Devlog - Legend of the Abyss

[Carl-Richard]

Meanwhile, I'm playing an unofficial restoration of a 22 year old game.

Quote

What is Lost City?

Lost City is focused on RuneScape preservation through open-source accessibility.

We are an initiative that has been ongoing since 2022 to recreate and restore forever-lost RuneScape 2 versions.

The old game will only live in fleeting memories otherwise. Jagex has no backups.

Development is at a steady hobbyist pace - after 2 years of active open-source development (2023) we hosted Lost City publicly for players in 2025.

If you want to help, potential contributors are encouraged to visit our development Discord to chat with us. We can teach people willing to learn.

https://lostcity.rs/t/faq-what-is-lost-city/16

Edited Sunday at 01:20 AM by Carl-Richard

[LordFall]

17 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Meanwhile, I'm playing an unofficial restoration of a 22 year old game.

https://lostcity.rs/t/faq-what-is-lost-city/16

I played runescape a bit in school, I didn't get into it I'm french so I ended up falling for another popular mmorpg at the time Dofus.

I like the job system from runescape, I like systems so the different jobs going from 1-99 seems cool to me.

Can you elaborate on what you like about the game and why you still play it all these years later?

Also why do you think the MMORPG and gaming industry as a whole is stagnating? Seems a lot of the biggest mainstream games are just reverting their game back to 10 years ago and people are liking that more than their new versions. Happened to World of Warcraft, Runescape, Dofus and League of Legends now also released a classic mode that is just the 2014 game. 

@Leo Gura Chris Roberts the founder of star citizen is apparently a black sheep in the game dev industry and is known for being a narcissistic micromanager that's clearly destroying the actual business efficiency of Cloud Imperium Games to produce actual value for their customers.

Edited Sunday at 07:07 PM by LordFall

[AerisVahnEphelia]

VR is shit, but I would like a huge mmo who is the pursuit of guild wars (1) with more deep lore like WoW.

[AerisVahnEphelia]

On 10/06/2026 at 4:50 PM, Leo Gura said:

Game development with AI is very deceptive because early on in development it seems like you're making rapid progress, but late on in development you will realize how much of an illusion that was. Game development gets exponentially harder as you try to ship a commercially meaningful game. The complexity of the game multiplies. The bugs multiply.

It's relatively easy to make half-assed unpolished game prototypes. What's really hard is creating a shippable, polished, commercial game.

But hey! I'm not saying it's impossible. Of course there are ways to leverage AI to help you make games faster. I'm just saying you should not expect it to be as easy as the AI hype-mongers claim.

Good luck with your game! I hope you succeed.

AI is very far away for making full games if you're a noob.

I think AI is good to complete your code or your ideas when you're ALREADY an expert at something, it complete an expertise but don't replace a true expertise and years of contemplation and epistemology in a domain.

[Leo Gura]

A chatbot will never make a good video game. Pure nonsense.

[LordFall]

7 minutes ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

VR is shit, but I would like a huge mmo who is the pursuit of guild wars (1) with more deep lore like WoW.

What don't you like about VR? How uncomfortable the headsets are or you don't believe in the concept fundamentally even if they made the headsets way better? 

[AerisVahnEphelia]

5 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

A chatbot will never make a good video game. Pure nonsense.

No, it won't, but it will increase ideation and improve speed.

Also, it's crazy that people still underestimate GPT, especially the latest versions.

I've seen crazy stuff built with Claude. Sure, COMPARED to a real game, it's still shit, but many are already better than games made by solo indie devs.

I mean, currently it's shit, but what even is a chatbot? Neural networks are almost magical. No one really understands what makes them "understand" the meaning of words in the first place.

Stats alone can't explain reasoning, and they do have some form of it.

Will chatbots replace game dev? Certainly not. But the next iteration of AI, built with the help of chatbots or in association with them, might.

but what even is a chatbot : no fucking clue.

we got this magic box that spit words and sometimes does words really create something new from the old.
 

[AerisVahnEphelia]

14 minutes ago, LordFall said:

What don't you like about VR? How uncomfortable the headsets are or you don't believe in the concept fundamentally even if they made the headsets way better? 

the headset is annoying indeed. not confortable.

We aren't there yet to my taste.

[LordFall]

33 minutes ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

the headset is annoying indeed. not confortable.

We aren't there yet to my taste.

Yeah, that's fair. I think it'll 10 years it'll be the new thing but right now the headset is a huge problem.

This girl is blowing up with her AI videos on Instagram. I'll give it a go and report back if it worked. If I can start getting tens of thousands of views on the Legends of the Abyss instagram then that's gonna be the start of a customer base. Fuck then I'll have to really code the game asap haha let's get it going! 

 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, AerisVahnEphelia said:

improve speed.

By 5%  maybe.

[Carl-Richard]

On 23.8.2026 at 9:02 PM, LordFall said:

I played runescape a bit in school, I didn't get into it I'm french so I ended up falling for another popular mmorpg at the time Dofus.

I like the job system from runescape, I like systems so the different jobs going from 1-99 seems cool to me.

Can you elaborate on what you like about the game and why you still play it all these years later?

The thing about Runescape is that there is always something to do, always something new you can try (on Oldschool Runescape, I have like 10 accounts with different combat builds, used for PvP, and I'm still making new ones), and it's uniquely self-directed. You choose your own destiny. Psychology says self-direction is one of the most fundamental and important things for making you feel alive. That's just one of the factors: the game is also incredibly interconnected through the skill system (what you referred to as the "job system"):

For example (generally speaking, as there are niche training methods as exceptions, and most resources and items can also be bought with money, but let's assume no money):

For Firemaking (I will capitalize all skills), you need Woodcutting. For woodcutting, you need an axe, which you need Smithing for. For smithing, you need Mining. For mining efficiently, you need to run efficiently which needs Agility. To run even more efficiently, you need energy potions so you need Herblore (or weight reducing equipment which you can get from quests and Hunter skill). For making potions, you need potion ingredients which you get from e.g. Farming and monster loot. For farming you need seeds which you can get from e.g. monsters (particularly some higher levelled ones which you more readily encounter in the Slayer skill), birdhouse runs (Hunter) and bird's nests falling out of trees when woodcutting, clue scrolls (buried treasures), Thieving chests and stalls, thieving farmer NPCs, etc.

If you want a deep dive, this guy essentially made a PhD thesis on what makes Runescape Runescape:

 

 

On 23.8.2026 at 9:02 PM, LordFall said:

Also why do you think the MMORPG and gaming industry as a whole is stagnating? Seems a lot of the biggest mainstream games are just reverting their game back to 10 years ago and people are liking that more than their new versions. Happened to World of Warcraft, Runescape, Dofus and League of Legends now also released a classic mode that is just the 2014 game. 

It might be that the later versions of the game became hyper-capitalized (microtransactions) and for Runescape in particular, a revamp of the combat system in 2012 ("Evolution of Combat") changed the game significantly in an attempt to become more modern (and it made people have to essentially re-learn the game, so a large portion of the player base quit). All in all, earlier versions of the games could be seen to represent a more authentic game experience, while later versions fell more prey to non- game experience factors like survivability and competition.

Oldschool Runescape now polls all their significant updates and they need a 70% agreement to be implemented in the game, which is again a form of self-direction and ensures people like the game they are playing. And in that sense, Oldschool Runescape is not as much stagnating, as there are new additions being made to the game, but nothing really revolutionary (it's very incremental and "content-based" so that it builds on previous content and makes the interconnections between content larger). The biggest recent addition was probably the Sailing skill (but that has been anticipated since the beginning of the game 20 years ago and people wanted it).

But even within this model, you run into problems like power creep and also Quality of Life creep (making practical sides of the game increasingly more smooth and seemless); the former threatens certain aspects of the game like especially PvP, while the latter of course makes parts of the game easier. And then, the appeal of the restoration project I mentioned is that you can play a version of the game which is not as over-powered and has little Quality of Life additions such that it becomes more challenging and raw (and of course nostalgic).

People already are doing self-directed versions of this "challenge-increasing" inside the main versions of the game with gamemodes like Ironman, Ultimate Ironman, Hardcore Ironman, Group Ironman, and unofficial concepts like bronzeman mode, various "snowflake" ironman / restricted accounts (e.g. area-locked ironman, popularized by YouTuber Settled). Sometimes restrictions make you think outside the box and make you have to find new solutions, and in Runescape, this is incredibly fun because of the already self-directed and interconnected nature of the game. Ironman especially increases the level of interconnectedness exponentially as you can't trade with other players and you have to engage with more aspects of the game.

Edited 2 hours ago by Carl-Richard

[AerisVahnEphelia]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

By 5%  maybe.

Definitely depends on the area.

My cousin is a serious coder; his app brings him $7,000 a month. ( not a cash grab or addictive bs )
He told me that with AI, he can code features into it in a week that would normally take him a month.

So it’s more like 75%, and I would think that for iterating on art, it’s about the same.

You can have pro drafts, mix parts, and trace them if anything.
I can create way more original character designs than the things I’ve even shown publicly, things that could be bought by Riot Games.
The thing is, I keep them for personal projects and as part of a huge world.

When you’re a PRO in a domain, AI improves your speed & workflow.

I tried to code a game file by file, and it does crack after a while because I don’t have enough knowledge about how to think about game-dev architecture properly. It would probably take me 3 months of just learning that with AI.

When you’re not a pro, you can LEARN faster. (I learned Blender and could adapt very fast in a single month; I could beat people who had used it for 3 years.)
But I had to use AI 14 hours a day and still use my hands in Blender. I didn’t ask AI to build things for me; I asked AI to teach me how to build the things I needed to know or learn. Even better it constantly can teach you in a way that is interactive, fun, or directly speaking to YOU.

AI is really like fire: it can waste your time just as much if you’re stupid, but with practice (+2,000 hours of usage), you start to know when it’s tricking you and when it’s “smart.”

My cousins are both very high-IQ, though, and both could work for companies like Google (even as French people, but one refused for his app, the other work in the highest reselling electronic company in the country ).

I don’t know mine, but it’s also on the high end, or at least above average. It’s not a show of intelligence; I’m probably not a genius.

 

AI improves workflow by 75% at your peak in certain domains.

I’m baffled by people who don’t see it, I m sure it's just suspicion due to how silicon valley is corrupt nowadays.

I’m not being grandly delusional. I’ve been trapped by AI BS more than once, but I learned to frame my questions and suspicions in a more clever and informed manner.

--

Does AI suck in certain domains of applications, absolutely.

Edited 7 hours ago by AerisVahnEphelia

[LordFall]

@Carl-Richard Makes a lot of sense, I like the job system's inter reliance I wanna implement that for LotA as well.

Thanks for the detailed explanation, 3 hours on that video is a bit much but I'll watch like a 20 mins video and get back to you with some insights I get about the game that we can discuss. 

That 70% community poll is cool, I'll write that down. One massive consistent complaint across most major games is that game dev just don't listen to the community so clearly there's something there. 

@AerisVahnEphelia Love it, it's common for smart talented people to want to build their own projects instead of working regular prestige jobs like FANG. I completely relate.

I also agree with your points. Soon enough I think you will be able to make a one prompt game. Project Genie by Google Deepmind is working on precisely that.

My prediction is that it's gonna lead to a bunch of generic games flooding the market which is why I'm looking to build massive amounts of depth into my project before this drops so that when it does I can skip a lot of the boring coding and just plug my system into Genie and other systems that have a first movers advantage on the wave of new game dev that are gonna pop up once everyone can make a game in 20 mins. 

[Michal__]

I already coded more with AI in one month than in a year when I worked on a game before AI existed.

[kavaris]

Ya gotta learn to program, but that itself isnt straightforward; It raises questions on how to program the underlying layers, to understand how text works, etc, cause how can you maintain a game without text?

Iuno, its a very in depth ques., games, and Ai as doing anything in the process, besides helping you to organize your thoughts is fairly unrealistic, And im not even quite surewat is meant by using Ai to help make games.

I can help you w/ low level stuff, but it would require of you to let go of the burning desire / need to rush into a video game thing.

p.s. i havent read every discussion in the thread, cause i dont have time for all that. Yous either wanna be serious and ask technical ques., or we are just riffin...

[kavaris]

On 6/24/2026 at 10:35 PM, LordFall said:

One of my big inspirations is Pokemon.

Which pokemon? Cause newer pokemon is pretty hardcore as far as technicality, Like thats GaneFreak or watever the company in the game div., their bread and butter. Id be surprised if they didnt have a full proprietary package behind all of their titles, giving credence to the years spent having to develop things very specific to the mechanics, etc.

Edited 4 hours ago by kavaris

[kavaris]

Theres been like, 500+ pokemon titles since 1995 - Some through other companies/divisions — All crazy different.

[kavaris]

They had games you couldnt even imagine in the 90s, Like there was some shyt where you interacted w/ a special machine plugged into the tv, using physical objects, Like a sortve proto-minecraft building in real life, but then illustrated on screen. Like everythings sortve a.... Like a veling over what was like the dawn of toys & games. Its almost like, too hard to even explain.

[kavaris]

And then, all of those companys got absorbed by larger, lesser aware companies, who are like, themselves not all video game companies at all. Like there are random companies on wall st., or in the private realm, that now own... "so & so" company, that, once upon a time, they were innovators in their field, of a certain flavor of games ~ in a certain sector or technology, That we now are either using, or that we are totally ignorant of, And no one knows the better, cause its been like 30 years of changes.

To make an analogy to egypt and sites around the world, its like all this lost tech theyre finding, that no one knows how it was done, meaning the tech involved to build all of these super specialized buildings of unique, man made geometries, and we are just sitting here today, totally ignorant of like, wtf it even is, or how it was done.

Edited 4 hours ago by kavaris

[LordFall]

57 minutes ago, kavaris said:

Which pokemon? Cause newer pokemon is pretty hardcore as far as technicality, Like thats GaneFreak or watever the company in the game div., their bread and butter. Id be surprised if they didnt have a full proprietary package behind all of their titles, giving credence to the years spent having to develop things very specific to the mechanics, etc.

I think the two best Pokemon products by far are the Pokemon TCG and Pokemon Go. 

I remember people in my neighbourhood playing Pokemon Go and running around city trying to catch pokemons fighting gyms. I was too into pickup at that time so I didn't play but I regret it. It seems really cool and I think one of the downsides of video games is it cuts you off from the real world so augmented reality is a massive innovation to this issue. I will find a way to incorporate it in to this project. Maybe literally copy it and you can find cool abyssal creatures around your city in places where you have to physically scan them with your phone or AR glasses to collect them.

Pokemon Cards are an insane innovation in terms of collectibles and are a new class of assets in and of themselves. I've been following the trend blowing up since the past year, it's very fascinating to me as the other flaws of video games I see is that you waste your time playing them. If you can play my game and you collect real assets and actual cards that go up over time, then that will crush and give it potential to also be worth billions if it scale to that level. Pokemon Cards in and of themselves have a market cap of $2.5 billion so that's pretty cool. 

I designed some playing and collectibe cards for Legend of the Abyss, I played it with some friends it was not that bad. I made it based off of heartstone where you get an Aether point each round and each card has a specific aether cost to play.

 

1 hour ago, kavaris said:

I can help you w/ low level stuff, but it would require of you to let go of the burning desire / need to rush into a video game thing.

Cool I'll message you.