Cobalt Arachne

Also, here's something for a little extra! A bunch of WIP screenshots from the zone during assembly, and some peeks at what's going on behind the curtain...

Most welcome! 🙂 Not only does the design allow for it, but leagues clearing the content by utilizing defeats is something I'd like to see become more viable, so expect that method to continue seeing balance improvements with time.

Hmm, given they're a capable wielder of dual blades, axe/shield, and the bow it's probably most sensible that they're ambidextrous. I feel like I've read about eyesight says that it is linked to your primary hand, and since the Minotaur has three eyes, being equally capable with both hands makes the most sense to me.

Hey everyone, it's Cobalt Arachne! I'm one of the designers here on the Homecoming Team! For those who are unfamiliar with my past projects, I was designer behind the Dr. Aeon Strike Force, Advanced Modes, Sheathed/Holstered Weapons, Aether Rewards, and most recently, the Labyrinth of Fog raid zone! Which will be the focus of my post today. It's been a while since my last Dev Diary (Wow, all the way back to January 2022!), but I felt like with the Labyrinth of Fog's live release, and it being one of the most experimental features we've released to-date, that people would enjoy some insight into the developmental process behind the unique project. This project was geared to defy precedent so this might run long, but for those interested, I hope it will prove a good read! Time to dig into the making of the Labyrinth of Fog! 🧠 Labyrinth Concept Origins The Labyrinth of Fog began the first week of August 2023, as an experiment in liminal space mazes using the City of Heroes engine. For those unfamiliar, liminal spaces are oftentimes seen as the 'space between points of interest' and games that focus on them are often maze like, surreal, and the assembly of these spaces can often defy what is sensible or realistic architecture. Sound familiar? Because that sounds to me like the various City of Heroes' mission instances, twisty mazes of offices, labs, warehouses and more! Who hasn't walked through one of those extra big 4-story office maps and thought 'How could anybody actually *work* in these labyrinths?', I always found it funny, but it was an entertaining thought that sparked the idea that became the Labyrinth of Fog. That was where the zone's earliest work began, as an experimental map to build a liminal space maze using our game's engine, and seeing what that felt like. An office floor that connected to a sewer floor that connected to a Council cave floor. Moving between spaces like this is already something players do in City of Heroes but assembling it in a different way resulted in a very different feeling. It was taking what the game already did, and adding new context to it, and resulting in something that felt worth building on. I felt that designing the map this way would result in a unique adaptation of a liminal space maze for City of Heroes. After playing around in the prototype space on my own enough to be satisfied, I now had my maze, but that needs actual gameplay to become content. The initial design of the maze involved a revolving number of colored floors, the hue would determine which threats that floor contained, and it helped set a size goal for how big the map needed to become. The Labyrinth of Fog currently has something in the high forties of individual unique floors and spaces, but that's actually only a third of what I originally scoped the design for. (The scope of the project quickly slammed into the walls of technical limitations.) Knowing that scale was a component of this design, I worked out a design plan to create what I was after: This became tracked in an Excel spreadsheet that I used for the remainder of the assembly process of the map. I planned out a new morning routine where I would wake up 3 hours earlier than usual, have some breakfast and caffeine, and then get to work. Each day was comprised of bringing a singular floor of the Labyrinth to completion. Building a Labyrinth floor a day keeps the burnout away! After building each floor, I would beaconize it (how the game's NPCs know where to move on the map), place the enemy spawns, and then ensure the Minotaur's (more info on them later!) pathfinding worked in bringing them to the floor from the whole of the zone. And so, things proceeded from there, and about a month-and-a-half later, I had a playable prototype! The Labyrinth's layout was planned before assembly! Originally containing multiple strata, only stratum A ended up being built in the zone, with stratums B & C going unused. Hard to imagine the Labyrinth being TRIPLE its current size, right? 🐄 Labyrinth For A Minotaur Due to the map being assembled from various map tile sets, the lore concept for the zone needed to be suitably surreal, so the map became a manifestation of the collective playerbase's memories. This allowed me to curate the experience to what would be most effective/fun in fulfilling a labyrinth's design, and not be hindered from loss of immersion for things such as players not having collision in the zone or there being a large variety of enemy groups present in the zone. It's around this point in the early phases that I explored the idea of some kind of monster being present in the maze to harass players, as this is something many other liminal space maze games utilize to drive pressure and engagement from participants. The decision to have some kind of persistent mechanical critter threat that would seek out the players, would answer many other parts of the design decisions, and from there a lot of formation of the zone came naturally. As for what this threat would be, I thought what fit better than borrowing from Greek mythology like so much in City of Heroes does? That landed me on making it an adaptation of Daedalus's labyrinth (who was conveniently already featured as an in-game NPC) and the maze's mythical Minotaur. Though City of Heroes had minotaurs as far back as Cimerora, I remember being confused by the Imperious Task Force having multiple minotaur enemies, as I'd always associated them with a unique singular monster in a famed labyrinth. So the liminal space maze now had its Minotaur In The Fog who could move to any player's locations with speed and accuracy, as the game's path-finding would naturally move them through the maze at the most efficient path possible using the Lua follow-behavior we prototyped while making Pocket D's Blarf. Once the Minotaur's basic setup was finished and function-proofed, I felt more confident that this was a solid-enough foundation to proceed as an actual content feature I could pitch to the team, subsequently receiving approval for the project, and then I moved from planning to prototype building! People are gonna have so much beef with this guy... Originally, the Minotaur was built as a non-intractable threat that players would have no choice but to flee from, as the Labyrinth's monster needed to be suitably scary and threatening. To accomplish this, I gave them a +5 base Level Shift, which would make them pretty much untouchable by the players, and any hit they sustained would likely spell their demise. The first draft concept had the zone's gameplay centralized around avoiding the Minotaur as much as possible and defeating the various mobs that spawned on each floor, who would provide greater rewards in exchange for the players not having a mini-map and losing the freedom to control which enemy groups they were fighting at any given time. In alpha testing, this setup was determined to be interesting, but not very fun/exciting, as there just wasn't much driving force behind the zone when it had no larger goal, and the feedback was that they wanted to somehow fight the Minotaur, instead of them being an invincible grim reaper. And so, I began crafting a way to turn the Labyrinth from a hazard zone into a raid zone. Thus, I designed a system by which players might collect their own Level Shifts while exploring and fighting in the Labyrinth, that they might climb to the point where they could eventually stand their ground and face the Minotaur as a raid boss. I put a point system in-place where defeats of the zone's Elite Bosses could be used to fuel Level Shifts, and then the pinata critters that ended up as Malevolent Fogs were scattered throughout the Labyrinth to encourage exploration and give an alternative progression method to defeating enemies. This fared far better in alpha feedback, and so I began redesigning the Minotaur to be a fully fleshed out raid boss. The battle felt like it was lacking in finale flair, so the Colosseum of Minos was put together to give them an exclusive arena to have a showdown in, which also allowed us to add some more mechanics into the mix, such as the spike traps and sand vortexes encountered there. Watch out for those spikes... They hurt! 🏃‍♂️ Maze Movement & Seeking Secrets At this point the zone was taking shape on its own, most the ideas were interacting favorably, and as I continued play testing it incrementally I found everything I was creating falling into place naturally, which is always a promising sign in any development project. By this point, I was feeling pretty satisfied with the raid encounter, but the exploration elements left something to be desired. Part of the Labyrinth's design is because players are not searching for any specific destinations, the lack of a mini map would not be a frustrating element and players would adapt and learn how to play the content without relying on it for spatial awareness/coordination. This ended up proving trickier in practice than in concept, as you needed a way to find and meet-up with your teammates seamlessly and so the Follow Through Fog tray power was added, which allows all players to instantly teleport from anywhere in the Labyrinth to the position of anybody on their Team or League. This worked out wonderfully, and I've been a big fan of how players use it to call out objectives and quickly meet-up and share information/locations. I wanted players to rely on each other, not silently using a provided system, and this design drove social interactivity forward, which is always a positive element to include in MMO design. Thus, we had our solution to the issue of how players would coordinate without a mini map to guide them and without that burden falling on raid leaders being required to manage every/all facets of coordination. With movement logistical issues out of the way, I began adding hidden things to find in the Labyrinth such as the secrets, motes, and gladiators. After all, if there's nothing to discover and find, the maze becomes a lot less interesting to traverse and explore! The idea of finding secret spaces was inspired by older 3D games, such as Super Mario 64, as a child and before the internet these games fascinated me with how many spaces there were to find, and without the ability to look things up you couldn't know if you had found everything or not. Those old games felt like they held infinite potential to surprise me, and that's the energy/vibes I channeled into making the Labyrinth's secrets: Surprises that might shock, entertain, alarm, fascinate, confuse, or obscure. The Labyrinth holds many secrets to be uncovered! In the same vein, the zone's accolade reward instead of giving a new power to players, instead gives them direct access to a new lobby in the zone. Along the way I was baking in as much lore and flavor as I could, nearly every power description in the project has text that gives context clues behind the zone's purpose and origins. By this point the Labyrinth was basically function-complete, and so it went to Closed Beta in March 2024, revealed to the public for the first time, and began the process of testing and gathering feedback before ultimately releasing on July 23rd, 2024, almost exactly a year to the project's conception to completion! It was a feature that aimed to do a lot of new, first-time things, and changing the approach to promote innovation, and I know despite the successes the project has seen, that there's lots of room for improvement in the Labyrinth of Fog, as such I'm fully committed to continuing supporting this feature moving forward and aiming to improve and polish it. Additionally, if anybody has any non-lore (no spoilers!) questions about specific Labyrinth design elements that weren't detailed in this post, feel free to ask! Look forward to future updates and improvements! A super big thanks to everyone involved in testing, feedback, and helping to make this project the best it could be! An additional thank you to all the support of our players & community, who are the real heroes in our City of Heroes! 🎉

I'll check on this... That bonus was working at one point, but last time I verified that was before it went to test.

Neither did I honestly! But it turns out with how flexible Lua is compared to SZE / hard coded scripts, that converting the existing Labyrinth script to run on LFG was actually a lot simpler than expected. That being said, the LFG version required numerous elements be pruned in order to function / load at all, as instances have less system resources than dedicated zones, and the Labyrinth of Fog pushes the CoH engine to it's upper limits. I will fully detail the LFG Labyrinth when it goes to test, but many of the non-raid / exploration elements (motes, secrets, gladiators, orange floors) had to be removed from the zone to get performance up so it could run on LFG, something that raid leaders might argue makes the instanced version "superior" specifically for raids, as all those non-raid-related distractions will be gone, and all Influence/Experience earned will be zone-wide. Reward Merits will instead drop as a lump sum from the Minotaur, with Malevolent Fogs serving solely as level shift points in LFG. The goal was to provide the raid experience in LFG, and I'm feeling optimistic it should deliver.

I'm reading all the feedback, and will be making a plethora of potential adjustments, many aimed at helping larger leagues. - There's a new area being added that's more tailored to infinitely grinding EBs after the Minotaur is defeated; This wider open space is aimed at bigger league sizes (3+ teams). - An Incarnate salvage roll being added to the Minotaur reward table, for those with no interest in Aether. - A method to track which Minotaur weapon defeats you have. - Balance wise, some adjustments towards making it easier to acquire shifts from fighting enemies. There were several elements we had limited test data for in beta when it came to large league performance and rewards, simply due to the larger effort of organizing them on the test servers, and thus they went out undertuned. Otherwise, I've been in lots of live Minotaur clears myself, and have been hard at work making changes aimed at improving things based on what I've experienced. Additionally, I'm intending to do a Dev Diary regarding the Labyrinth's design and creation and that should help clear up a lot of the reasoning behind XYZ. Lastly, I've prototyped an LFG version of the Labyrinth that's aimed for Issue 28, Page 2 that should give raid leaders more tools, including advantages such as zone-wide defeat rewards that instanced content receives. This instanced version will work a little differently from the zone version, but should improve the content's availability. I'm intending to continue supporting this feature, so expect on-going improvements! 🙂

If I'm recalling, time spent in zones is tracked for all players and all zones, though only a couple of badges use it (those examples being some of the few). Most of the current instances of those stats being called into dialog (like the various pedestrian click strings or kiosks) are hard coded, which is why a solution that's more flexible is probably worth doing here with our modern usage of Lua.

1: Definitely doable! I'll work on a Null-like solution there that shows which Minotaur weapons you need. 2 & 3: Probably doable... eventually. We don't have a function written in Lua currently that can query badge stats, we'd need that added before we can do anything fancier than a binary yes/no check, such as providing exact numbers.

Orange's secret isn't quite accessible yet, but will be added in an upcoming patch. The original plan for Orange's secret was changed slightly (it was just going to be the secret Minotaur door) but then I decided it deserved a proper secret, and the idea that I came up with was a bit more ambitious than just a cool set piece. The new secret will be something the whole raid can participate in, stay tuned!

There's a bug where the Mark pet is being accidentally scooped up by the Lua teleport functions (which grabs you + all your pets), but I should have that fixed in the future by having the destination of the teleport be the original coordinates where you summoned the Mark, not the invisible Mark critter's current position. Lua scripts in CoH have to be "owned" by something; Either the map, an arc container, or a critter must host it, the player can't host Lua themselves, which is why this accolade uses a pet setup to host it.

They do; Anything Boss rank or higher! 🙂

The consensus from the PvP players was that the freedom to customize their visuals in PvP was not disruptive, so they were made allowed in Issue 27, Page 7, with the exception of Mini Mode which impacts nameplate visibility.

I have not seen anybody report yet of having found green's secret, it's not a DE spore map.

The reason that ended up going undocumented is because it was an unplanned side-effect from a different fix, that was addressing Level 54 enemies running up against an internal hard-cap on single mob drop rewards if a bonus was being applied on top (such as Advanced Mode), meaning players were not being rewarded the full amount of rewards for their efforts. In order to fix that, the reward table's spectrum had to be very slightly pushed out to allow those modifiers to work at Level 54 so that the influence/experience numbers would reward the full amount without running up against the internal hard cap. After that change went live, people later noticed there was a small discrepancy as a result of that value range extension. On the other hand, players who run Advanced Mode content should notice their rewards looking as good as 40% better after that change went live. It's not ideal that it slipped through, but it would be more accurate to categorize it as a bug, not intentional; It's just a bug that didn't warrant the original fix be retroactively pulled/reverted.

Fixed that this morning; It shouldn't work to prevent that Hoof Stomp's KB next build, be aware, it will send you flying into spikes potentially. It will work for avoiding the Sand Vortexes (mag 11 KB), but not Hoof Stomps.

The stomp makes you vulnerable to the majority remainder of the Minotaur's other attacks. The Minotaur's weapon attacks (in this scenario his archery attacks) all deal 100% Negative Energy damage only. Netted Pilums deal Lethal, Unholy Plague Howl deals Toxic, and Hoof Stomp deals Smashing; These attacks won't be impacted by the debuff, but the rest of the move pool should. Edit: The stomp is also supposed to be doing unresistable KB that should send those hit flying into spikes; But might be bugged; Checking things now.

Giant Monster mini pet recipes (rare quality) will be vendor-able for 100,000 Inf, starting with Issue 28, Page 1.

Unsure, if I knew how to reproduce it, I wouldn't need to ask. That's what's difficult; There's no HP thresholds activation AI, it's an auto-power that fires automatically when the Minotaur goes below 75% HP at all, that governs the arena teleport and it activating at all revokes itself, so it activating at 50%/25% makes no sense because it's not possible with how any of the Minotaur works. If it happens again, let me know, maybe new details will come to light that will explain what you saw. No other reports, I can't get it to happen in my dev box, and it doesn't line up with the code I wrote, so unfortunately there's nothing I can do with this; What you're claiming happened shouldn't be possible, and I can't reproduce it. 😥

Will look into this; Shouldn't be firing more than once ever. Update: I can't get this to happen locally... As soon as I accept the prompt, the power that creates it vanishes from the Minotaur's power list and doesn't fire again. If this is still happening on Brainstorm's release candidate build, I'll need more details, as I can't reproduce it to test for causes.

Blarf has anti-stuck safety, if he hasn't changed position in a few minutes, it will automatically reset him, so that issue should resolve itself on it's own.

😄

Happy to hear somebody appreciate the extra map efforts haha, a large amount of preventative work was put in-place to ensure the zone's functionality remained intact and consistent as much as possible. The zone was designed to run cleanly and automatically and be able to account for things like the Minotaur trying to hunt somebody out of bounds or getting permanently stuck in the geometry. Hiccups may happen, but the zone will always correct itself in short order (between 3-15 minutes depending on what happened). It was the biggest hurdle with the Minotaur being a moving, persistent entity and the focus of the zone, with how quirky (like to lodge themselves in walls) City of Heroes NPC behavior sometimes can be with path-finding; It needed to be a zone that would never need GMs to come reset it if the Minotaur got stuck untargetable inside a wall, for example. Sounds like potential new speed-runner strats to me! 😄

Not sure how I've never come across this suggestion before; It's fantastic. O: I'll look into that for next wave's costumes!

It's meant to be engaging, but not difficult/challenging per se... If it's so easy it's boring that's not fun, but neither is so hard that raids can waste huge amounts of time by failing/not clearing because that's also not fun. It's not Advanced Mode content, so it's not going be inherently cut-throat about things. Reward abuse is gated by the timer, but since the Minotaur is up on an hourly rotation, they're meant to be regularly consumed by players rotating in and out of the zone throughout the day, which is why he scales, so they're doable at times that aren't raid prime times. If you can organize a whole 50 players together then this should be a very-consistent raid just like Hamidon or Mothership raids. The current idea was melee should be having to maneuver around Hoof Stomps, while range/control deals more with the Sand Vortexes that will cut through their positioning. That wasn't the original idea, but there were many colorful and lengthy posts about how much melee disliked the idea that their positioning success would have to be dependent on control locking the Vortexes down for them.