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Tags, Forums, and Kill Data

As usual we got a lot of work done over the weekend and hit the week running. Here’s what we we’ve done since our last update.

Our forums are now hooked up. Instead of trying to create our own we decided to go with Discourse. It seems to be simple, intuitive and most people are familiar with it. Best of all, it’s already done so we don’t have to spend precious engineering hours creating our own. Right now there are just a few threads, but as we get closer to rolling the game out, we’ll add more topics of discussion. However, there is already a thread for recipes of our in-game canned meat product. Feel free to add your own family SSHAM recipes if you have one. (Paddle Creek Games does not encourage or endorse the eating of fictitious meat products. Though we too get the tasty attraction of shrimp shu-mai)

We’ve added tags to the media section so you can easily sort images. If you only want to look at tools of death and destruction just click on the “weapons” tag and you’ll only see guns, clubs, and sharp things. This will become more useful as we post more art, 3D models, and screenshots.

The team is finishing up animation work on weapons, crafting, equipment use, and climbing/jumping. Patcher/launcher work continued to sort out any remaining bugs, and we talked through some lingering builder issues.

We’re working on our alerts system and polishing up the ui. We’re tying them into our quest system (which is in the process of being built itself) and integrating them into the map to help with navigation and to highlight points of interest. All this map talk led us to a discussion about a desire to have a tactical mini-map for houses that members can use to monitor the location and status of other house members. More on that later.

San spent a lot of time working on analytics regarding player death and respawning. Our plan is to make available that data to players and use it to create some really interesting graphs. You’ll be able to compare how your house did in combat compared to other houses or who the top shooter/stabber/clubber is on the island. You’ll be able to see how many times you died (maybe even what killed you) and how many confirmed kills you have. Being able to see your name or your house at the top of the kill list should help add some validity to your bragging rights, and we like to help. That about wraps it up. We’ll have another update later this week but now it’s time to go over some surfboard designs. Here are a couple that just came in.
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Communication Goals and Coming Back From The Dead Quickly

We didn’t spend the entire holiday grilling food and shooting off fireworks. We did a lot of work too. Here’s what we were up to.

We did a lot of work on our alert system and its ui. This got us talking about our communication goals in the game. We broke down player states into 4 types: Offline, Idle, Participating, and Playing. Our goal is to not only have things you can do in the game when you’re not actively playing, but to have a communication system that serves users in all states. Whether you’re just chatting with members of your house, waiting for your friends to login, or (and this is a big theoretical at this point) operating some defensive system while carpooling to work, we want you to be able to choose through a list of available channels and talk with a click of a button.

We did some work on friends lists and discussed the importance of hooking up privacy settings. Nobody likes being bothered by some random person who bandaged your character at some point and has boundary issues. Having working privacy settings will help those especially needy to move on and bandage other people.
We talked about the need for click tracking and a heat map to help us see what navigation users seem to like or use the most. We always appreciate feedback but understand not everyone feels like telling us that they like or hate something we’ve done.

San did a bunch of patcher/launcher work. Loading the game has never been faster. We continued working on our game tutorial and did some more environmental work. We’ve made some updates to how we display our 3D models that you have to see and began some audio work. Soon the forest will be filled with better sounding birds and our Kükenroot will finally sound like a proper Kükenroot. We even did some work on respawning. We were getting tired of having to restart every time we died and figured you would too. Soon the time between falling off the radio tower and being able to climb back up, to jump again, will be greatly reduced.
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Making the moon smaller and the price of pretty

We finished our (temporary, likely) in-game chat system so you can share your words with your friends (but not words with friends, we’re not that kind of game company). We designed it like our quest, alerts, and login to be integrated with Google services.

San worked on a new patcher for your quicker loading enjoyment and removed a bunch of old code. Multi-stream downloads are supported. He worked on a minimal RPC Voip test service that Discord would be hooked into later.

We did some more trueSky debugging to fix some of our mysterious glowing and other strange lighting issues. We found that directional light on the Moon was not hooked up. We also changed the moon’s size slightly in the hopes that it would fix some of our trouble. We don’t anticipate any effect on the tides.

We’re doing some more post processing work so you can expect some extra pretty pictures coming real soon. In addition, a bunch of environmental improvements are in the works including some improved blending and ground textures. Note the cool totem.

With all the environmental work coming up we had a discussion about its impact on performance. We talked about the balance between having a game that is enjoyable to play on a mid/low level GPU vs. making a setting that is as realistic and beautiful as possible. In the end we decided the price of pretty was worth it and we would focus on making a fun, lush environment instead of worrying about the game playing smoothly on an old laptop.
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Friends and Thorcon and Genitals and Stars, oh my

Hey everyone! We had a busy week and these are some of the highlights……

The team made the friend request notifications smarter, so once you’ve sent a request you aren’t constantly reminded of it. We worked out a few lingering sitemap issues that were causing URLs to point in the wrong places. The team fine tuned the sidebar navigation following some of your suggestions. We hope it’s a much more intuitive clicking experience for you now. Thanks for the feedback! We smoothed out a number of styling and color problems on the blog and squashed a few minor layout related bugs there as well.

In the meeting, we discussed social links and if our energies would be better focused on providing useful in-game stats for players about their characters and houses. Instead of spending weeks tweaking the Facesnap or Twitterbook API’s, we decided to devote our time on systems that would benefit our players more directly.

We’ve started looking into how best to integrate Discord so our players can easily ask us questions and keep better apprised of our development process. Ideally, we’d end up on a channel with all our alpha users and let em chat with us there, or something. In the short term, players can add a link to their Discord user profile in the social settings.

Also this week, we should be getting our trueSky source license. Top minds are on it, the tippyest toppiest! We hope to have our sky looking a little more awesome gorgeous soon.

We’re starting to make a framework for our quest system so you can feel like you have a purpose while running around and get rewards. We’re also finishing up on how the inventory works, you have to put your stuff somewhere, and a couple of game mechanics including: cooking, crafting, and combat.

We’re working on a catalog of sorts for game items that users can look through. It will be separated by item type: clothes, weapons, medical equipment, etc. Items will be accompanied by a picture, game statistics, a description of what it is, and even how it works in some cases. We look forward to eventually reading the product reviews and seeing how many stars you give the travel size Leiomano.
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We made a lot of other important decisions too. For instance, we decided that 127, the element used to provide power to some of the game’s most futuristic technology, is likely to cause genital cancers if inhaled. So there’s that…..

Here’s a look at the inside of the Thorcon plant. Hazmat suits or at the very least, lead underwear, is advised. We’ll have another update, with more eye candy, later this week.
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