As you may be aware, we’ve been hard at work on the Mycena Cave Adventure System since February, and have been working closely with some of you in a Closed Beta program since the early June. Many of you experienced some of what this feature could offer during its alpha release in the Quest for the Icy Soul event in February. Since then, it has grown in leaps and bounds, in part from your feedback, but especially from the tireless efforts of our various teams of beta testers.

I’m excited to announce that our closed beta is coming to a… well, a close! This means a few things: that we are no longer looking for new beta testers, that it has progressed by a staggering degree to the point where we’re almost ready to call it a finished MVP, and most excitingly, that we’re working hard on our last few tasks before we can begin the open beta!

With so much work behind us, I thought it might be fun to look at some of how adventuring has changed. We hope you’ll be as excited as we are!

You may remember the sneak peek we posted to whet your appetites to what was coming — while the event consisted of people experiencing an adventure, it was really the initial alpha release of a full-blown system in which people could create their own adventures that others could then play through. Here’s a few screenshots of how things have improved:

Before

Commands:
Enemies:
items:

After

Commands:
Enemies:
items:

Some of the differences are subtle, but it’s a lot easier to use, and more flexible. There are also a number of new tools built into the builder to help you keep track of your adventure and ensure that it’s correct and consistent.

The adventuring interface hasn’t changed a whole lot, but there are a few notable differences between what it is now and what it was. The most noticeable of which is that die rolls are explicitly shown whenever they are rolled, as well as generally more information being displayed in status messages (current HP if altered, etc.).

Oh man, here’s where the real gems are, and there’s far too many things to talk about them all here. An enormous focus has been put on system flexibility, giving as many tools to worldbuilders as possible to empower them to construct the mechanics they want to. These aren’t as conducive to screenshots and are difficult to list without a lot more context on how limited the original release was, but some of the highlights are:

• A full-fledged expression engine to basically let you do arbitrary calculations in deciding what should happen next
• A versioned publishing system, letting worldbuilders update their adventure without breaking existing adventurers’ threads
• Damage types that are more than flavor, including resistances, vulnerabilities, etc.
• Varying combat types such as ranged attacks, magical attacks, or whatever else the worldbuilder decides to include
• A much more comprehensive “item” structure, allowing for magical items that do pretty much anything
• Countless new “actions” that can be built into commands, encounters, items, and so on
• The list goes on… and on… and on…

There’s a number of things still on the to-do list to implement, including things like passing adventure items between players, expanding the options for armor, having a correctness-verifier to make sure your adventure doesn’t have any obvious mistakes in it, and so on.

One thing that struck us during the beta was how easy it was to get lost in the weeds. Putting together a small adventure isn’t terribly difficult, but it’s very hard to resist the seductive call to start planning out your 50-piece magnum opus with custom mechanics for everything under the sun, only to find that after doing the first 90% you then had to do the next 90% and a third 90%, and suddenly realize that really you’re still only about a fifth of the way there and please check back in six months. It’s far more difficult to say “I have all these great ideas that I won’t do today”, to point at an adventure, say “this is finished now” and click ‘publish’.

To that end, we’re working on a very hands-on guided introduction to it for when we launch the open beta.

Back in February I quipped that

this is the largest and most complex feature we’ve added to Mycena Cave since… well, quite literally ever, actually.glitch

Since then, it has grown by an enormous degree: it turns out that making something more complex while simultaneously making it easier to use is a rather difficult task.

To give you an idea of the insane task foisted upon our beta worldbuilders, back in February this thing was less of an Adventure Builder and more of a Quest-For-The-Icy-Soul Builder — amusingly, this was one of the hardest things to communicate to the beta testers at the beginning of the program, leading to questions like “you can add 1 to a number, but can’t subtract 1?” having answers like “I didn’t need to subtract anything in QftIS”. Making the Quest for the Icy Soul was easy in comparison: if I needed a new feature I’d code it up, but you can’t do that in a general builder: the Worldbuilders didn’t just need to think about what mechanics you’d need in an adventure, they quite literally had to think about what mechanics you’d need in order to build whatever mechanics someone else might need. It’s a shockingly difficult question to answer, and is to a large degree why this update has been months in the making.

If you can’t tell from the tone of this post, I am incredibly excited to bring you this update. I don’t yet have a final date for when the open beta will begin, but I hope this post gives you an idea of how close we are OuO

:D

:D

:D :D :D

ovo Much excite ^-^

I am excited you’re excited =D I agree with ScienceGal8, I’ve never seen anything quite like the Adventure system and this could easily be the distinctive thing (on top of amazing Artstyle and current events) that’s the gem that sets MC apart from other pet sites =)

Well done everyone on the hard work behind the scenes!

YeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEES.

And I am very aware of how much work this whole thing was and will continue to be: Thank you for sticking with it, I’m looking forward to the release soooo much ; A;

omggg this looks RAD AF _{also the people behind rpg maker could take a few pointers from team glitch on tidy ui, seriously}

thanks for all nyall’s hard work building and testing!! <3

I figured I’d pop in and showcase another recent update :)

Those of you who participated in the Quest for the Icy Soul probably remember some annoyance caused by the inability to discard or give adventure items to other adventurers in your thread. “Sure,” your character might have said, “you’re at Death’s door and I have three healing potions but no you can’t have one because they’re mine, nyaaaah!”

The reason for this constraint was primarily a user-interface issue: if you had four adventurers and were holding three items, that’s 16 commands in the command dropdown just for item management, crowding everything important out of the way. Gross! The new adventure system has resolved this issue:

Clicking those blue buttons creates the item-related command in the dropdown and selects it for you, leaving it clean and holding only your actual adventure-specific commands unless you specifically need to do something with items.

LiveSky you can still peek at the old adventure threads if you want to get a feel for the basic idea :)

https://www.mycenacave.com/forums/quest-for-the-icy-soul

glitch
thanks for the link! definitely looks a lotta fun, different from what i expected in that event (which is why i didn’t participate). in any case, looking forward to trying it out :D