With the Veil News Network (VNN) newsticker working across the front page, the team is focusing on getting a live video system working for specific news events. We have a fixed camera live stream on our YouTube page with some terrific, (for some definition of terrific), Hawaiian elevator music for accompaniment. Jesse needs to rework the overlay to give access to the video controls, and make it responsive for people with smaller screens and mobile, but the view can be quite beautiful when the sun is rising.
We plan on recording a few videos of certain areas to highlight places to explore, and cover any holes in our live coverage. We talked about ways we could adjust and present the service to make it look and feel like a real news organization. The team discussed in depth how it currently has more of a public access/small local channel vibe to it, than a super-polished large news network feel. We’re going to make some slight changes in size, and placement on the front page in the coming weeks, but are pretty excited about how things are looking so far.
We continue to work on a system for team play, and Jesse showed off the latest stage of the team ui. Right now, it has an indicator when someone is talking, map markers that show the relative position of team members, basic information of cohorts, (for people not in your party only your name appears), and a noise indicator on the minimap. We want to be careful to not show too much information about other players crawling through the underbrush, or waiting to snipe a target however. So, we talked about ways to let more social players find new friends, and let the creepers creep.
We completed a big pass on crafting and resources this week. Virtually everything in the game is craftable now. We’re still having some trouble with very large trees and rocks giving up resources, but we hope to have it worked out soon. We also adjusted the weight of resources, as everything was way too heavy before. Now players can feel free to make enough twine to put together a shirt without becoming overburdened and an easy lunch for the wolves.
We are finishing up our shopping cart improvements this week as well. Every game package is colored coded, and has images of everything included now. We plan on having a table style view for comparing them ready for production soon.
Lastly, the art team showed off the latest concept drawings of the spawn area, and other parts of the map. We plan on expanding the spawn area from just one room to three, and we looked at the first iteration of an explorable mine area. One of the benefits of using an actual map of Lahaina is that much of the map layout work is done already. We discussed which areas, such as farmland, we need to alter for the game and which we can use as a template. We plan on leaving a few main roads for travel from one place to another, and converting some of the ones off the beaten path into dirt trails through the jungle. You can see below what the fracture, and 60 years of neglect has done to some of the residential roads in Lahaina.
That’s it for this week. We’ll be back later with more updates.
