With a couple of short weeks coming up because of the holidays, the team has been busy finishing up goals for sprint 18. Our latest pass at the inventory and crafting ui are in. We’re adding a little polish and trying to address the plentiful bugs we’ve found so far, including improvements to the crafting workflow.
We’re still hammering away at two of our biggest projects as well: the programmatic building system, and our item spawning system. We’ve fine tuned both and have worked through most of the bugs. After adding a bit of 3d art, both will be ready to go and we’ll be able to create a number of different structures complete with furnishings and loot on the fly.
Many of the team felt a gigantic thorn in their sides removed yesterday at 2pm when we stopped using a previous SCM system. There was a great rejoicing! We’re a little closer to our goal of having GIT and Perforce working by the end of the week too. San has been focusing on infrastructure stuff and moving servers around to help save costs and improve debugging speed.
The web team continues to be focused on creating a timeline view for the stories on the blog. They’ve added slider and calendar filter options, so you can quickly go through the 100 year time span that the story covers, and have included some scrolling improvements. Jared fixed a lingering data state bug that was causing some problems, and added some better logging to help us track problems. Jesse tweaked some layout issues with House banners, and finished up an image for stickers in our store.
Spawning, both initially and after things don’t go so well for you, got a little attention and refinement too. Most of the work we need done regarding persistence is finished as well. Players will be able to keep their gear and various bodily afflictions after logging out now. Speaking of gear, we’ve finished up our crossbow which exposed a lot of issues with it and the other bows in the game. We’re working on getting those fixed and a few new animations before we make it available to players. Our player compass work progressed too. We have a working HUD compass now and discussed having a craftable one in the near future. San shared his thoughts on how much fun it is to play a game that spawns you in a place where you need to use a compass to find your way back to your friends, and how that fun lessens exponentially every time you have to do it.
The art team stayed mostly focused on breaking down the map, but did continue working on adding detail to the game’s large buildings. The interior of the Thorcon power plant got a little more love this week. As you can see below the hallways are looking great, and are one set of mutated twins away from being terrifying.
We’ll be back later in the week with more screenshots and updates.
