The web team continued their polish work on the shopping cart this week and made a number of minor fixes and improvements. As I mentioned in the last update, we decided to try a new brand of t-shirt that we think will be more comfortable. We now have both men’s and women’s shirts instead of the just the one unisex style that we had before. Jesse designed new logos and we picked out some new colors for both styles of shirt. We’ll be adding some more new shirts, posters, and other merchandise soon. In addition, we made another pass at box design, and Jesse is adding the finishing touches now.
We talked a bit about our future server needs, and went over a few options to get us where we plan to be. San continued to work on persistence and we should have an inventory that stays with your character very soon. With the end of the year approaching, we took some time to go over a 3 month development timeline, to make sure everyone was on the same page, and that we weren’t missing any low hanging fruit. The team discussed messaging systems and what we’d like ours to do that isn’t readily available with other options. We went over different short and long term goals and solutions.
The ambient sound system is nearing completion and it’s sounding great. We have a number of different sounds for various areas and times of day. Players will hear different noises traveling at night than they will in the morning, and we have separate sounds for both birds and insects. Even buildings have their own associated ambient noises. The automated building system is almost ready to be deployed as well. The tech team showed off a number of screenshots from randomly constructed buildings and it’s looking good. Their still loading our game-specific furnishings and props so everything we looked at used generic placeholders, which led to this magnificent kitchen you see below. One can only imagine how many years of their life the cabinet maker gave to complete this kitchen. There’s enough counter space to hold the contents of another entire kitchen, and we’re still trying to calculate how many shark-toothed frying pans will fit in the lower cabinets
We talked some more about integrating a game camera on the website and discussed getting more House and player data on the front page. We’re collecting a lot of useful data right now, but we’re not doing much with it yet. We discussed displaying player metrics and events, things like: who crafted the most of X item, who did the most damage, announcing that Chris got more head shots than anyone else, and so on. Displaying user data can be tricky though, and we went over the different privacy options we’d need for those of you who don’t want your character info shared.
Our armor system is now in place and we’re going through and adjusting different damage mitigating outfits to make sure the game remains balanced. As I mentioned earlier this week, we had some issues with drag-n-drop in the inventory. Those problems have been worked out, so characters can drop anything they want instead of being stuck in a permanent item dragging hell. Finally, the communication tower shading and sounds are done, just in time for us to run into some lighting issues. It’s looking great even if it’s a bit dark right now.
That wraps it up for this week. We’ll be back with more updates Tuesday.
