What is Afar?

Afar is a free online RPG game with multiplayer elements. It is all about exploration, storyline, and battles.

Released in the last quarter of 2010, Afar has been in production since 2007 but kept falling back. The game was restarted from scratch as a PHP game in it's current state, and was quickly released. Since release it has ammassed 200 players, with a record of 100 online at one time.

The State of Afar

Since the game is constantly (as much as daily) updated, it is hard to keep a project thread organised, and so instead I am writing this semi regular newsletter to place in all my threads around the place.

Where is the game currently?

Last time I spoke, there was no battle system, inventories was a big thing, and we had about 20 players around the world.

Build 2

Build 2 greatly enlarged the screen resolution, specifically with future plans for apps in mind and based on player feedback.





The navigation system and random battles are a new feature. That's right, battles!

We now have a basic turn based battle system. At current all you can do is attack, and the view is head on, but there are some tactics to it all:

- Different equipment has different stats for how much damage will be dealt
- Choosing your profession gives you boosts in certain weapons
- Swords give you melee exp, which makes you harder hitting with a sword
- Bows give you sight exp, making you better with a bow
- Different enemies are weak to different things

This is just a shell however and not representative of the eventual goal for the battle system, which will have animated sprites rather than a front-on view.



The World

As it currently stands, this is our world map:



The marked off regions are not yet created, but are planned.

You navigate the world using the four arrows shown on the screenshot above, but you can also access some key areas via the world map, once you have unlocked travel to them.



You gain gold as you play or by defeating enemies, of which there are currently ten. I am not revealing the algorithms and they are ever changing as I tweak and balance the game. You can at current spend this money on items in shops.


You can also gain gold by referring other players; how to do this is shown in game on the main screen.




Structure

Afar is created using PHP and javascript, with phpBB providing a base for account authentication and forum posting. It uses graphics provided by First Seed Material and others created by myself.

The amount of my own code has risen a lot since last time I spoke to you. The battle system was created entirely from scratch for example, as well as various other systems. Most of the game aspects are my own code, with the phpbb backbone merely serving as a good base for authentication, forums, and moderation as well as the admin cp.



Quests

Quests are under construction. You can complete most of the first one, but there is no reward yet. The second is in development and they will both be finished around the same time. The current "testquest" storyline revolves around vampires.




System Requirements

You must have javascript enabled for the domains:

vengeance-rpg.com (for now)
afar.ws
jquery.com

jquery is a javascript library, visit the jquery.com website for more information.

Otherwise your gameplay will be severely hindered. I may block users who do not have javascript activated in future because this may cause unfair advantages; it doesn't at the moment (other than making screens such as the inventory just not work).


High Scores

Because of our now large userbase we now have highscores. You are rated on either your gold amount, or your cumulative exp from all stats.

Stat signatures are available which update regularly:



If somebody registers from your sig, you get gold!


Accessing the game

http://www.afar.ws


Inspiration

The Netplay project for getting me into creating MMOs,
VDex for making me realise my old idea of making games using forums could actually work
W3schools for teaching me PHP
Tomas for helping me with javascript and showing me better ways of doing things
Everyone who helped me with Vengeance before <3

Elements will be the next battle system improvement. But what are they?

Some enemies will be clearly based on one of the four elements proposed by Aristotle as being building blocks of the Universe. Fire, Water, Air, Earth. These are commonplace in RPGs and while cliche, it's a good cliche and it works well.

Every element is strong and weak against another element (or the same). Fire is weak against water, being the most obvious.

Elements will be expanded into more than those four. Current thoughts:

Fire - strong against other fire
Water - strong against fire
Earth - strong against other earth
Air - strong against other air
Ice - strong against water
Electricity - strong against water
Light - strong against dark
Dark - strong against light
Metal - strong against earth

These are of course just basic weaknesses, it will be a lot more complex than that. Each enemy, and indeed each item, will have a stat for each element for the damage it deals, and how strong it is against it.

This stat will work out as a percentage, imagine if you will you are fighting a fire enemy with a water based spell:

FIRE GIANT
Weaknesses:
Fire: 50% (fire weapons deal 50% damage)
Water: 150% (water weapons deal 150% damage)
Light: 110%
Metal: 100%

Yes, I know, this system has been seen in countless other games, but it is a system that works.

The clincher is that you cannot find out what an enemy's weaknesses are. This makes it more interesting as you will have to use trial and error to see what weapons are damaging an enemy more than others. Some will be obvious - a fire animation is going to be strong against fire. Others, such as boss battles, will require you to listen to what NPCs are saying and remembering things such as past battles, the story behind an enemy, etc to find out what it's big weakness is.

Also, keep in mind you cannot change weapons while in battle currently, so it's up to you whether you equip yourself with a fire sword and risk coming into battle against a fire enemy, or stick with a metal weapon and do averagely average.



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"Random gold" has now been retired - the gold you get from walking around and doing various things. I know some people won't like this change, but it's replacement is better. Now, with an adjustment to the algorithms, instead of gold you get agility exp.

Agility

Agility is used in calculating the battle damage algorithms. It's the last calling point, and represents your character's ability to "dodge bullets" as it were.

damage = (0..weapon/2) + (0..stat/2) - (0..agility)

In short, between 0 and your agility is removed from the damage dealt (with a base limit of 0 representing a full block).

Enemies also have an agility stat - snakes with the highest at the moment - hence you will often miss.


There are now therefore four active battle stats, meaning the maximum combat level is now 30!

Slight update:

To discourage cheating, as with constitution, you have to win a battle to claim each level you gain. So if you just walked around for hours not fighting anything, your level would not change until you battle.



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Inventories now stack items. This means each type of item only shows once, with a number displaying how many of that item are owned. Currently this number appears in the description box, but I will work out a way to put it on the icon itself later.

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Judging by how many items people are getting, I think a bank system is in need. Players inventories would be limited to a certain number of items; anything else must either be sold or go in the bank. What are your thoughts on this?

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Finished the scenes added that weren't finished. These are the extra woods scenes that were created to add more areas to fight in. Each area has unique graphics.

Updated map (spoilers):

http://bb.hbgames.tk/upload/tibenregion_5.png

Eight new temporary scenes added (shown in the map above by the white squares between the farm and the coast). They will be filled in with content later.

-

With two new scenes the
Tiben
area woods are now pretty much complete.

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Congratulations to Viktor Lorks, who is nearly the first person to reach the level cap in two skills... but this poses a problem. It's only been a few days! If this is possible in that short a time then clearly the exp ratios are too low.

Therefore, they will be changing... either that, or a new maximum level with a much steeper exp curve from level 50 will be added.

I appreciate everyone's thoughts on the matter.




I did say daily updates

I was just playin' around with this, but none of the images were loading and I was getting PHP debug errors during combat.
I'm using chrome...does this game have issues with that browser?

It shouldn't do, although I'm not sure my web host can handle the amount of players. I need to get a VPS but can't afford it right now. On paper my host should be fine but hey.

I have decided to split the "very large expansion" up and release it in chunks, as that way you get more content right now. The first part I have titled Beasts of Afar, as it is an update to the enemies database.

It was planned for tonight but has been pushed back to tomorrow (Friday) due to the amount of work involved. It is "mostly done".

Update: I lied, the update is now live and finished.



What does the expansion involve?

At the moment there are five enemies to fight while traveling the world of Vengeance (which has been for a while called Afar, if you weren't aware!). There are a few others scattered around dungeons, but these are not available in random encounters.

The Beasts of Afar expansion adds 30 new enemies (that's right, brings us to seven times the current amount) to random encounter tables.

But that's not all! The expansion also involves the creation of random encounter groups. These are area-based groups of enemies, meaning you encounter a different set of enemies in each mini region. Farms will have different enemies to the desert, which will have different enemies to the fire caverns.

This update brings us to 49 total enemies, which includes 14 special instances from dungeons and quests (therefore 35 available in random encounters).

Three of the enemies added are only available to paid members (at current that service is unavailable, and only two people have these accounts as well as myself, for they have done work for the game or have generously donated to keep us online; however the service is coming in the near future) in the Damascan Sands region. This is a peninsula of 20 maps including a new city, that will be available during or shortly after the Beasts of Afar expansion.

Look out for the expansion tomorrow if all goes well. Until then have fun fighting the... five enemies in the game!

Quoted from the forums:

Hello there!

Exciting things are happening with Afar. Unfortunately they're exciting for all the wrong reasons. Mainly, things are just breaking all over the place.

A few weeks ago you may know, we were wiped out as a result of a hack elsewhere on the web server. We are back fine, with no content lost at all! However, the hack had some unfortunate repurcussions:

1. We need to get off this web host. They own our domain unfortunately, so we are switching to http://www.afar.ws as our domain; this means we had to change everything and it hasn't gone as smoothly as we'd hoped.

2. A domain used to host our images was removed by the domain provider because the index was empty. They didn't realise there were thousands of images still on the host in a subdirectory.

What does this mean?

Basically over the past few weeks we have been fighting hard to fix all links across the game to the new afar.ws and afar.ws/img domains.

What this means to you

Things will be broken. They will. This is unfortunate, and needs to be fixed, but they will be broken.

Please, and I can't stress this enough, don't feel bad reporting any errors! We will work to fix them as soon as possible. But if we don't know about them, then you will have to wait until we find them!

We are being vigilant in fixing these errors but there are a lot of them. Currently page.php is fixed (the file that runs the majority of game processes such as exploration and other functions), all function files are fixed (so you won't lose any data or anything), but posting, and general template files, may be broken. This means there is potential for:

1. broken images
2. broken links

Broken images: if you find one, and want to report it, please right click -> view image and find the URL or name of the image file and report it to us. This is an easy, easy fix, but if we don't know the image is missing there is nothing we can do until we find it in our searching.

Broken links: you may find yourself plonked on the index randomly instead of where you should be! This is because the link is going to vengeance-rpg.com and not afar.ws. This is also an easy fix, but again if we don't know about it there is nothing we can do until we find it.

I am very, very sorry about all of this, and I will try and make it up to all of you who keep the game alive and thriving.

I am deeply sorry if any of you have tried to play in the past few weeks and not been able to.

This is in all an incredibly dire situation to be in - but the only way from here is up.

Welcome to Afar - the free browser game.



We now have an IRC channel for out-of-game support.

Please visit #afar on synirc.com if you need help of any kind, and don't threat to message AmyPond.

http://mibbit.com/?server=irc.synirc.net&channel=%23afar&nick=afar???&settings=07c413133cd4572e5c6a3419b89da443&noServerTab=false




To make up for all this crap I will be working on a new update to the enemies table adding around 30 new unseen enemies to the game. They will range from rabbits to DRAGONS. Everyone loves dragons.

I don't know when that will be finished but I'll work on it.

Then it's time to get spells sorted!

Hey man I played around with Afar. It's pretty neat and with a lot of polishing it could go a long way. There's inconsistencies in the directional functions (some are text, some are arrows which look good btw). Just keep working on it and you'll have a neat game people can play in their spare time!