It looks like our goal of having the shopping cart all buttoned up by the end of the week is on target. Order status and order history is hooked up so you can easily see what you’ve ordered and when it is coming. The team checked off all the bugs on our list and Jesse fixed all the lingering styling/flow issues. We’re going to spend a couple days running through all the possible order scenarios we can come up with before turning it over to Chris, “Finder of Bugs and Breaker of Things.”
The impending completion of our basic shopping cart led us into a discussion about the next step, Shopping Cart II: The Gifting System. We talked about what features we’d want and the basic outline for a gifting system. The team discussed the need for built in fail safes for the purchase of packages to give away, and making sure nobody gets stuck with a package that they, or the person the bought it for, can’t use. We talked through some possible solutions and some systems we can put in place to make sure we head off any potential issues before they come up.
We tackled a bunch of issues with the Friend system this week as well. We’ve reworked the accept/decline buttons and added some context menus to help make things more clear. Jesse did some styling work on player taglines so your character mottos and quips look better on the page, and made space for a message link, so it can be added once we have our messaging system up and running. All the remaining bugs were checked off the list, and we discussed integrating more House items into player cards, like House colors and icons.
Of course we spent some of our time working on the talent system and page. We weren’t overjoyed with some of the previous colors we were using to highlight talents at certain levels. Jesse swapped them out with colors from some of the foliage from the game. They’re looking great now and fit the game palette better. We liked them so much, that we’re changing the inventory colors to match as well. We fixed some icon trouble in the sidebar and are hunting down a non-display gravatar bug we ran into. Jesse also showed off the latest design for a Manimal logo which now includes some anthropomorphic claws fitting of the “Slaughter Your Thirst!” tagline.
San continued working on cameras. He added barrels to the landscape so he wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s work and so he had an item to attach cameras to for testing. The end result is great tactical/security cam system, even if right now it resembles one of those nature shows where they disguise cameras as rocks or old logs to get shots of the wildlife. While it may not be for the most paranoid of players, we think it will be a valuable tool for Houses. Good news for those of you who like to sleep all night and work all day, lumberjacking is now a thing on the test map. We hope to have it running on the real map by the end of the week so we can start hoarding wood. The only issue right now is that the trees don’t actually fall after you chop them with an axe, they just give up their wood. This makes the experience more like beating up a tree for its lunch money than an authentic representation of working in the timber industry, but we’re not trying to make a carpentry simulator, so we’re not overly concerned for the moment.
Since moving over to UE4.17 took a little longer than expected, the art team was still mostly focused on smaller prop items. We looked at a number of new and revised models for inventory in our post-fracture home goods store, and to use for staging our numerous ruins. One exciting development is that the team is doing some path and AI work for wildlife in the game. They will be adding the actual mesh/animals to the game this week. Soon we’ll have birds flying away when you approach, going from tree to tree, and other more naturally acting wildlife. Now that everyone is moved over however, they’ll be focusing once again on finishing up our large buildings. As you can see below the interior of our Thorcon Power Plant is really starting to come together.
That’s everything for now, we’ll be back with another update next week.
