With sprint 26 coming to an end this week, the teams are busy adding the finishing touches to a number of tasks, and hunting down some remaining bugs.
The web team has corrected a number of issues on the page that have been hurting our SEO, and have implemented some improvements to give us a boost. They fixed a few rendering issues, and Jesse continues to push forward with onboarding improvements, and streamlining our referrer section. We want to make the sign up process as easy and intuitive as possible, as well as, explain the benefits you receive when you get your friends to sign up, and adventure through the wilds of Lahaina with you.
Jesse has also been working on the logo for the ingame shipping company responsible for the numerous boxes players find abandoned around the map, or hoarded inside buildings. We looked at various colors, and cover schemes, and had a blast coming up with absurdly funny taglines fitting the humor in the game.
Terry is busy finishing up some server documentation, and taking a break every now and then to do some debugging work. He is looking into the cause of an occasional crashing issue we’ve ran into, and working on a rendering problem with the ocean and the sky creeping until they have replaced everything else in your field of view. While I would argue that there is a solid 10 minutes of fun in the movie Waterworld, we’re not looking to make a homage game to the movie, maybe for the guy stuck at the bottom of the tanker, but definitely not the film as a whole. We discussed at some length the best time to start the upgrade to UE 4.20, and having Terry available to focus on any integration issues we run into.
With our first quest/advanced tutorial coming up around the corner, everyone has been: running around, shooting, jumping, crouching, crawling, harvesting, and building to find and fix as many bugs as we can. We’ve found a few including: ongoing zipline issues, echoing footsteps that persist beyond the underground spawn area, strangely sized doors inside buildings, and players being able to walk through some of the props around the map, but by far the most enjoyable is the can gun. For reasons unknown as of yet, if you eat food out of a can while you have a pistol equipped the two will sometimes merge. There’s no doubt that if you break out the peaches to host an emergency meeting, nobody would expect a gun as an accompaniment, cinnamon maybe, but not a pistol. Below you can see a short video of the infamous can gun complete with reloading.
Our drone work continues with the team smoothing out, and finalizing its initial flight path until we build out more of the map. The drone will cover the game live highlighting the best action, places of interest, and the most beautiful places in post-fracture Lahaina. We discussed the possibility of specific drone streams in the future featuring certain aspects of the game like: combat, wildlife, main buildings, or even specific groups down the road.
Lastly, work on our first quest continues. We are making some last minute changes to the look of some of the buildings and vehicles players will be searching through for specific items. Some audio and animation improvements are in the pipeline, but most of our time this sprint has been focused on trying perfect the games lighting, especially at night. You can see in this shot of the Communication Tower entrance and the area immediately outside, how much that work is paying off.
Check back later in the week for more updates and screenshots.
