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Devlog #53 - Steam
About a week and a half ago Valve was nice enough to send me a loaner Steamdeck and ever since I've been tinkering with it and learning all I could about SteamOS.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SteamOS
SteamOS has been in development for over 10 years now and is essentially a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux. There is a game mode and a desktop mode which runs the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
Initially FO2's Linux client would crash immediately on startup when run on SteamOS desktop mode. It turns out there were some libraries missing that SteamOS required and the window resolution I was setting just wasn't supported. So after a couple days of debugging I finally got it up and running in SteamOS desktop mode. The weird thing is it wouldn't run in game mode either even after these fixes. This turned out to be just needing to add --no-sandbox as a command line parameter when launching it. How annoying!
And then there was FO2 running on Steamdeck. Surprisingly, the Steamdeck controls actually work incredibly well right now.
The right hand trackpad is essentially a mouse replacement. You can scroll the mouse cursor and click the left mouse button. So right off the bat I could move, select and attack enemies, interact with npcs, etc. But how would I equip things?
It turns out that L2 acts as a right mouse click. So you scroll over an item with the right track pad, hit L2, and voila you can equip! I'll add Steamdeck specific instructions to tooltips in the future.
One thing that became apparent right away when starting a new character on the Steamdeck, was that the default mouse cursor is ugly and doesn't give you any contextual information. So I've asked Perseus to make new mouse cursors that are similar to FO's. We'll have a sword over enemies, a white hand over npcs, a blue pointer over walkable areas, etc.
The other thing that became immediately obvious is that we need music and sound effects! In the last week I've reached out to a great composer that I'm getting close to signing with. I'll update with more information once we sign a deal.
I played through all of Noob Island on my new SteamGamer character and it took about 1 hour to get through that content. That means new players will need at least 2x-3x or more so we're looking at a solid 3+ hours for just the first zone. I also found 2 bugs I've never seen before so those are on my todo list.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2957110/Fantasy_Online_2/
Have you wish listed FO2 on Steam yet? Go do it now!
The artwork on our Steam page looks great!
How many Market listings per account?
We are going to have 10 market listings per account.
T1 Weapon Features
I will be investigating coding up leveling and runes for tiered equipment.
Patch Notes #54 - Tier 1 Weapon Crafting
We got dwarf gems and tier 1 weapon crafting so we're ready to venture forth into the Forgotten Wasteland!
This guy and his brother showed up to take you to and from Forgotten Wasteland. I've sent all the data for FW over to Perseus so he should be starting on mobs and drops for that zone soon.
Dino has started work on sprucing up the Forgotten Underground. Remember the spaceship? The above screenshot is from 2013! Time flies.
And I've been hard at work getting the market backend up and running. The market search API endpoint is nearly done. The code for listing an item on the market in the game server code is nearly done. Now I just need to make the market window and hook everything up. Expect the market to go live sometime late this week.
Once the market goes live I will be implementing integration with the Steam community market. Some items will be able to be transferred to and from the Steam community market.
https://steamcommunity.com/market/
Having FO2 on the Steam community market will be a great way to boost visibility and get more people aware of the game and what it's all about!
Then of course back to working on parties. It's annoying code. I'll get it done. And quests of course. Putting in quests really drains my brain for some reason.
The latest Art Contest #3 just ended and I'll be putting up a poll for that soon. That means a new box set will be coming fairly soon as well.
Crazygames.com is a no go as they don't actually have a microtransaction system. They implement it by hand for the games they want to implement it for. Bleh.
I'm back to negotiating with Kongregate.com so we'll see where that goes.
I'm very surprised how few sites have payment API's. I even contacted Newgrounds and they don't have payments either. I'll have to ask them if I can just use stripe.com on their site as newgrounds.com has actually had increasing traffic over the last few years.
For now, Steam will be our main forums outside of Discord.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/2957110/discussions/
Next year in 2025 I'll look at adding forums to the main site but I've got too much to do right now.
Next year will also likely be when I create a web based database for all items and the market. Of course some one else can do it too once I release the API endpoints in the near future.
On July 1st I'll be sharing a roadmap for the next 6 months of development. This will include a Steam Early Access release date. We've nearly made it to content up to level 40 but I still want to get to rebirth level 60 with much more polish before it goes out to a wider audience.
Have you noticed that the Mr. Market has appeared in Crab Coast and Mirabella Cove?
He's almost ready to open up shop!
See you next patch notes!
Have Fun & Keep Gaming!