With Labor Day this week and the launch of our Friends and Family Alpha last Friday, there isn’t a whole lot of new stuff to show off for this update. Most of our time was spent squashing bugs and running through the game tutorial, making sure that everything works as expected. It’s one thing to envision how something will work, but quite another when people start doing things you hadn’t considered. All in all, everything went well and some interesting conversations came up.
We found a few issues like: bow strings going through your arm when you’re aiming at something, rain falling inside buildings, and some weird looking patterns on the ground if you were holding an item and turning around in the rain. However, there weren’t any major malfunctions and the handful of people we let in the game ran around, made splints, shot things, and had a good time. As you can see below, the fires in the tutorial area make our welcome sign look great and reflects nicely off a machete blade.
One of our topics of discussion was the need for some sort of interaction bar for hot swapping items and weapons. We talked about the balance between usability and reality when it comes to being able to quickly switch things in and out of your hands. We plan on siding with realism most of the time, as long as it doesn’t interfere with gameplay. While it might be physically possible for you to carry 6 long guns if you throw away all of your other gear, having them all magically appear in your hands instantaneously with a turn of your scroll wheel isn’t what we’re interested in making.
We also talked about key mapping and what keys players expect to do common things like move, crouch, and jump. We talked about the pros and cons of changing those keys around, and the need for making those controls customizable so players can change them to whatever works best. It was decided that our current inventory and crafting UI needs a few tweaks. Right now it’s a little cluttered in there. We have some readability issues, and the screen just needs to be more streamlined. For now we’re going to adjust the font, remove size and weight info on the crafting screen, and Jesse is going to be working on a few new wireframes.
Finally, we talked some more about ecommerce and setting up an online store. We looked at a number of different print-on-demand services and other more traditional merchandise options. Having a store that offers a combination of real life things like shirts, bags, and hats as well as in-game currency and items has it’s own set of difficulties. We talked about our desire to reflect real life purchases in the game for certain items-e.g., if you buy a certain type of Hawaiian shirt you get a similar shirt in the game. Our goal is to have our vendors and services sorted out, and have a working online store up and running by the end of the month.
That’s it for now. We’re still working hard tracking down bugs and figuring out what is working and what needs some attention. As usual, we’ll have another update next week.
