With the current sprint ending today, the team continued to focus on adding some last minute polish and nabbing any lingering bugs. Jared and Jesse finished up most of the ecommerce work needed to get our shopping cart up and running. PayPal integration is complete, and mock-up images of all the new shirt colors are done. The player wallet API is complete and Jared is testing the system. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to buy a shirt with referral money from getting your friends to play the game.
Jesse showed off some new logo work and we looked at an awesome mock-up for waving House banners. We talked about various other options for customizing Houses as well, and what limits we want in place to make sure we don’t have areas of the map that burn up GPUs. Speaking of customizing houses, San shared the story of why the new rack has to stay in his garage for a while yet. It turns out it’s too big to fit through the hallway to get to the server room.
Work continues on our drone cameras and we should have a basic system up in running in a few weeks. We talked some more about how and where live video would appear or be shared on the homepage. We then took a pretty deep-dive into all aspects of a news alert/feed system for game events and happenings, including what we’d call the fictional news service providing the feed (protip: avoid any name the leads to an acronym that starts with VD.)
We talked about what kinds of events that would come across the ticker. Things like: good samaritan acts, major weather events, House raids, killings, and so on. We talked about how we’d collect and disseminate the data used in the feed, including the possibility of some sort of curated system to make sure important events were called out. We are collecting death information currently that covers the who, what, when, and where. The why seems pretty obvious; It’s a game. We talked about what bits of data were important for other events, and how we’d decide what gets run. Jesse showed off some layout and news alert mockups to help us visualize what the system could look like.
The team talked a bit about how the game map should lead players to explore areas, move around, and encourage longer gameplay. We talked briefly about the state of the AI in animals and NPC’s. There will be a couple basic AI archetypes when we roll out Beta, but really smart creatures and great battle tacticians are a bit down the road. In short, it will be awhile before players get to face off with a Hawaiian mutant Sun Tzu. The barking button and doors are fixed in the communications tower elevator, so that building is done for now. As you can see from the pictures below the interior looks great and it’s quite a drop from the upper deck. The art team is moving on to the Thorcon power plant and the Veil Station.
We’ll be back next week with more updates and screenshots.
