Our plan to have a “Friends and Family” release tomorrow is on schedule. That means this past week was mostly spent hunting down some final bugs, last minute fixes, and adding some final polish. While there wasn’t a whole lot of new features or assets added, a few noteworthy things were finished.
The web team ran down a number of bugs involving Houses, fixed broken links in the launcher, and tackled a lingering issue with token refreshing and timeouts. We’re hooking up images and House charters so they can be seen in public view, as well as making it possible for you to connect Twitch, Discord, and Steam to your House. We continued our ongoing discussion about how to best display member stats and what data would be most useful for House leaders. We’re tagging stories with game character accounts so you can easily visit the profiles of our fictional characters. The sidebar got some more polish, and your online friends should now show up at the top of the list. Lastly, we made the images in the Media section easier to share.
We spent some time talking about how much/little information to show for an item in your normal walking around view. We want to make sure that we don’t clutter all your screen real estate with item info, but recognize the need for detailed descriptions of things you might want to throw in your backpack. We talked about notifications, alerts, and finished up the icons for various ailments. Now, when you have broken ribs, a life-threatening disease, are about to bleed out, or could just use a sandwich, an icon will appear warning you that everything isn’t alright with your character. Because we understand that behind every character is a real-life human being, we even included an alert for players. If you’ve been playing the game for 12 hours a deep vein thrombosis alert will pop-up and urge you to go for a walk. We love that you love the game, but we want you to explore the real world too, or at least not sit in one place for half a day.
The lion’s share of our time was spent making sure everything works in the tutorial area. In this area players will learn basic systems, shoot, loot, and assemble items. We highlighted some lootable items to make them more visible in the environment. The team finished work on alerts, crafting, assembling, and cooking. They did some AI work, installing a sense of fear in some of our factions. Now if things are going poorly for them, there’s a chance that an opponent will run away and regroup, instead of recreating The Charge of the Light Brigade. Finally, we fixed some collision issues we were having with people not being able to go through doors. Here’s a look at the tutorial area and a close up of the cabin that had the impassable doorway.
We assume that we’ll find a list of new bugs after we allow more players into the game on Friday, and will be spending much of our time next week fixing them. We’ll be updating the sprints section with an overview of what we plan to be working on during the next month. As usual, we’ll be back next week with another report on how things are going .
