This week marks the beginning of sprint 16 and we spent some time going over what got done from our last sprint. The highlights include: completing the bug hitlist from our Friends and Family Alpha, weapon attachments for all your scope and bayonet needs, a quest system to give players a little purpose, a item spawning system to ensure that there’s plenty of loot available, and we finally have a working elevator in the communication tower.
We did find a slight problem at the top however. There’s a sizable area where a player can fall unexpectedly and inexplicably hundreds of feet to their death. We briefly discussed leaving it and putting up a “Mind the gap!” sign but decided it would probably be best just to fix it. We pushed our armor system and crafting tools into sprint 16 along with, finishing work on a programmatic building system, and designing a talent system. You can always see what we have planned and what we’re working on currently, by checking out our sprint section.
The team discussed notifications and talked about how to best integrate them with our tactical map and House command features. We want Houses to be able to send alerts to all members whether they are logged in or not. This led to a fairly in-depth conversation about base building and what features we’d need and want to be included. We discussed possibilities for customization and the game mechanics involved with a player building something from scratch instead of just taking over an abandoned building. We talked about how defending your base would work, and went over different scenarios involving automated turrets and defences, including letting players operate a turret via the web.
We continued work on our shopping cart. Many bugs were squashed including one in which duplicate items would break everything. We added address field validation and we’re auto-populating city with zipcode now. We’ll have chronological sorting to the story section soon, so you can read about events and people in the order in which they happened. Jesse is finishing up our Manimal logo and working on a ui design for attachments, before moving on to talent trees.
Terry is working through some issues he ran into with Plastic while trying to merge 4.17, and San continued working on APIs for persistence, as well as cleaned up things on the backend. We talked about how to best implement a camera that would provide screenshots at a certain frequency. We discussed the mechanics of how that might work and where we would attach it. The team talked how we could use such a system beyond just tactical purposes.
Finally, with so many systems getting into a working state and models reaching completion, we talked quite a bit about trailers and gameplay videos. We went over different types of videos highlighting certain aspects of the game and how that differs from a cinematic style trailer. We kicked around a few different ideas and Jesse is working on some possible storyboards. With the art team finishing up work on the communication tower, they’ll be focusing on some of the other large buildings. Soon players will be able to explore more than just the loading area inside the Thorcon power plant.
I’ll be back on Thursday with more updates and some new screenshots from our creative meeting.
