Our Friends and Family Alpha launch is fast approaching, so there wasn’t a whole lot of new work to show off or talk about this past week. Everyone is pushing hard to finish up systems, give them a little polish, and squash and identify bugs. However, there were a few new or completed projects, as well as some pretty funny bugs since our last update.
Since creating and placing every building ruined by the Fracture would be a terrifically time consuming endeavor, the team has been working hard on an automated ruin system. As you can see below it’s really starting to come together. We’re still having some trouble with a few of the materials though. In particular, the glass needs some work because we don’t want to perpetuate the rumor that frosted windows are the wave of the future.
We discussed further improvements to our Houses. We talked about building out tools for House members like: the ability to add different backgrounds to your profile, different colors, and cropping functions. We discussed improving the data we collect and making better charts to easily disseminate the data. As we talked about before, our goal is to provide a quick and easy way to keep track of who the superstars in a House are, and who is slacking. The team also talked about integrating video uploads for showing off your best wicked jumps and kills or for House recruitment purposes.
A swarm of tiny bugs were swatted and styling work was done this week including: some inventory issues, reworded some prompt text to make it clearer, social media link styling, fixed some alert system problems, and adding a scroll bar to the launcher. The art folks are finishing up their marathon work on the Comm Tower this week and plan to start refining the Thorcon Plant next week. Tags are integrated in the media section and it is now split up into sections so you find the things you’re most interested in. We are adding a “Sprint” section so you can see exactly what we’re working on, what we already finished, and what we plan on tackling in the future.
We ran down the merchandise rabbit hole and made some progress digging our way out. Our alerts and recycling systems should be finished this week. The basic crafting system is done but we still have some work on cooking left to do. To be fair, ingredients and a sanitary cooking environment are really hard to come by in our version of 2117 Lahaina. What we focused on the most this week was upgrading and finishing the player controller and animations. While the team made some great progress we ran into a few issues that we had to share. For instance, as you can see below, going prone while shooting at wolves could cause a player to lose their head literally.
Finally, we thought we’d provide players with a way to keep the rain out of their eyes, and since it’s almost impossible to hold an umbrella while using a shotgun, (try it if your don’t believe me. On second thought please don’t. It’s really dangerous and your neighbors will stare) we thought a wide brimmed hat would do the trick. As you can see from the video below things didn’t quite work out as planned and our feature ended up being a bug.
As usual, we’ll have another update soon with more pictures and news about what’s been completed and what’s on the to-do list. We might even have a few more screenshots of things that haven’t gone quite as planned.
