Happy Friday night! This is a sneak peek of an upcoming boss monster that our team's artists and animators are working on. Not sure when it will go live.
The process of making a boss fight has a surprising number of steps. There is the concept sketch (half a day), modeling (1-2 days), texturing (1-2 days), rigging (half a day), and then animating it (2 to 5 days depending on complexity... and of course the animation controller needs set up). Those number of days per step can vary wildly depending on how complex a monster is, how many strange and unique animations it needs, and how "in the zone" the artist is. Creativity is strange and unpredictable. This also explains why so many 3D games re-use models and rigs. An artist could potentially re-texture 5 monsters in the time it takes to animate just one. Re-colors are a fast way to create more variety. But re-texturing a monster is actually lot of work. Compare the normal Frogzard to the Ebil Dread Frogzard. Once the art & animation is done, it is time to create the actual boss fight. The monster gets a database entry and all of its stats added. Then, skills are created and assigned to the monster. The more skills we make, the more we have to use to make interesting boss fights. Sometimes the boss monster needs to interact with the map... like in the Noxus Fight. So "machines" are added to the map. Machines are invisible game objects that have code on them, and do special things when needed. Like activating the lightning beams or buzz saws in the Trollenstein challenge. Machines can also be used spawn additional monsters, blow up the walls and hurl you into the void as seen in a Battle Concert, or... well, they can do pretty much anything. Creating boss fights are probably one of the most fun and thrilling things the team does in the game.
This week we added the shop menu. However, we received bug reports on Twitter that it was not possible to buy the Guardian items from the Guardians shop. Turns out, this is because the security is limiting the shop so you can only buy things from it in the Guardian Tower. In fact, all of the shops are restricted to their maps this way. It took us a bit to figure out what was going on. At first we could not reproduce the bug from our accounts. Turns out, dev accounts bypass that restriction for testing purposes. We will temporarily remove the broken shops. Then we will made it so shops in that menu can be opened anywhere.
In the meantime, if that menu is not working please find the shop keeper in the world to use the shop. (Most of them will be in Town or the Guardian Tower.)
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Pun-slinging Paladin
Undead Legion Ruler
Scribble Scribe
Dawnforger
