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How much of an issue with implementing something is “we have a neat idea” vs. “lemme navigate the spaghetti code first”. For example, an idea I had recently, to accomodate the idea that a few people claim that swords are busted (Exhibit A :Yinyarns first two “The x is stupid” videos) would be to ignore a portion of defense. If it could be done on Necros skulls, why not daggers and wands/bows?
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How much faster/more plausible would implementing an idea be if the community came up with the code to do it? Currently I think it’d be fantastic if the pause function could be added back for teleport-disabled dungeons and when players are <20, but I have no idea how hard that is and, more importantly, I don’t end up knowing whether my idea was rejected altogether, or whether it was too hard/undesired to implement.
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What, exactly, are you planning on all changing? Right now we’re looking at a list of something like Ice cave - Etherite/cdirk - Mountain temple (the last one only because it was mentioned in the r/RotMG thread from a year ago), but we have no idea what you acknowledge/think is an issue with this game and what is merely a nuisance when it might affect/mean a lot more to the games community than you think.
Closed testers, coders or DECA employees... (3 questions)
Thanks to Krathan’s amazing backend wizardry, not entirely implausible! While the game is limited by its base code, most ideas that don’t fundamentally change the game are possible.
That depends on the suggestion. For your suggestion, probably not too long, though a lot of internal testing would have to be done to make sure no exploits are possible.
I’ll leave this one to Deca themselves 
Really depends on what and where it is. In this example, the problem is that every projectile in the game would need a new property for that information. Skulls and various other abilities work in a different way, which is that they don’t stick around - you use it and that’s it, pretty simple. But with the client already struggling with memory and how many projectiles there can be on a screen, additional properties can add up really fast.
That’s always something to consider. The other thing is that implementing something like this needs to be worth it from a design perspective. I like the idea and have been thinking about this for a while as well, but there are a few questions we always need to ask ourselves: where should it apply, could it potentially be confusing or unnecessarily complicated, are there better ways to solve the issue, etc.
That’s an interesting idea, which admittedly I haven’t seen. It’s very hard to keep up with player ideas since there are so many. And all of us at Deca Games have plenty of ideas to go around already as well. There will always be more ideas than time to implement (salt and chicken for those who remember), such is the way of game development.
I think literal code wouldn’t really help all that much since we’re not sharing our server code-base, developing without context and based on assumptions isn’t ideal. What does help is a lot of detail, consideration of edge cases, user flows and things like that. It’s important that things are thought through, that will make implementation much easier. Speaking broadly, that’s pretty much where “just an idea” turns into actual game design!
In this case for example, I find the general idea of restricting pause based on level and other aspects interesting (I mean, more interesting than straight up disabling it everywhere). But I’m not entirely sure what restricting only level 20 players in teleport-disabled dungeons, which tend to be end game focused and not meant for sub level 20 characters anyway, is aiming to do exactly.
Good question, this is something we still need to get better at. Communicating about what we are working on and planning to do is always tricky, since so many things can change or be pushed back as we go along. As an example: we teased the Goblin Lair a while back. It went on hiatus which we have confirmed, but we still get a lot of questions about whether or not it’s still being worked on, when it’s coming out, etc. We want to avoid building up hype around something that might not even see the light of day, in time for the hype to not have died out already, or at all.
When it comes to acknowledging issues with the game, I think we can all agree that client and server performance, balancing overall and the pet and fame systems in particular are all big aspects that could use a lot of love.
With public testing going as well as it has, it’s a good step towards more transparency as you will know what has been worked on before it hits production, hopefully going forward also more experimental and iterative changes which might not hit production.
Currently we’re working on more long term plans for this and next year and we’re also discussing how to best communicate them. What I can say now are the smaller (somewhat obvious or already confirmed) dungeon related things, like: HP Scaling, Ice Cave, Mountain Temple and Lost Halls reworks are happening. O2 and LoD hopefully soon.
Patch X.23.0 - Assassin and Trickster Balance
For what it’s worth, the example about teleporting was about it being restricted to the number of players in a dungeon being less than 20 or so, rather than the characters level > <
That said, Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions and for explaining some of these concepts in layman’s terms, since the most I’ve heard about the game from a development perspective is 1) the game is built in flash (wow) and 2) the spaghetti code is spaghetti. It feels a bit better to know what some of the… invisible walls are surrounding the code that define what is and what isn’t possible. Even if you never read this response, thank you for responding ^^’
Oh! Haha, that makes a lot more sense. I totally blame still being awake at 7 in the morning. But disregarding that, I guess this is another good example of the need for details.
So I’m guessing that each entity has a sprite component, a transform component, a collider component and a group assignment?
BTW just curious what kind of code & framework does realm run on. I’ve started to get quite in-depth with C++ and SDL2 to (attempt) to create something quite similar.
Just read this, yeah that makes a lot of sense actually.