So, and all hail our great god of mammon, the e-commerce shopping cart! This is our way of saying that we’ve almost completed work on our basic shopping cart. The core features are done and we have a list of initial physical and virtual products. Jared did a bunch of validation work and is smacking down some lingering bugs before deploying to prod. We have some styling work left to do, but it’s far enough along that we placed a test order with minimal headache. Jesse did some work on a poster design that will probably end up as one of the slides on the front page as well. We got into a discussion about creating a system to offer custom merch for Houses and players in the future. There are some hurdles in the way so it probably won’t be right around the corner, but our goal is to have a system that allows you to easily get shirts with your House insignia eventually.
We spent a lot of time in the past few days jumping with both feet into talents and skills. We looked at how different games handle them, and like with most things, it’s easier to know what you don’t like than what you do. We want to avoid many of the pitfalls that other games have run into. We don’t want any sort of list that you’d need to make notes to understand, but want talents that provide opportunities for different play styles as well. Too often games offer too many points or options, so you get people who can do virtually anything with expertise. Our goal will be to make sure people take a deep dive in one area or become a jack of all trades, by going shallow across the entire skill tree.
We discussed how and when players would be able to change their skills and some possible ui arrangements. This led to an interesting conversation about creating some sort of baked-in training/build system in the game. Many players in similar games spend a lot of time looking online for character builds, or trying to be like “Bob,” the best killer in their group. We’d like to give them an easy way to achieve their goal without looking someplace else. Having a course of sorts that sends players on the correct missions, or gives a template for creating the “perfect” medic, scout, or Bob, would be a cool and useful tool. The trick is doing this without doing ‘Grad School, the game’ ..
San continued his work on a having a player camera, and it’s almost done. Soon players will be able to broadcast a security cam like image of their surroundings to other players, even on the web. Much of the art team’s focus this week continued to be the automated ruin building system. In a week or so, all the bugs should be worked out and it should be up and running. As you can see below it is coming along nicely.
We looked at mock-ups for a variety of smaller items, including a shark-toothed pan to join the boar-tusk broom in our post fracture homegoods store. It was during a discussion about the kukenroot model however, that we added a new phrase to the Fractured Veil lexicon. “It needs to be chickeyer” will join other phrases like, “I made the story more cannibally” to our collection of neologisms. In addition to creating a new word, Chris voiced his dismay that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of gore produced when he killed something with a machete or other large-bladed weapon. We talked about how to make the proper amount of arterial spray come from a gash to help Chris paint the walls of his rather sparsely decorated basement.
That does it for now. I’ll be back with additional updates, (and possibly some more new words), next week.
