Graal2001 is Moving Forward Again

[Lance]

First of all I'd like to say there's just something amazing about Graal2001 and its community. For the past few years, I've signed on Graal a couple of times each year to visit and check things out. I've also visited the forums sometimes, and it is impressive to see the sheer volume of people who have posted saying they come on Graal every few months to check on the project, or this is the only project that would bring them back to Graal, or otherwise reminiscing about the good old days.

That said, I'll skip straight to what you've been wanting to hear: Graal2001 is really going to come back! For the past week I have been working with a few fantastic people, at first get the server back to the incomplete state it was in when I left the project, and then to start moving forward. For this to be accomplished, the patchwork backup the GDT had put together for Skyld was nuked and replaced with a much more current (and complete) patchwork backup based on files Stefan provided as well as my own backups. From here we have been working around the clock to continue work that would have been done six years ago had we not been forced into a premature reopening. We are also working on integrating several new additions and improvements that were made from teams that came after, including many of Konidias's updated graphics.

We aren't going about things very haphazardly; we are extremely organized with several tools to facilitate planning and communication, and we are making good use of these tools. By now I'm sure you are wondering what some of our plans for the server are, so I'll get into that immediately.

• Kingdoms: Kingdoms have always been a big part of Graal2001, but times have changed. I can guarantee that they will still be big, bold, and iconic. Our current projected kingdom count is 3.
• Quests: We intend to ship with the quests you are all familiar with as well as a few new ones. Formerly-broken quests, such as Birdbird's pyramid quest, will be restored to full working order and available for all players upon release.
• Events: Graal2001 was well-known for its events such as survivor, CTF, laser tag, etc. First we will continue to fix old events that were not working. In just the past week, for example, the Kingdoms event and Laser Tag have received a good bit of attention. We will also be adding tools to make hosting the events a bit less chaotic for Events Team members. There will also be some creative new events.
• Items: The same familiar items and wheel-around-you item management will return, but with a much more robust system powering it. This will allow us to create new items without having to update a ridiculous number of graphics, scripts, and animations.
• Money/Economy: Money on Graal2001 was always meaningful, and we intend to keep it that way. We will be tweaking the gralat yields of several jobs to ensure that no one job gives a disproportionately high amount of gralat for the time and focus investment of the player. We further intend to have more interesting things for players to spend their gralat on rather than just hats, dolls, bomy pets, and personal housing.
• Jobs: Jobs are getting a lot of love. Instead of D-mashing, jobs will be more interesting and interactive. There will be new jobs available for players upon release.
• Systems: We will continue to use the HP system. Tentatively a player's starting HP will be 100, with a possible 200 maximum after completing quests.
• Overworld cleanup: There was a lot of stupid stuff in stupid places. We will be cleaning up the overworld to put things in a somewhat-more-sane arrangement. We will be removing a lot of empty/useless/unfinished stuff.
• World/Environment: Many things will be receiving a refresh. There are still several areas that are nothing but a repeated single green grass tile. There are several paths whose tiles change from swamp to water to grass randomly a half-dozen times; that will be addressed. We want the world to feel alive around you. Also, the train is working.

More information about all of these categories will be forthcoming; this was only intended to be a quick summary. If any skilled developers, especially former Graal2001 staff, are interested in contributing, we would be happy to welcome you aboard. Contact me for more information.

Lastly, we will try to make several posts with progress-update information as well as teasers about new content. There will also be several testing events to get community feedback, make tweaks, etc. However, we will still reserve the right to surprise you all with some unannounced work.

Graal2001 is coming back. Tell your friends!