Salutations!

Christian here, humbly presenting you with this week’s rendition of ‘What Happened Last Week?’. Once again we have a shorter post as we continue to work on things that will get a proper reveal later on. Apologies, but I promise the eventual reveals will be exciting! First, let’s talk about last week’s patch.

Patch 0.12.1.0

So far it seems most people have been enjoying Dragon Garden – Night, even more than Dragon Garden – Day. The night scenery seem to be working better for those who had issues with visibility on the day version, which of course is good to hear. The layout, being a bit different than the other maps, seems to be appreciated as well. So a good reception overall!

The changes to Jumong seem to have brought him to a okay spot in terms of balance right now, even if there might still be some rough edges left to smooth out. It’s a bit early to tell just yet what the final effects of the changes will be, but as usual we’re keeping a close eye on how everything plays out.

Raigon too seems to be in a pretty good spot now balance-wise. Immediately after patch 0.12 he struggled a bit, but the increased survivability and the added utility to Dragon Palm seem to have helped out. The changes to Pestilus rounded out his most picked (and powerful) Battlerites but I’d say we’ve yet to see how much this affects him. The change to Ezmo was both to reduce frustration when facing him as well as making it require more effort to utilize Exhaust. It’s a small change but the effects of it should still be noticeable.

Gameplay Team

News from the gameplay team is unfortunately becoming more of a rarity when not enough time has passed between the latest patch and the blog post. If at least a week has been we can always talk a bit about what they are currently looking at in terms of balance, but for now we’ll have to wait. In other words, work has continued on cool-stuff-that-will-be-a-while-before-we-show-it. Like I said above though, it will be exciting when you see it! Besides that, some very rudimentary testing of the new player experience took place during last week which will help them fine-tune it.

UI 2.0

Right now Katey, with the help of the UI programmers, is trying out the navigation of UI 2.0 in different prototypes. She’s aiming to iron out as many kinks as she can in regards to how you go from one place to another, and is trying to get the experience as smooth and intuitive as possible. Below you can see some of the things she’s playing around with:

As usual, all icons along with the art style in general are placeholders. They are only meant to convey how the navigation works, not how it will all eventually look.

Art Team

Much like the Gameplay Team, the art team is still largely continuing to work on things that will be revealed later on. They are still hammering away on things for the new player experience though and we can continue to share some of that. For the campaign, they are currently working on mini introductions where you are presented with an image and some brief text about a champion or challenge you are about to face, styled like pages of an old book. Viktor (who wrote the Dragon Garden dev blog) shared with me the following concept images of the introductions.

And that’s it for this week. It’s looking like you guys might be getting a break from me next week, as we dive into something a little different than the usual blog post. As always, thanks for reading!

/Christian