This week marks the end of Sprint 15, so everyone is pushing to fix lingering bugs and finish up as many items as they can before planning for 16 begins. There is probably going to be a couple things from this sprint that get pushed into 16, but the good news is that our bug list from the Friends and Family release will be completely done this week.
We have a base skill system in place now with organic growth built in. Jumping makes you become a better jumper, and climbing practice will eventually make you a perfect climber. We talked about skill trees, and looked at some amazingly complex examples that looked more like the string art you’d make at camp when you were a kid, than any sort of system you’d want to use in a game. We’re all big fans of robust skill systems with many paths, but assigning/choosing your skills shouldn’t feel like completing a maze. Jesse is working on some wireframes for us to iterate on.
There’s a lingering bug that is making it night whenever you play. While this might be kind of cool if we were making a vampire-centric game, we’re not. We don’t even have one vampire hidden in a cave, or a ruined blood bank somewhere on the island, so we’re going to fix the day/night cycle. Or add a blood bank. That’d be fun, or not. ‘Phlebotomist, the game!’, coming soon to a computer near you!
Soon you’ll be able to add scopes, silencers, and forward grips to rifles. We’ll have crafting tools (axe, pick, skinning knife) done by the end of the week, but we’re pushing the bulk of crafting work into sprint 16. We have elevators mostly working now and are finishing up the armor system. We’ve also started work on a system for spawning loot in buildings and areas. Just think of all the places we could hide stuff in a neighborhood like this.
Terry is doing a little work on the libraries and San continued his work on persistence. We have location and alive/dead states working now but still need to finish up work on item persistence and the unconscious character states. He did some more work on the tactical map API so now House members will be able to send a message or an SOS flag to other House members through the web.
Our ecommerce work continued this week as well. We talked briefly about warehousing and fulfillment options and explored how much custom-made silk Hawaiian shirts would cost. We have a basic inventory system, various shipping options, and a product details page up and running. There’s some styling and layout work to do yet, but we hope to use it to place a few test orders by the end of the week and start collecting bug reports.
The prospect of having merchandise sent out raised a touchy subject, the bubble of bad luck that surrounds Chris receiving shirts. For some reason it takes 3-4 days longer than it should for packages sent through the mail to arrive at his house. Many months ago I had a package of shirts for him, and Jeff offered to deliver them personally since he was traveling to California. He forgot them. He forgot them the next time he was going out there too. After many more twist and turns of responsibility, Jeff finally mailed the shirts but they got lost for a few days. Eventually they found their way to his front door, almost a month later than everyone else. Fast forward to August. We get a new batch of Tshirts with better fabric and I send everyone a package. I joke that I’m giving Chris’ to Jeff so he should see them around Thanksgiving. A few days later everyone is giving their opinion on the look and feel, when Chris says his haven’t arrived. The timeline below sums up the ordeal.
Here’s a bonus shot of the Cherry keyboard that stirred a larcenous urge deep inside of Chris.
That’s everything for now. I’ll have another update later this week, assuming Chris doesn’t have me packaged up and sent to the dead letter office in Atlanta. The whole point of this story is to show that we care about that which we place on our torsos. A test with some online t-shirt companies is going on now, if they manage to ship a decent shirt to Chris, we’ll be amazed and will deploy the merch.
