While Terry kicked off the week poking the monster that is the UE 4.20.2 upgrade and updating trueSKY, the rest of the team was busy switching over audio to Wwise. We’ve made a number of audio improvements across the board. The amount of noise a player makes when doing various activities has been adjusted (there’s no quiet leaping from the top of a structure), and we’ve made improvements to some other environmental sounds too. You can now occasionally hear a bullet ricochet, (a strangely pleasing noise when firing a weapon), and we’ve added a little flying blood when you successfully cause damage with a shotgun.
We’ve been polishing the area where our first quest takes place, fixing bugs, and doing some general UX work. The shot below shows you what the neighborhood surrounding the Communication Tower looks like as you approach, looking for quest items.
A few of the bugs we fixed already this week include: Medkits will now heal poison effects. Sometimes a player would start to lean to one side like they had just maxed out their credit card on mai tai’s, at Beachcomber Bob’s Tiki Tavern. We made sure everyone now stands up straight. Occasionally a mutant would refuse to climb stairs, so we worked on their confidence, glutes, and quads to make sure they could run stadium stairs with the best of them. Lastly, we fixed a problem with crafting recipes turning up empty.
While we were working on the crafting bugs, we also put in some UX time and addressed a number of layout issues on the crafting screen. We nabbed a lingering bug with the player inventory grid, added some improvements to the queue, made rollover info for items more clear, made some navigation improvements, and added subtle changes to the color scheme to help differentiate items actively being worked on, and those waiting for repair.
The web team made some changes to the front page, including upgrades to the slides, colors, and navigation layout. We talked about incorporating a badge/achievement system to encourage players to explore the page, and all the various social tie-ins available to them. Jared started work expanding our notification system so players can get alerts every time something new happens in their House, or to one of their friends. He’s also making sure there is a setting for those of you who don’t want to get notified of anything those people are doing, so long as they’re helping you shoot things in the jungle, and bandaging hurt limbs. We discussed the need to give the VNN drone the updated geographic information of the new map, so it will stop traveling through the Earth while making its path around the island.
Our SEO work is starting to pay off and we talked at some length about user flow improvements. We’ve addressed some of the confusion our packages page had inadvertently caused. After some initial feedback, we learned that some wrongly thought they’d have to pay a monthly subscription to play the game, instead of a one-time fee. We’ve addressed the problem, and updated the page to make it clear that a player doesn’t have to pay every month to play the game. We discussed offering some sort of game bundle which would allow a player to buy multiple copies of the game for their friends at a discount. We looked at a number of examples other games were using, and are deciding what we think would work best for us.
Being the temporary social hub in the game, the Thorcon Power Plant is getting some minor touch-ups, and we’re building out the surrounding areas to make sure there is plenty to loot, explore, and fight. However, we plan on moving the main meeting point to the Veil Station in the near future. The art team is hard at work making all the performance and texture improvements necessary to make that happen. The shots below highlight the building’s exterior transformation from normal wear and tear, to what 60+ years and The Great Fracture has done to it.
That’s everything for now. I’ll be back with more updates at the end of the week.
