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Customizing Houses and Respawning Players

This week started off with the completion of the timeline view on the story page. We’re still working out a few minor bugs, but now you can read the game story in chronological order, instead of the back and forth over a hundred years of history and happenings, like before. Jared continues to look into improving performance and page load times, while Jesse is focusing on building out player profiles and Houses. We’ll be adding more color schemes, background and banner choices, as well as more image loading options. Soon players will be able to individualize themselves, and their Houses a lot better.

San and Terry continued their infrastructure work, migrating servers, and getting us to the point where we can start automating a push every night. With all these steps forward over the past few sprints, we started a more in-depth conversation about analytics and different data tracking options. We discussed the pros and cons of writing something specific for ourselves, and looked at a few of the software options available out there.

The team is still working on squashing the lingering bugs with our item spawning system, and are just about done. They’ll be moving on to adding stats to every item this week, and working on item attachments. Tactical lights, scopes, and the rare crossbow bayonet are coming up in the near future. They are finishing up the last of the recycling ui work, and are adding notifications, so it will be easy to know when your item has been broken down into its core components. With the initial handful of player talents in and working, we’re expanding options and adding new talents. The team will be working on balancing those, and play testing them this week.

Spawn points are a point of focus this week as well. We’ve put a lot of thought into having a system that will allow players to spawn back without getting immediately killed in a fire fight, or appearing in combat over and over again like an undying killer in a horror movie. The system is still in its early stages, but right now we are thinking a cave-like respawn area and a sewer drain protected area for starting over. It turns out exploring, and playing in storm drains was an important part of both San and Chris’ lives as children, so they’re both excited about the idea of respawning in the sewers. We have no plans on including teenage reptile martial artists of any kind down there, but there might eventually be a few mutants. Chris would like to ask that kids today don’t go storm drain spelunking. It’s a good way to get in trouble with the safety patrol, oh, and you know, die during a rainstorm.

Compass and map work continues, with focus on the use of both in the HUD. We’re working on some layout and ui issues, as well as fixing some remaining bugs. Speaking of bugs, we talked about some of our ongoing trueSKY issues and how best to address them without eating up a big chunk of engineering time.

Finally, we continued work on our Veil News Network (VNN) logo and overlays. We talked about expanding the service into specialty segments like travel, weather, or animals. If you think cat videos are cute, wait until you see the antics of an upset pig-shrimp hybrid, grumpy shrig is sure to be a hit! This VNN camera is set up on a bluff overlooking the forest and beach, with the bird songs and waves mixing together beautifully.

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We’ll be back later this week with more updates.