We made a lot of progress on team ui, and a team page over the weekend. Jesse showed off some wireframes, and we talked over some potential user flow issues regarding playing with a group. We discussed numerous filtering options for finding Friends and House members who are playing the game, and quick ways to invite them to your group. We talked briefly about some of the mechanics involved with trading, and worked through some potential issues.
We’re finishing up some team related mechanics this week too. Soon, you will be able to heal team members, and others with healing items. You could splint your own leg previously, but we’re expanding the healing gear, and allowing players to extend medical help to others. We discussed some future goals for our crafting system, and the possibility of making specialty rounds down the road.
Progress on our second loot drop scenario continues. Players can now claim a building, and if they can keep control of it for a set period of time, a loot area filled with gear and survival equipment will open to the them. We discussed our ingame money, Rai, a few loot distribution goals, and the overall game economy. A few weeks ago we added the ability for a player to throw a melee weapon in combat. This week we added some animations to make it look better, and physics rules so weapons can now bounce around after you hurl them. There are very few things cooler than throwing a shark-toothed axe at someone, but bouncing one off of a pillar before sinking it into an opponents head is one of them.
The web team continued their work on a game map for the web page. We’re still having some trouble lining up key landmarks with the ingame map, but we’re making progress. We’re busy squashing bugs as they appear, and making some performance improvements to the page. We’ve optimized images across the site, and fixed some icon rendering issues.
It wasn’t just the web team bug hunting over the weekend either. We addressed a loading screen issue, and fixed a bug that was crashing staging. The HUD got a lot of improvements and tweaks as we close in on a final look and ui design. The Settings ui received a lot of attention and updates too. Changing your game preferences should be quick and easy now, even if your trying to play at work.
Finally, we’ve added audio support to a number of areas, but have a few more to go before every area sounds as unique as it looks. We added a few quality of life improvements to the game as well. A fire does more than just look pretty now. A player standing near one will warm up faster than normal, and it will even dry off your clothes much faster than usual. Our spawn area expansion and facelift is nearing completion. We could still use a few decorations to draw the eye away from the wet brick and mildew, but the spawn area is almost ready for newly restored players.
We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.
