Battle Forces Online - Upgrade Time

Battle Forces Online has gone through a revision.

New Features

• Added Destinations - Inns, Gates and visiting spots
• More boards to play
• Fight Pits - Small maps that once clear earn you loot
• Optimizations in the response time to action requests
  
• You can now buy more Blades (units) and weapons
• Healing Spell added for Mages
• 2 New Blades added, Earth Mage and Fire Mage
• More spells and items
• No more random spawning, everyone enters the board at the same time.
• Alter your party
  

StoryLine

The story line is a bit weak at the moment, but I wanted to build the ability to give each map a storyline.

Destinations
There are now a number of places you can visit on each board, these places allow you to heal up, buy stuff and chat with NPCs.

More Boards to Play
Currently the game consists of the following boards/maps

• Awakening - All new users enter here, there are very few enemies. This board allows users to get used to moving and attacking.
• Dark Forest - Central location, allows you to move around and fight other players. There is a forest theme to it.
• Gorjin's Bridge - A control point, you're going to need to level up and have a party of 2 Blades to clear this map. There is a bridge theme to it.
• Gorjin's Lair - This board was built to test a user. Try to get to the castle at the far end.
• Small Fight Pit - Very small fight pit, good for users with low stats or low party counts.
• Medium Fight Pit - A medium sized pit
• Large Fight Pit - Lots of enemies, lots of space...bring your whole party!
  

Optimizations
Due to the nature of the engine, when you tell a Blade to move or attack, the request is routed to the server, the server then responds with an OK or Not OK. This was causing a delay to occur between when you clicked and when a Blade actually performed the action.

I made some optimizations to the server handling as well as providing a visual cue (The blades says OK and fades a bit) when you give an action command.

Spells
If a spell is not an attack spell, a mage will cast it upon all members of the party. So a heal spell will heal all members by 10 HP. You do not have to target a member to do this.

In addition to this some spells now have a duration, these spell affects will last for a certain length of time. For example: Magic Shield last for 2 min and gives all members in the party +5 defense.

New Blades
I took the old mage and re-named it to "Fire Mage", this mage can cast fire spells.

I created a new mage called "War Mage", this mage cast lighting spells.

I created a new mage called "Earth Mage", this mage cast healing and defensive spells.

Mages can be killed by any warrior pretty easily so protect them.

Spawning
The old system used to randomly place your Blade on a map. The new system has a spawning point and your entire party will spawn around this point every time you join a map.

Editing the Party
You can now edit how your party spawns, so if you want the mage in the back and the Lord in the front you can do this.

Additional editing features are coming.

In the Future

Some things I'd like to develop in the near future:

* Guilds
* Challenges