Note: This is a development blog. As such, anything shared here should be considered a work-in-progress and can change at any point.

More grinding on the technical work but we're hoping to have a private alpha soon! We've made some more progress on our core gameplay since the last update and our game designers have been experimenting with a new class!

Sneak Peek: Bard

Our game designers have been discussing and designing a potential new class for our client. The bard class is slated to be a muse second job class that specializes in guitars and other stringed instruments! While still in the early concept stages the initial visuals are under way! We hope that we'll be able to share more about this class in the coming weeks as we develop it out further and flesh out its role in the ROSE universe.

Stat boost

We are continuing strong with our design choice of disabling dual-clients! After experimenting with various different options to balance and improve gameplay where everybody doesn't have a cleric 24/7 we've finally settled on a solution. We already decided that de-emphasizing buffs was the way forward and discussed this in our previous post but we realized that the core gameplay is designed entirely around buffed gameplay. If we simply remove buffs then the game becomes practically unplayable! This is the main reason why all major versions of ROSE have always allowed dual clienting. Some servers were a little more creative and utilized things such as buff fairies in cities or encouraged players by giving them special game master buffs. However, we don't want to rely on these mechanics and do not want our players to be slaves to the buffs, wherever they come from.

In our server all players will start with higher base stats than in other ROSE versions:

We modelled the initial stat boost on a cleric with 15 int but max buff skills. We found that this makes for a very enjoyable solo-leveling experience and is a great improveement to the base gameplay! So far we're happy with these numbers but we will make adjustments after further testing.

Minor: Hidden name box

We've added an option to hide your own namebox. We find this helps to declutter the screen and allows one to enjoy the ROSE art more:

However we know that this might not be desirable for all users so we've made it configurable. Currently it is only configurable in the rose-next.ini file but eventually we will add an option for it in the ingame options menu:

Minor: Free skill books

We've made skill books free. In the future we'd like to incorporate learning and leveling up skills into the GUI directly but for now we felt this would be a good temporary measure.

Minor: Remove cleric skill books

In preparation for the cleric rework we've removed all cleric buff skillbooks. They will no longer be available from NPCs.

Technical advancements

In the past few weeks we've made big strides on the technical front! This is very exciting for us because we are now approaching the point where we will be able to focus exclusively on bugs, new features and new content.

Database

As we've mentioned in our previous posts, our development time has largely been devoted to porting the database system. Our goal was to do this work now so that in the future we could build ontop of this good foundation. We're happy to report that we are almost done with the port and the only feature left to update is the clan functionality! This is the last big hurdle for us to start our alpha testing and we are excited that we're approaching the end of this work. We're also excited that this means we won't have to talk about it anymore in our dev channel or on our blogs. We are starting to suspect that our lead game designer is starting to hate the words "database" and "port"...

Tooling

We've improved our tooling to support automatic creation of client VFS files. In addition we've added more automation across the board to simplify development and to ensure we can deliver features more rapidly to our users in the future.

Conclusion

We're slowly approaching alpha! Thanks for staying patient with us and we hope you will be able to participate. If you're interested, join our mailing list on https://www.rosenext.com and our Discord Server! If you'd like to keep-up-to-date on our blog posts then please checkout our RSS Feed.