The week started off with the web team smoothing out some layout issues with the Community landing page, and hunting down some bugs. Jesse updated some layouts (mostly on the settings and referral pages). We’re adding icons for the House page and other sections so players can quickly navigate to all subsections of the community page. New form validation work continues, and Jesse continued his refactoring to clean up the code.
We continue to work on performance by chopping up the map, replacing buildings, and adding structure features with our programmatic building system. With so much construction work being completed and props to place, we got a new artist to help populate the map, and speed things along. Audio support keeps marching forward, and we learned all about delay and attenuation, while working on flyby bullet sound effects. It turns out that we probably won’t be able to completely rely on Foley effects, no matter how good we get at slapping gelatin, bending saws, and clapping coconuts together.
The underground respawn area continues to take shape, and we discussed placing certain resource gathering tools, like hatchets, there until we have more structures in place to explore. We worked out a harvesting system, allowing players to collect wood and other resources, and created a stacking mechanic to help players move resources around efficiently. However, we ran into a little problem with harvesting wood. When you took wood from a tree, every other tree on the map would lose wood as well. While we understand that everything in nature is connected, this is a little too connected for our tastes, and raised some concerns about what happens when we start skinning animals. There are enough horrors in the forest without hordes of inexplicably flayed raccoons looking for retribution.
We have our item spawning system up and running, and plan on a complete HUD update as well as some fullscreen ui work too. We added some armor and weapon animations. You can see below what it looks like now when you run around with your Haikili rifle out.
Lastly, we took a few more steps towards completing the Veil News Network (VNN) service. VNN will report on events within the game in real time, providing players with alerts about a variety of game events and announcements. We looked at a few more templates for types of news stories, and San made some improvements to the news API. Jesse began work on a news ticker ui and we had an in-depth conversation about the possible futures of the service. We discussed the ability to: sort news by player or House, the possibility of citizen reporters, and how players might use it in-game. We’re really excited about some of the cool player interaction possibilities VNN would offer.
I’ll be back later in the week with more pictures and the latest updates.
