With the short holiday weekend coming up, everyone is pushing hard to finish projects before the end of the year. Our goal of having a chronological view of the numerous game story posts is just about complete. The team hooked up year and story tag filters to the timeline view, and highlighted the date of the great fracture. Soon, you’ll be able to read the game story in the order that it happened.
We took a deeper look at our tribute and referrer system as well. While it’s explained in the FAQ, we want to make sure that everyone knows that if they invite a friend to play the game, and that friend joins, they get a 100 kula (our premium currency) bonus. In addition, For the first year of play after accepting an invitation from you, and if they verify you were their referrer, you will get a percentage of any cash payments they make to us (Paddlecreek games) in your player wallet. We discussed different simple ways to explain the process better, with a pictorial to illustrate how the process works.
We did some polish work on the inventory and crafting ui too. We added downward facing arrows when you hover over a container that can hold dragged items, and a few other minor improvements to make things more clear. The team discussed adding other visual cues to denote dropping, swapping, attaching, equipping, and any other action a player might have with an item.
We circled back to a discussion about a game news service that we would like to set up. The service would display notable game events like good samaritan acts, major weather events, House raids, and killings. We’d use some sort of curated system to write short news alerts about particularly important events as they happen. This cool feature would help players stay up to date about events in their world. The team talked about what we’d like our news archive to look like, and how we’d differentiate it from the game story archive.
This led us to a discussion about player death and the fine line between making death hurt, and making it so frustrating that a player gives up. We talked about special rules for death in a game instance, and using player data for special respawning rules. Fractured Veil is in part a survival game, and we want to make sure that a player dying is a serious event to be avoided. However, we don’t the pain of death to be so bad that players feel like giving up after they get eaten by a Green Lady, or a plan doesn’t come together.
Work continues on a game compass with most of the attention now focused on ui aspects of navigating around Lahaina. After some discussion about using the compass in game, we moved on to how drone cameras would impact the fog of war on the map. We want to make sure that someone doesn’t get a tactical advantage over someone else by watching the live drone camera feed. As armies throughout time learned, having a bird’s-eye view of a battlefield can be a game changer. We want to make sure that nobody has an unfair advantage when they decided to get a group together, and murder the neighbors.
Finally, the art team continues the task of breaking down the map and adding detail. As you can see from the shots below, Lahaina at dusk is a beautiful and deadly place.
We’ll be back next week with more updates.
