Having read the recent Staff Feedback posts, It's clear I could both be more active and more transparent with everyone. I've decided to write up this development blog on Zulrah so you can see our progress from start to finish, as well as be notified when we've been working on this piece of content. If this Dev Blog is well received, I may make one for future projects too. Thanks for the idea @Timburt!
Well, where to start? With what's completed so far, of course!
What we've done so far:
1) We fixed an issue with the teleport location map (see below spoiler)
2) Added the ability to teleport to Zulrah.
3) Created the instance-starting via NPC on the docks of Zul-Andra.
4) As far as the combat of Zulrah goes, we have currently completed the full phase system, as well as the different attack sequences. We also have all three coloured models of Zulrah attacking with their correct combat style.
5) Zulrah's Melee AOE attack is fully working as well as the Jad Phases.
6) Our most recent piece of work was creating acceptable GFX for Zulrah's different attacks. As we aren't an OSRS based server we have to design these ourselves to make them feel as close to the original as possible. I feel Splash did a good job with this.
7) We also started work on the final special attacks; snakelings and poison clouds. This is an interesting one as we need to place them at specific
co-ordinates in certain phases so fairly time consuming to do.
To-do list:
1) We need to copy over the drop tables from the OSRS Wiki and then re-balance them to make them suited to Ely.
2) We need to disable Summoning Familiars and Cannons in this area.
3) When we finish the final special attacks, we'll need to get some of the Elysians online to help us test Zulrah to ensure the combat is flawless and the boss is balanced. This will most likely be the last step before release.
4) We also need to handle how to reclaim your items upon death, we will most likely mimic the same system OSRS uses for Zulrah.
5) The main drops from Zulrah will need to be made 100% from scratch as we don't have any of the required assets such as the OSRS Blowpipe attacking animation. It shouldn't be too hard to use something similar, though. We also need to find a solution for Monster Carnage and the Serpentine Helmet as we want to move it to exclusively Zulrah.
Moving forward, any time we work on this piece of content I'll create a new post detailing what we've done (I'm more than likely going to reserve a few posts below this one so I can just edit it in and have it all in 1 spot).
If you'd like to see more of this type of post in the future, please do let us know. We hope to get Zulrah released by the end of November!
Developer
