As usual we got a lot of work done over the weekend and hit the week running. Here’s what we we’ve done since our last update.
Our forums are now hooked up. Instead of trying to create our own we decided to go with Discourse. It seems to be simple, intuitive and most people are familiar with it. Best of all, it’s already done so we don’t have to spend precious engineering hours creating our own. Right now there are just a few threads, but as we get closer to rolling the game out, we’ll add more topics of discussion. However, there is already a thread for recipes of our in-game canned meat product. Feel free to add your own family SSHAM recipes if you have one. (Paddle Creek Games does not encourage or endorse the eating of fictitious meat products. Though we too get the tasty attraction of shrimp shu-mai)
We’ve added tags to the media section so you can easily sort images. If you only want to look at tools of death and destruction just click on the “weapons” tag and you’ll only see guns, clubs, and sharp things. This will become more useful as we post more art, 3D models, and screenshots.
The team is finishing up animation work on weapons, crafting, equipment use, and climbing/jumping. Patcher/launcher work continued to sort out any remaining bugs, and we talked through some lingering builder issues.
We’re working on our alerts system and polishing up the ui. We’re tying them into our quest system (which is in the process of being built itself) and integrating them into the map to help with navigation and to highlight points of interest. All this map talk led us to a discussion about a desire to have a tactical mini-map for houses that members can use to monitor the location and status of other house members. More on that later.
San spent a lot of time working on analytics regarding player death and respawning. Our plan is to make available that data to players and use it to create some really interesting graphs. You’ll be able to compare how your house did in combat compared to other houses or who the top shooter/stabber/clubber is on the island. You’ll be able to see how many times you died (maybe even what killed you) and how many confirmed kills you have. Being able to see your name or your house at the top of the kill list should help add some validity to your bragging rights, and we like to help. That about wraps it up. We’ll have another update later this week but now it’s time to go over some surfboard designs. Here are a couple that just came in.
