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Reporting Crimes and Minting Coins

The push to create the Veil News Network (VNN), an interactive real-time service that reports on major game events and announcements, continues this week. The news API is collecting more metadata, and Jared’s story template library is growing to cover a variety of happenings and events. Jesse is working on animations for a newsticker on the front page, and a VNN news overlay for videos.

We discussed possible latency issues once the ticker is up and running, making sure live alerts don’t feel spammy, and some interesting game tie-ins. We talked about a “citizen reporter” type system, in which players could report crimes. Think of it as a sort of neighborhood watch with a healthy dose of extortion, witness tampering, and murder thrown in to keep it interesting. San had some clever ideas about how players might eventually manipulate the news to their advantage as well that we’re going to keep an eye on.

Overall ui work continues as well. We’re finishing up drag and drop for items in the inventory, and adding alerts for dropped items, so you don’t accidentally drop something important like a claymore before you go out into the bush. We’re adding finishing touches to a new fullscreen ui update, finalizing the new HUD, and adding some shadow/light scalability settings in the game settings ui.

We’re wrapping up the initial merch offerings this week too. Jesse is working out some details on some all-over shirt designs, finishing up a Kula coin (our premium currency), and completing our catalog with all images of available products, and game packages. We ran into a bug that was keeping shipping options from being displayed during checkout as well. Jared is hunting it down and the fix should be in soon.

The item spawning system is ready to fill your backpack with items of an appropriate power/usefulness level at an appropriate rate. While they can be fun for a few hours, getting rocket boots on your first day can make any game too easy, and ultimately not very fun to play. Terry focused on map builds and integrating Wwise and TrueSKY. We’re working on a handful of needed animations for long guns, and prone combat too.

Lastly, this round of map and game performance optimization work is just about done. We’re replacing the last of the old building components with parts from our programmatic building system, and adding audio support to the few remaining silent places around Lahaina. The safe sewer spawning area is done for now. Players can find a canteen and a few basic survival tools there, and take a minute to get their wits about them if they’ve just been killed in combat. As you can see from the pictures below, it’s not bad a far a post-apocalyptic drainage systems go.
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