thus won't delay our schedule.

We are looking to gather feedback about the proposed challenge types; they are supposed to cover as many different playstyles as possible, while retaining an element of time and effort investment proportional to the "centrality" of this feature in the life of your character.

While the previous Beta testing rewarded a unique hat, this testing round will reward you with an overall that fits the same style!




The code-related mechanisms proved to be working well as intended, during the period in which the first beta testing has been live. We could have gone for a simple set of quests, and saved ourselves the trouble of planning and implementing a fully custom design for it (you see it as an npc chat for now, but the final plan is completely different), but that would not have fit our view of this as one of the most central features of our gameplay. It would have felt too anonymous, as it would have blended with every other questline. Sure, we would likely have saved one or two patches worth of time, but it was not worth the design loss. That has been our decision from the start.
Additionally, we would not have been able to implement all these different challenge options. Especially some of the ones we have planned for higher tiers.



8 years (and counting) of good times

I'd like to conclude this thread on a lighter note, hopefully also showing interesting stuff.

While you see the final result of a patch in the form of working and polished (or "working" and "polished", depending on the case) new content, most of the implemented changes have gone through a lot of iterations, both for bugfixing and for design changes.

Here's a small list of some of the little things that either never got released, or got changed before release, along with a few funny design mishaps.

• Spoiler

  
  The Omok set from the Halloween + Christmas event of 2021 was originally intended to be solely Halloween-themed.
• Spoiler

  
  
  Baby steps being taken during the introduction of extra animations for Transformation.
• Spoiler

  
  
  Debugging for this game can be tough... Here's a little shot from the past, when we were preparing NT2 questline for release!
• Spoiler

  
  The icon for Assassinate:Charged buff had this as its first proposed design. It got changed to not be confused with an Eyesore debuff.
• Spoiler

  
  
  
  Rosa's design went through multiple iterations, before landing on the style we are now familiar with.
  
  
  
  One could say that her hairdresser got carried away with experimenting, and I couldn't argue against that.
• Spoiler

  
  
  An example of what post-v62 features can include. This is what used to happen during testing if you got hit while Ghost-morphed, both for Halloween 2022 and Lunar 2023. Fun times debugging that one.
• Spoiler

  
  
  
  Last Halloween was truly a spooky place.
  
  
  
  
  And a lot of translating, for the original Sophelia questline.
• Spoiler

  
  
  If only you knew how many design iterations Berserk went through...
• Spoiler

  
  
  Something that not everyone might have noticed is that the design for our Lunar New Year Rabbit coin was made to recall the old design of the Mouse coin of 2020 (Year of the Rat).
• Spoiler

  
  
  She didn't make it in time through the design pipeline... But the Lunar New Year was supposed to be managed by a completely new npc!
• Spoiler

  
  
  
  
  Adventures with Chairs. Some of them require so much trial and error to reposition correctly, because simply copying gms' position does not always work!
  
  
  
  Rings are no joke either.
• Spoiler

  
  
  More about chairs, but from the very first steps we took to implement custom height. This one has been particularly nasty, back then, because it's never been consistent.
  A sobering reminder that you can never "assume" things are working fine, at any stage of the development.
  
  But honestly, it looked very funny.
• Spoiler

  
  
  Throughout these years, we've added a few custom NPCs of our own. It's been 8 years already, who knows what adventures and new faces have yet to come!

We hope you enjoyed this little read, and we wish for you to keep having a good time in our game. While we're not perfect, we are doing our best. We love what we do.
Thank you for the time you spend with us.

The MapleLegends Staff