As we near the end of the week, the web team is pushing to complete the last of their work on the Community Page. The push on House customization is done for now. There’s a new prominent callout for Houses with links to the FAQ explaining what they are, and how they work. House founders can: load images, design banners, create charters, manage member roles, and pick a color scheme. Players will also be able to see when their friends are online, and what House, if any, their friends belong to. Friend requests and House invitations are now more prominently displayed. Jesse updated Bootstrap and did some refactoring work to keep things neat and tidy as well.
Work on increasing performance by sectioning up the map, and replacing old buildings with structures created with the programmatic building system continues. It takes a while, but the positive impact on gameplay will make it worth it. The last thing we want is for your GPU fan to kick into overdrive everytime you explore the ruins of a subdivision. A few last touches were added to the Thorcon plant interior too. Here’s a look at how it looks inside.
We talked some more about how the Veil News Network (VNN) would work in the game, and how best to display information on the website. We came up with a few new ideas regarding how we’re parsing the data coming in from the news API, and some additional templates for various types of stories. We discussed how we want to tie notifications into the VNN system to make sure it is fun and useful, without players feeling like our news drones are spamming them with weather reports.
We went over the last few items we need to finish up in regards to merchandise, namely challenge coins and Manimal cans. One of the requirements for our real-life Manimal distributor is that we have a business number on the can. So far, nobody has volunteered to use their personal number for the official Manimal info contact, but we did have quite a lengthy discussion about an appropriate hold message and music. Metal seems to be the consensus as far as music goes, but we didn’t decide on a specific genre: death metal, black metal, deathgrind, or other types of distorted screaming. If you have a suggestion we’d love to hear it in the Forums.
Our talk about merch led us to a discussion about rai, our in-game money. We discussed how other games handle money after you die, and how it affects your encumbrance. San brought up a couple interesting ideas about how players could manage money, especially very large sums, in the game. We talked about possible vault or banking systems, loss of money after you’ve been killed, and how those features could impact things like theft or extortion between players in the game.
Finally, with all the new weapons introduced recently, we’ve been pushing to include some body armor options for protection. Below you can see one of the latest iterations of a high-end armor to protect yourself from the slings, arrows, and bullets of outrageous fortune while running around Lahaina.
