Having finished most of the rough mechanics with our shopping cart last week, this week we focused on giving it a little polish and making sure it runs smoothly. Nobody likes trying to use a cart with a frozen wheel. Jared worked on: the check-out flow when users aren’t logged in, adding order/shipping status notifications, and emailing receipts. The sidebar is now updating with order information and Jesse is tackling a list of styling bugs and working on a layout to make the order history page a little less confusing. He also completed a first run at a poster and we have ordered a test printing.
By some miracle that none of us can quite understand, the test shirts that we ordered for Chris arrived at his house. While it’s true they arrived days after the others we ordered at the same time, and he is at least 5 hours closer to the sorting hub, the fact that they arrived at all is amazing (see the timeline in this update.) The delivery left some of us doubting the theory that his house is built on an ancient postal truck burial site. In addition to their wondrous arrival, the new design and shirt quality are great. Chris had issue with one of the color choices, but we finally have t-shirts that we can feel good about offering in the store.
The upgrade to UE4.17 hasn’t gone quite as smoothly as we had anticipated, but we are still making good progress on other goals in this sprint. The programmatic building system is coming along, exteriors are being built and we’re still working on interiors. We started to rework and polish: our inventory, crafting ui, and the quick bar. Persistence work continues and we started some basic reskinning to the settings menu.
San made a lot of progress on a game camera, so much progress in fact, that we have a basic House tactical camera system working. Our goal isn’t to become the next-best streaming service, but rather offer a security camera-like view of your base, or glimpses of what other members of your House can see. We want to offer players the ability to monitor their base or check up on their friends during their downtime at work, or while having to sit through another boring family meal. We discussed future features like the possibility of thermal cameras, and being able to select and expand a specific feed from a grid view.
Much of our time since our last update was spent trying to get our talent tree to take root. We went over a few design options and layouts, and picked through a jumbled list of possibilities. We talked over the benefits of a point based system vs. a repetitive action based one, with players bunny hopping across the landscape until they are expert leapers. After laying out all the options, banging our heads together, and a great gnashing of teeth, we finally have a system and layout that everyone is happy with, for now. We have a good range of talents for different styles of gameplay, as well as different roles in a group. They span from buffs to certain actions, to abilities that help others in a group, and both passive and active individual talents. We talked briefly about a color scheme, and started work on the design of a talent spending page.
The art team continued work on detailing buildings, inside and out. As you can see below there is a lot of Veil Station exterior to detail.
In addition to that work, they showed a number of reusable smaller item and plant designs. This included a nice chair and umbrella set to join the shark-toothed frying pan, and our boar-tusk broom to the inventory of our post-apocalyptic home goods store. Chris gave an impassioned speech about why his favorite kukenroot model was the best, and how the idea of a plant that produced fruit that resembled a buffalo wing made a lot of sense if you understand the fictional history we made up for it. Finally, we got a first glimpse at the inside of our Municipal Veil Station. There is a bunch of detail work to be done yet, but we like what we’re seeing so far.
That’s it for now. I’ll be back next week with more pictures and further updates.
