ELUSION

World events. Double XP weekends, double loot nights, a land made to stir for a whole evening - set ahead of time from my GM panel, no new build needed. Everyone online hears when one is coming and again when it begins, a line at the top of the screen counts it down and names the next one, and the server pays it at every kill.

Player stats, for me. A new window in my GM panel shows how far new players get - making a character, the first kill, level 5, coming back the next day - where the ones who stop stop, and which monsters get hunted. It counts, it never names anyone, and it is how the next updates get picked: by what keeps people playing.

A steady aim. The ball on your aim ring no longer wobbles while you walk with the mouse still - it was reading the mouse a fraction of a step behind your character. Your attacks aim from the same steady point. And the GM panel's World tab now reports to Results.

The stirring lands. Every three hours one of the seven lands - dark, light, ice, wind, earth, fire or water - stirs, and the whole server hears about it. Its monsters glow in its colour, hit 25% harder, have half again their health, move faster and drop loot half again as often, and your resistance to that element counts half again as much. The world picks the land nobody has been hunting, and a line at the top of the screen counts down to the next one.

The warrior's gold finisher is one clean crescent now. The glow behind it was a slightly bigger copy that sat just ahead of the wave, so every third swing looked doubled.

Voice settings, in the Party window. Turn everyone's voices up or down, or each player on their own, up to 200% - set before they even join voice. Turn your own microphone up or down and watch it on a live level bar. Open-mic sensitivity draws a line on that bar so only your voice goes out, not your keyboard or the room. And switches for noise suppression and echo cancellation.

Safer logins. Your login now belongs to the copy of the game you signed in on: if it is ever used from anywhere else, every session on the account ends at once and the game tells you to sign in again. Staff logins last 12 hours, end after half an hour away, and ask for the password again before bans, ranks, gold or items. The game only talks to the server over HTTPS. Everyone signs in once more after this update.

Party voice. Switch Voice on in the Party window and talk to your party - open mic or push to talk (V), a mute key (B) and a volume for each voice, with a speaker lit beside the name of whoever is talking. It is the browser's own calling, through a relay, so nobody ever sees anyone else's internet address. And click any name - over a player's head, in the Players list or in chat - to whisper, add a friend, trade, invite them to your party or guild, or report them to staff.

Parties are here. Invite anyone from the Players list, or from the new Party window under Social, and play as a party of up to four. The window shows each member's class, level, where they are and their health, and the leader can hand on the lead or remove someone. Party chat has its own tab, your party's names show in light blue over their heads, and the map now shows your party in your area and every monster on ground you have explored, in its element's colour.

Attacks aim without a mouse. With the cursor off the game - playing on the keyboard in Chrome, say - every attack used to swing toward the screen's top-left corner, so a warrior could only hit left. Now an attack aims at your cursor only while it is on the game, and otherwise straight ahead the way you face. The warrior's gold finisher is less cluttered, and other players wear their aim ring and a health bar under their name, so you see them the way you see yourself.

Fixed an error when changing area just as the connection dropped, and gave the healer back its own attack - 0.40.0 had it playing a sword swing. Another tank's fire ring now draws under the players standing in it, not over them, and a new Options switch hides everyone else's attacks. A healer's aura still heals you while it is hidden.

The healer heals. Right-click drops a beam of green light where you point: everyone inside the ring gets back a quarter of their health, green orbs fly out to heal friends just outside it, and monsters caught in it take damage. Every class now attacks with left-click, or Space.

The warrior's sword throws the crypt's orbs. Every swing flings three steel orbs off the blade, and the gold finisher wave flies with a fan of gold orbs and bursts into a ring of them where it cuts a monster. The white arc and the trails from 0.38.0 are gone.

The warrior's blows land harder. Sparks fly where the sword cuts, the first blow of a swing holds for a heartbeat with a small shake, and every third swing throws a gold finisher wave, bigger and half again as strong.

The healer's orbs leave long glowing trails, and each main orb has a one-in-five chance to hit for double. A doubled orb turns gold, so you can see it land.

The healer's orbs got the crypt's look: a white-hot core, green wisps behind them and a splash of sparks where they hit. Every fifth shot also throws two smaller orbs, one either side.

The mage's ice spike has effects. Frost streams off the staff, the target ring frosts over with a shadow growing under it as the spike falls, it shatters into shards and mist on impact, and it leaves a patch of frost melting on the floor. The Meteorite throws embers instead.

Fixed the boss rooms hiding what lies on the floor. Meteor craters, Dynamite scorch and the mage's target circle were drawn under the floor tiles in the boss room and the gauntlet, so nobody saw them. Now they show.

The tank's aura burns. While it is lit, the floor inside the ring glows with small flames and embers, and the ground it passes over stays scorched for a few seconds, so a walk leaves a burnt path behind you.

The mage and the tank get aim rings, so all four classes have one now. The mage's ball points where the spell will come down, and the tank's where a stick of Dynamite will land.

The healer can hold the new off hands too: the tomes, wands and grimoires are for mages and healers both.

The mage gets an off hand. A tome and a wand at every tier from iron to ember - tomes add armour and mana, wands damage and mana - and three grimoires at tier 5. The store sells them up to amethyst; the ember pair and the grimoires are finds.

Monsters keep coming between attacks. They used to stop at the edge of their reach and shoot from there for the whole fight; now they walk in closer while they reload. Bosses keep their distance as before. Two new Options switches turn the aim rings and the range circles on and off.

Monsters notice you close and chase you far. They used to spot you from off the screen; now one comes for you when you are within 250, or the moment you hit it, and follows until you are past its leash. Its circle on the floor shows both.

Range circles. A faint dashed circle round every monster shows how far it will follow you, and a warrior holding the Double Axe sees how far the axe reaches.

Every monster shows who it is after: a faint red ring round its feet with a dot pointing at its target, so in a group you can see which of you it picked. It turns full red once you are in its reach and flashes as it attacks.

The warrior gets the aim ring too. The ball around its feet follows your cursor, and the slash wave - or the thrown Double Axe - goes exactly where it points. The ring flashes on every swing.

The healer's aim is fixed, and you can see it. Its stream used to leave from its feet, so aiming up-left or up-right went higher than you meant and crossed its own body. Now every orb leaves from the middle of the healer, and a ring on the floor around it carries a ball that shows exactly where the next one will go.

Every potion is in the store now. The large and greater health, mana and stamina potions were drops only; you can buy them alongside the tiny, small and medium ones. Ember gear and the mythic weapons stay rare finds.

More hits land in the Field. Every orb that reaches you now counts as its own hit - before, one hit let the rest pass through for a tenth of a second - and an orb has to miss the middle of your character, not a dot at its feet. Standing still in a pack of monsters, you now take about twice as many hits. So don't stand still.

Fixed the cooking fire. A burnt fish stayed charred while the next one cooked, picking a different fish mid-stack showed it while the old kind kept cooking, and the bar flicked to the burn chance between fish. Now the fire shows the fish actually cooking, the bar is only the cook, the burn chance is written under the fish, and a burnt fish stays on the fire long enough to see.

Slowed down the fastest characters. Agility added 10 speed a level and running doubled it, so a level-99 warrior ran at over 2,000 - past anything in the game that could aim at it. Now agility adds 1 a level and running is half as fast again: a level-99 warrior walks at 298 and runs at 447.

Large slimes got dangerous. Their spray slows to a stop right where you were standing and stays there as acid for a few seconds, and every other shot they lob their acid ball over everything onto your spot - marked on the floor while it falls - where it bursts into a ring and leaves a puddle. Standing still is no longer safe around a slime.

The monsters' own shots are back. Every monster in the Field fires its artist-drawn arrow, orb or acid ball again, with its pattern flying alongside rather than instead. The Bush Sniper's arrow comes wound in a spiral of orbs and trails a V of them behind it.

Every monster in the Field has its own pattern: the Bush Mage a slow ring with a gap toward you, the Fire Sprite a pincer that closes where you stood, the Electric Sprite a chain that strings out as it flies, and the slimes twins, sprays and a burst as a big one splits. Each orb is a share of the monster's shot, in its element's colour.

The Field is now bullet hell. Down the ladder from the Big Field, monsters fire volleys of glowing orbs to weave between, and walls stop them. The Big Field stays the RPG it was, so the game has both kinds of fight. In a group, everyone sees the same volleys and each of you dodges your own.

Fixed kills going uncounted. A small slime hit in the first tenth of a second after it split off - landing in a fire ring, say - lost health on your screen without the server ever hearing of it. A monster's first hit now introduces it to the server.

The Credits now read "a game by Robert and AllMind". AllMind built the first inventory and helped with the UI when Elusion began, and his name belongs on it.

A head start for new players. While the game is in testing, I can set a character's level from the GM tools, so someone who has just arrived can try the later weapons without hours of levelling first. It goes on their record and can be undone. And AllMind is back on the team as co-owner, with the GM tools beside mine.

Every item and every coin I hand out is now written in a ledger, with what it was worth on the day, so there is an honest record of how much of the game's gold came from me rather than from playing. The gifts from before were read back out of the server's logs.

Fixed a character that kept walking on its own. In Firefox, a running attack (Shift and right-click) opened the browser's own menu, which swallowed the key you were holding, so you walked that way until you pressed it again. The game now lets go of held keys whenever the browser's menu, another window or a text box takes the keyboard.

Playing together got a lot better. You now see each other's meteors, thrown axes, Dynamite, slash waves and healing orbs, not just the swing - as pictures, so only the attacker's own hits count. Pulling a boss gate's lever opens it for everyone in the area. And other players walk past smoothly instead of surging and stalling.

Walk and talk. Press Enter to open chat and type; Enter again sends the line and hands the keys back, so you never have to stop. Left open, the chat window goes see-through over the world and comes back whole when you type or point at it.

Every mythic has two rolls: a common one on one attack in ten, and a rare one on one in a hundred. The Meteorite drops a second meteor, or, rarely, the pull. The Double Axe flies wide, reaching half as far again, or, rarely, bloody, spattering the ground as it spins. Dynamite throws a bundle of three, or, rarely, a barrage of five - in place of the old bundle on every fifth throw. Each weapon's tooltip names its rolls.

The Meteorite can pull. While the stone falls, its ring of fire drags the monsters around it in toward the impact, so a pack bunches up to take the hit; bosses stand their ground. Since v0.17.2 it is one meteor in a hundred - watch for the wider ring.

Monsters that had no death of their own - the sprites, bush mages and bush snipers - no longer just vanish. They flash white and break apart into pixels, thrown up in their element's colour.

The portal you arrive through now closes behind you as soon as you walk away, instead of hanging around until you happen to step back over it.

Step through the town's portal and you land in the Big Field: one long road with ten packed fields off it, a different element in each and harder the further you go. The ladder at the far end takes you down to the Field, then on to the gauntlet, the Crowned Beholder, and the teleporter home.

The mythics get louder. Dynamite blasts as wide as a meteor, throws faster, keeps the tank's fire ring burning while you throw, and every fifth throw is a bundle of three that goes up in a chain. The Double Axe whips up a whirlwind that reaches further the longer it spins, and every cut leaves its target bleeding. The Meteorite falls wrapped in a fire vortex, with a ring of flame swirling in on the ground where it is about to land.

Dynamite leaves the ground smouldering. Every blast's scorch keeps crackling with sparks and smoke for a second and a half, burning everything that stays in it - about a quarter more damage on a boss that stands its ground.

The Meteorite lands twice as wide and leaves its crater on fire: flames, a glowing floor, and a burn on anything that stays in it for a couple of seconds. Dynamite chains: a blast sets off any lit stick near it, a beat later and a quarter harder, so sticks thrown at one spot go up one after another.

Mythic weapons hit like the rarest drops in the game should. The Double Axe goes from 110 to 140, the Meteorite from 41 to 53 and Dynamite from 18 to 23, and each adds 15% damage instead of 9%. Leave the Double Axe spinning and it speeds up, to twice as fast after four seconds.

Beat the last Crowned Beholder and a teleporter now opens in its room to take you home to town. Before, the only way out was the ladder back up to the Field. Pets also say how to bring them out: right-click one in your bag to summon it.

The bosses go by their real name now: the Crowned Beholder. There are seven of them, one for every element, from Light The Crowned Beholder to the Dark one at the bottom. You'll see the name in the Kills window, on the town sign, and when somebody finds a mythic on one.

The Electric Sprite pet hits from a distance now. Its orb faded out after about 80 pixels, so unless the pet was right beside what it was aiming at, the shot never landed. It flies as far as every other pet's shot now.

The Credits' Support tab now just asks for a hot cocoa: put your name in the PayPal note and I'll add it to the list.

Times are right across the clocks changing. In the browser, every chat line, notice and log shows the hour it really happened, even from before a daylight-saving change, and a game left running picks up the new hour when the clocks go forward or back. The Kills window's "counted since" date is your own date now, not the server's. And leap years are checked: Feb 29 is a Tuesday in 2028, and 2100 doesn't have one.

Credits, under Options. Who drew the art, who made the sound, everyone who has bought me a hot cocoa, and the engine the game is built on — each on its own tab, with links to the artists' own pages.

Armour resists an element. Every piece of armour now rolls one of the seven elements and a share of its harm to take away — a few percent on iron, more the deeper the tier, and the top of the range on a Perfect piece. Pieces that share an element add up, to half a hit at most, so a set built against fire makes the fire boss a different fight. The shop shows "?" until you buy, the Gear window adds up everything you wear, and weapons never carry an element: what you hit for is still your own.

The server watches every fight now. Until today it took your game's word that a monster died. Now it keeps its own count of every monster's health from the hits it sees, checks each hit against what your character could really do with the gear and skills you have, and writes down any kill it can't account for. Nothing changes in play yet: kills pay exactly as before. After a week of seeing what honest fights look like, a kill will only pay when the server's count agrees. Also fixed: when you play with others, a large slime no longer shows a second copy of itself for a moment as it splits.

A kill record. Kills, under Social or on the K key, lists every monster in the game with its picture, how many of each your character has killed and when the last one fell. The Everyone tab adds up every player's kills and shows who has killed the most of each. Monsters you haven't killed yet are greyed out, so it's also a list of what's left to find.

Bigger text and new fonts. Options can make all the text bigger, up to 150%, and change the font to one of five that suit the game. And you can change your keys: open Controls (H), pick Change keys, click an action and press the key you want. Every action takes two keys, and every key can move except Esc.

For the downloaded game on a PC with more than one screen: Options has a Window mode (windowed, borderless fullscreen or exclusive fullscreen) and lets you pick which screen to play on, listed by size and refresh rate. The game opens where you left it, and a frame cap can match your screen. If the game stutters on one of your screens, exclusive fullscreen is the one to try.

Better tools for looking after players. The server keeps the last few snapshots of every character, so if something goes badly wrong with yours I can put it back the way it was. I can also send an item straight to a player, see who's online in a list, and Go to puts me right beside you instead of at the area's entrance.

Esc closes every window now, including the shop, loot bags, the trade window, the kingdom board and the players list. Closing the trade window still doesn't cancel the trade. And monsters no longer ignore you when you back up against a wall: standing flush against some walls hid you from every enemy in range, so they'd crowd around you and never attack. They see you now, and their shots aim at you rather than at the wall behind you.

You fight the same monsters now. Everyone in an area sees the same slimes, the same boss and the same spikes coming up out of the floor, and can take them on together. The loot stays yours: when a monster dies, everyone who landed a hit on it gets their own bag and their own XP, and nobody else sees what's in yours. And if someone leaves in the middle of a fight, nothing resets; the monsters carry on right where they were.

Loot bags can be picked up from much further away. They also stopped catching enemy shots: a bag on the floor used to soak up arrows meant for you. And nobody on staff can create items any more. Only I can, to test things.

Rare finds wait two days before they can change hands. A mythic, or a Perfect piece from a bag or the shop, can't be traded for 48 hours after you get it. And I can pause trading for everyone with one switch if something looks wrong; a trade that's already open always gets to finish. Trading everything else works exactly as before. It's there so that if someone ever cheats their way to loot, it stays with them while I look.

In the browser, the little online dots in front of names were showing up as boxes with codes in them, in the Friends, Guild, Trade and Staff windows. The game's font doesn't have those symbols, and a browser has nowhere to borrow them from. They're drawn properly now.

You can see each other now. Everyone in the same area shows up on your screen, live: walking and turning, swinging their weapon, the tank's aura lit, their pet trailing behind, and their name over their head in the colour they chose, with their guild and the crown or staff badge. It's company, not shared combat yet. Each of you still fights your own monsters, so a friend swinging at nothing is swinging at something only they can see. Shared fights are next.

Gear rolls its stats now. Every piece that drops, and every piece you buy, rolls each of its stats between 85% and 115% of normal, and one in a hundred is Perfect: 120% on everything, in a gold frame. The shop shows a "?" where the stats go, and you find out what you got when you buy it. Two jade swords aren't the same sword any more.

You can sell to the shop. It pays a twentieth of what a piece is worth: enough to clear out a bag, never enough to beat hunting. Prices went up across the board too. Gear costs twice what it did and potions four times, so a potion now costs about what the cooked fish of its tier is worth.

The three spike gates by the ladder down to the bosses have levers now, one on each side. Pull either one and all three drop; pull it again and they rise. And going through the town portal no longer plays its sound twice.

You can play Elusion in your browser now, at play.elusionrpg.com. Your characters live on the game's own server, not in your browser, so they're there whenever you sign in again. Bring a keyboard and mouse.

Every enemy in the game can now drop a mythic weapon, and the tougher it is, the better your odds. The Crowned is about one in 150 kills. A light slime is one in two million, a real lottery ticket. It's always your own class's weapon. When one drops, the bag lands under a tall red pillar of light and the screen flashes red, and everyone online gets a banner saying who found it and on what. The bag stays on the ground for five minutes, so a boss fight can't cost you it.

Three new weapons from Ahvassa, and each one changes how your class attacks. The mage's Meteorite brings a meteor down where you aim. It comes in at an angle, its shadow grows until it lands, and it leaves a crater. The warrior's Double Axe is thrown to a spot and spins there, cutting everything near it, until you call it back. The tank's Dynamite replaces the aura with a lit stick on a fuse. One meteor or throw in ten comes twice. They need level 22.

I played Elusion as a brand-new player for the first time, and it was rough. Nothing told me that Space attacks, Shift sprints or E opens the bank, nothing said which way the Field was, and the bar along the bottom was fourteen tiny buttons. Now the first time you stand in town, a welcome card shows you the way out and every key, and H brings the keys back whenever you want them. The bar is down to eight: Friends, Players, Guild, Trade and the Kingdom board live under Social, and Options and logging out under Menu.

A round of polish. The bank's Deposit and Withdraw, the level on Character Stats and all eight gear slots now use the same sockets as the hotbar, so the whole game reads as one set. The cooking window used to open stuck in the top-left corner with twelve empty boxes; it opens in the middle now, with one row of six, one per kind of fish. And Character Stats is two columns with short numbers: 1M, not 1,007,892.

Trading got a proper overhaul, and testing it with two accounts found the nasty one: whoever pressed Accept first could lose the item they'd just traded for, the next time they so much as moved a potion. Their game never heard the trade had finished, so it saved the old bag over the new one. Fixed. Accept now only agrees to the offer you actually saw, so nobody can swap a sword for a stick at the last second. You're told when someone wants to trade with you, items show their icons and worth, and your recent trades are listed.

Guild chat works. The tab said "Guilds are not in the game yet" long after guilds were in the game — the server had guild chat the whole time, and the game never asked it. A player typed "oi bruv" into it, nothing happened, and that was the bug report.

My mods have a proper desk now: every player's record, a log of every ban, kick and warning, and staff-only notes, so whoever is on can pick up where the last person left off when I'm not around. When somebody says they got scammed, staff can look up exactly what was traded, with whom, and on which character.

The name colour you pick in Options finally shows everywhere — chat, friends, guilds and the players list, not just over your own head. Rank became a badge instead (the crown, MOD, DEV), because once colours are free, a colour can't prove anyone is staff. Guilds got a cleaner panel too: online members first, what everyone is playing, and a short history of who joined, got promoted or left.

I died, came back with full health, logged out, and logged back in on 52 HP out of 504. My own server had been catching it for weeks and I hadn't looked — the client was healing itself, and the check that watches for unexplained healing was trimming it back to what regeneration could really produce. It was right. Accepting death was still a decision made on the player's machine rather than a request the server had to agree to. Both ways out of the death screen go through the server now, and the gold you were carrying is properly destroyed rather than just vanishing off your screen and coming back at the next login.

A switch that makes me hostile. Flip it and the whole world is told — and it stays on screen for as long as it's true, rather than scrolling away like any other message. There's also a Players menu anyone can open: who is online, what they're playing, and where they are. One day I want to be the world boss.

Every line of chat and every notice from the server now says when it happened, in your own local time. That sounds small. It wasn't: the server had been sending the time all along and the game was throwing it away, so anyone logging in was handed a week of old announcements, every one of them claiming to be happening right now.

The Kingdom's Coffers counts every gold piece that leaves the world for good — and it now says how much of a player's contribution was given and how much was simply lost when they died. Deaths are counted too. Dying still climbs the board; the board just admits what it's made of.

Elusion is getting a sound. It took me over a year of asking to get Horizon into my Discord — he's 17, has been writing music since he was 15, plays football, and is a genuinely busy guy. He's working on the intro theme in secret and has assured me it's no problem. A placeholder is in for now; the real track is on the way.

Every skill is now server-owned. Attack, defense, agility, magic, fishing and cooking are granted and checked on the server — no client can claim or edit its way to level 99.

Security pass across the board: saves, inventory, gold and the economy are all reconciled against what the server actually granted, backed by 3,400+ automated tests.