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News You Need and Subterranean Safe Spaces

The first full week of sprint 20 saw the web team finish up preliminary work on customizable House features. Players can now go to their House Settings page to: write their House charter, setup application instructions, load a House banner, pick their House colors, Integrate VOIP and streaming services, and assign a background image. We’re nabbed a few minor bugs as they arise, but players should be able to add some unique touches to their Houses now. Jesse is finishing a House callout page, and we discussed adding various email notifications, alerts, and overlay options during the next customization upgrade.

Houses aren’t the only things getting a makeover this week. We’re working on a complete HUD and fullscreen ui update as well. Our goal is to make a less cluttered view of Lahaina, with easy access to systems and equipment that a player needs to use often, or in an emergency. Things are looking great so far.

We talked at length about our in-game drone cameras, and setting up the Veil News Network (VNN) to keep players up-to-date about events in the game. Jared is hooking up our news API so that we’ll have real time data about player locations, kills, and actions in the game. We talked about a few different game tie-ins, real-time announcements, and integrating players and Houses. Our goal is to have a semi-interactive service that keeps track of everything going on in the game, and highlights the most important events, with some fun announcements thrown in. VNN, the news you need, the details you deserve.

The team is working out a few last kinks in the automated item spawning system so players will find more than disappointment in boxes, crates, and hidden spaces around the island. We’re continuing work on improving performance as well, by breaking down the map, replacing a few old structures, and updating the roofs of the programmatically built buildings around Lahaina. We’re working on adding some audio support to a few locations as well. Hopefully, it will be so clear, you won’t know if you’re listening to a nature documentary, or if a family of raccoons took up residence in your walls.

Finally, work continues on the sewer respawn zone. The subterranean safe space will give players who have just experienced a fatal assault a chance to reflect, and not be instantly hacked to pieces or shot while loading. As you can see from the shots below, it’s pretty nice as far as apocalyptic sewers go.

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We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.

DEV

Fixing the Cart and Adding Packages

Even though many of us were busy with trips, celebrations, and family visits during this short week, we kept plugging away to finish up our goals for sprint 18 and squash any lingering bugs.

We found one of those bugs when San was placing an order on mobile. While the “continue to checkout” button would display, it didn’t do anything when you clicked it. Since that is a pretty important part of the checkout process, (one might argue the most important part), The web team dug into the problem and we’re addressing the issue. We discussed the need for better logging to help find and fix problems like this, and the terrible feeling you get when something broken works fine on an emulator.

The art team remains busy sectioning up the map, adding detail to buildings, and completing any remaining texture and lighting work. The shots below show how good the scenery looks, even in low light.
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Jesse finished generating all the remaining images for the products in our store, including the can art for Manimal. Soon “ultra extreme athletes and mathletes, mammals in a hurry, the nocturnal, the diurnal and fans of tasty energy in liquid form,” will be able to hold their very own can. We took another look at packages as well, and decided we need something between “Princess Bernice” and “Makaha”. More on that soon. We talked about sending more notifications to players navigating around the web page and making purchases, and how to improve the email we already send.

You might remember that he needed to hire a contractor to take out a window just to get it into his house, but San has made good use of the giant new rack, and has most of the servers moved over now. We talked about our current hosting abilities and where we need to eventually grow to handle heavy traffic. Chris spent some time with Terry updating Ubuntu over ssh, which was riveting, exquisite suspense.

Finally the last of the minor bugs with the programmatic building system and item spawning system are being squashed. For all intents and purposes both are done, but we need a few animations to smooth things out yet. We continued work on a player compass, with a HUD version already completed to help you navigate through the wilds of Lahaina. We circled back to earlier discussions about security cameras for Houses. We talked more about the logistics of the system, and the necessity of keeping the cameras rolling when people aren’t logged in to please the paranoid, and the small percentage of wildlife voyeurs in our player base.

That’s all for now. We’ll be back with more updates at the start of the new year.

DEV

Player Death and Referring a Friend

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.
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We’ll be back next week with more updates.

DEV

Building Houses and Breaking News

With the current sprint ending today, the team continued to focus on adding some last minute polish and nabbing any lingering bugs. Jared and Jesse finished up most of the ecommerce work needed to get our shopping cart up and running. PayPal integration is complete, and mock-up images of all the new shirt colors are done. The player wallet API is complete and Jared is testing the system. It won’t be long before you’ll be able to buy a shirt with referral money from getting your friends to play the game.

Jesse showed off some new logo work and we looked at an awesome mock-up for waving House banners. We talked about various other options for customizing Houses as well, and what limits we want in place to make sure we don’t have areas of the map that burn up GPUs. Speaking of customizing houses, San shared the story of why the new rack has to stay in his garage for a while yet. It turns out it’s too big to fit through the hallway to get to the server room.

Work continues on our drone cameras and we should have a basic system up in running in a few weeks. We talked some more about how and where live video would appear or be shared on the homepage. We then took a pretty deep-dive into all aspects of a news alert/feed system for game events and happenings, including what we’d call the fictional news service providing the feed (protip: avoid any name the leads to an acronym that starts with VD.)

We talked about what kinds of events that would come across the ticker. Things like: good samaritan acts, major weather events, House raids, killings, and so on. We talked about how we’d collect and disseminate the data used in the feed, including the possibility of some sort of curated system to make sure important events were called out. We are collecting death information currently that covers the who, what, when, and where. The why seems pretty obvious; It’s a game. We talked about what bits of data were important for other events, and how we’d decide what gets run. Jesse showed off some layout and news alert mockups to help us visualize what the system could look like.

The team talked a bit about how the game map should lead players to explore areas, move around, and encourage longer gameplay. We talked briefly about the state of the AI in animals and NPC’s. There will be a couple basic AI archetypes when we roll out Beta, but really smart creatures and great battle tacticians are a bit down the road. In short, it will be awhile before players get to face off with a Hawaiian mutant Sun Tzu. The barking button and doors are fixed in the communications tower elevator, so that building is done for now. As you can see from the pictures below the interior looks great and it’s quite a drop from the upper deck. The art team is moving on to the Thorcon power plant and the Veil Station.
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We’ll be back next week with more updates and screenshots.

DEV

Armor, Audio, and Audacious Kitchens

The web team continued their polish work on the shopping cart this week and made a number of minor fixes and improvements. As I mentioned in the last update, we decided to try a new brand of t-shirt that we think will be more comfortable. We now have both men’s and women’s shirts instead of the just the one unisex style that we had before. Jesse designed new logos and we picked out some new colors for both styles of shirt. We’ll be adding some more new shirts, posters, and other merchandise soon. In addition, we made another pass at box design, and Jesse is adding the finishing touches now.

We talked a bit about our future server needs, and went over a few options to get us where we plan to be. San continued to work on persistence and we should have an inventory that stays with your character very soon. With the end of the year approaching, we took some time to go over a 3 month development timeline, to make sure everyone was on the same page, and that we weren’t missing any low hanging fruit. The team discussed messaging systems and what we’d like ours to do that isn’t readily available with other options. We went over different short and long term goals and solutions.

The ambient sound system is nearing completion and it’s sounding great. We have a number of different sounds for various areas and times of day. Players will hear different noises traveling at night than they will in the morning, and we have separate sounds for both birds and insects. Even buildings have their own associated ambient noises. The automated building system is almost ready to be deployed as well. The tech team showed off a number of screenshots from randomly constructed buildings and it’s looking good. Their still loading our game-specific furnishings and props so everything we looked at used generic placeholders, which led to this magnificent kitchen you see below. One can only imagine how many years of their life the cabinet maker gave to complete this kitchen. There’s enough counter space to hold the contents of another entire kitchen, and we’re still trying to calculate how many shark-toothed frying pans will fit in the lower cabinets
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We talked some more about integrating a game camera on the website and discussed getting more House and player data on the front page. We’re collecting a lot of useful data right now, but we’re not doing much with it yet. We discussed displaying player metrics and events, things like: who crafted the most of X item, who did the most damage, announcing that Chris got more head shots than anyone else, and so on. Displaying user data can be tricky though, and we went over the different privacy options we’d need for those of you who don’t want your character info shared.

Our armor system is now in place and we’re going through and adjusting different damage mitigating outfits to make sure the game remains balanced. As I mentioned earlier this week, we had some issues with drag-n-drop in the inventory. Those problems have been worked out, so characters can drop anything they want instead of being stuck in a permanent item dragging hell. Finally, the communication tower shading and sounds are done, just in time for us to run into some lighting issues. It’s looking great even if it’s a bit dark right now.
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That wraps it up for this week. We’ll be back with more updates Tuesday.

DEV

Lights, Cameras, and Transactions

The week started off with more discussion about cameras. We talked at some length about how we’d handle cameras in multiple worlds, and the faraway goal of having hundreds of robot cameras, rendering images of multiple worlds at the same time. The team revisited the idea of having a live streaming camera of the game world on the website. We talked about various things we could add to the live stream, including a news ticker-like feature with game announcements and/or story headlines. This led us to a conversation about incorporating more character data in the website, and what things would be useful or interesting for players to see on the web.

We continued to make improvements to our online store and shopping cart. We’ve decided to switch brands of t-shirts to one we hope is more comfortable. In addition to wanting to offer you the most pleasant shirt wearing experience we can, lots of us are wearing these sample shirts every day too, so we want all of us to be comfortable. With the new brand comes picking new colors and styles. Jesse even made a few tweaks to the logo to make it stand out better.

PayPal and game wallet integration continues (see the FAQ for more information about our Tributes, Affiliates, & Invitation System). We talked about a few different return scenarios including one that added the new word “re-kulaing fee” to the official Fractured Veil Development Lexicon. Jesse continued working on the box art and company logo. We looked at a number of other possible products, and we’ll have a Manimal poster available in the store soon for fans of extreme refreshment.

Terry continues his shader work and we talked at length about supporting a Vulkan Linux client. We did a bunch of ui cleanup and a lot of work on drag-n-drop in the inventory. Currently, we’ve got the dragging part nailed, the dropping part….not so much right now. We’ll have weapon attachments soon, and we continued work on the quick bar. However, we ran into a problem with how the bar and inventory work together. The bar takes into account weight but not size. This leads to some edge cases that have to be addressed, or a player will be forced to play an unwanted item stacking mini-game. We’re interested in killing mutants and building bases with your friends, not playing Tetris with ammunition, splint materials, and bottled water.

We ran into our most ironic bug to date, when we discovered that our water effects were leaking memory like a sieve. We hope to have the leak plugged soon. The automated building system took another step forward over the weekend. The loot spawning system is now integrated so that buildings not only come populated with the appropriate props, but they come with loot now as well. There is still some debugging and optimization work to be done, but we can now create multiple buildings, complete with furnishings and treasure, on the fly. This development sparked a discussion about expanding the system to other types of structures. Right now, we’re focusing on homes, but it wouldn’t be that far of a stretch to make it work for larger industrial buildings as well, like factories. This would give us the ability to have similar large buildings, even specific ones, like a SSHAM factory, that would be slightly different in different worlds.

Lastly, we’re wrapping up the minor work needed in the communication tower. As you can see below, it’s almost ready for exploring, inside and out. Jesse is finishing up ui work for the elevator control panel, and we’re adding the tower sounds this week. “Sounds of the Tower”
may not become the hottest album of the year, but we think it will add another great feature to what has become one of our largest, and most detailed buildings.

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We’ll be back with more sights and sounds later this week.

DEV

The Sounds of Automated Construction

As planned, we put our shopping cart up on staging and turned it over to Chris, the breaker of all things. He gave it a kick, tried out every option the average person could think of, tried out options only Chris could think of, and tried to break it in general. Thankfully, he was unsuccessful and everything seems to work great. The team is just fixing some minor bugs and layout issues, but it should be up and on production in a day or two.

We have run into a few bugs in the game recently however. Currently, characters are spawning in naked. While this might be fine for a different kind of game, it doesn’t really fit with what we’re trying to do. It’s called Fractured Veil not Free and Easy Veil. Also, as you can see below, Chicken Little’s warnings turned out to be true. For a yet undetermined reason, sometimes the sky is falling.
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Terry is working on fixing our build issues, and we talked through some version control concerns, and discussed some possible options. Player stats are now incorporated and are updating as you play. Inventory ui work is still coming along and should be done (at least the initial version) soon. Item persistence is done and the player interact bar is ready. Now a player can drag-n-drop inventory items into the quick bar, and get the gear they need in their hand quickly. We also worked on streamlining trait and talent effects.

Jesse continued work on box art, and he showed off what it might look like. We talked about getting logos for the fictitious game companies finished so we can include things like the Veilcorp logo on the box. We looked at the latest iteration of a new company logo, and talked over some cool animation ideas. The team discussed business cards and Jesse showed off his latest designs. We all wondered how Jesse had access to a time machine, what with the business cards and all.

San did some work plumbing character persistence and talked about experimenting with higher camera resolutions. We looked at some different camera overlay options and talked about different use cases. We continued our discussion about having a live camera on the website to show off the game.

The automated building system took some more steps forward. Buildings are now being populated with props and furniture. Kitchens have: stoves, tables, refrigerators, and other room-appropriate items. The same is true for the rest of the rooms in the automated houses. We did run into a minor issue with asymmetrical pieces, but we hope to have that that fixed soon. The team will be importing all of our game specific furnishings, including much sought after items like: the boar tusk broom, and the shark-toothed frying pan this week.

With the auto-builder basically done, we talked about building placement and how much, or little, we want buildings to be protected from destruction. While we want to use the Lahaina map as a guide, and accurately represent places mentioned in the story, we want to make sure to avoid the cookie cutter neighborhoods that are common in some other games. There was some discussion and debate about a character’s ability to completely level a building as well. On one hand, we want players to be able to use a building for construction materials or as a hideout or base. On the other hand, we could end up in a situation were almost the entire island has been leveled for building materials by early players. We’re still talking through how to strike the right balance for everyone.

Lastly, we’re doing a lot of audio work, including designing a dynamic environmental audio system. When it’s up and running players will hear different environmental noises as they move around. As you get closer to a grouping of trees, you’ll hear more jungle noises. Wander into a neighborhood and you’ll hear background noises appropriate to that area and so on. The larger buildings have their own distinct environmental noises too. In addition to the visual work on the communication tower, the team is working on the noises specific to the building. As you can see from this aerial shot of the rusting roof at night, the tower is sure to make some creaks and groans in a heavy wind.
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We’ll be back with more updates later this week.

DEV

Cameras and Buildings and Bears!

The team spent the weekend making refinements and improving the automated building system introduced last week. The system now has a number of pre-saved templates for buildings to choose from, and a batch build button so you can create multiple buildings of similar characteristics. You can adjust square footage, add a porch, and move doors and windows around. Stairs now have bannisters and railings, where appropriate, rooms have windows, and chests/containers are being placed in rooms. While they are generic containers now, they will become room specific soon: refrigerators, dressers, stoves, medicine cabinets, that sort of thing. We talked about figuring out some scarcity rules for loot placed inside, and some optimization tricks to speed up the building process. While it’s not 100% automated yet, it’s getting there. Soon we’ll be able to quickly construct whole neighborhoods of houses like this.
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We added a bunch of new wildlife to the island this week as well. Evidently, the Lahaina Zoo’s breeding program was far more successful than their security measures. Many animals escaped during the fracture, including bears. Being large enough to protect themselves, they did the second most common thing bears do in the woods, and the population grew. Out of respect for San’s affinity for Fred, his neighborhood’s friendly trash panda, we added raccoons too. Rats, chickens, rabbits, squirrels, foxes, and humpback whales round out the new members of the animal menagerie. We’re working out some animal animations yet and audio/sounds too. We want to make sure people know that despite what cartoons led them to believe, rampant obnoxious rooster crowing is not reserved for the crack of dawn. We’re even making sure that the chickens lay eggs, because nothing is better for breakfast than free-range eggs, especially during the apocalypse. The biggest issue we’ve found so far is that the animals have a tendency to run straight into the ocean when they’re trying to escape, which makes collecting hides hard.

Since we’re wrapping up sprint 16, there was a lot of polish and last minute bug fixes as well. We talked about fixing the rain system to make it more realistic. Terry is doing some lighting work, and we changed the color scheme on the crafting and inventory screens. Inventory item persistence work is wrapping up, but we found a bug that crashes the game whenever you open your inventory. We’re working on a fix right now. The team is finishing up some paper doll work as well. We made some layout changes to the crafting and inventory screens and the crafting queue now includes a timer.

Lastly, San continued his camera work and improved the API. He showed it off to a few people this weekend and found that they spent most of their time using it to watch sunsets, landscapes, and the occasional frightened raccoon run straight for the deep end of the ocean. This got us talking about using the system for some sort of flying cam that would sweep the landscape, following a set path, before making it available for tactical/security purposes. We talked about how we would implement such a thing, and how we could incorporate it into the web page. We still plan on providing specific cameras for base defense and tactical purposes for Houses, but you might see a sky cam on the webpage capturing scenes like the one below, sooner rather than later.
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We’ll be back later this week with the latest updates.

DEV

Building Neighborhoods and Installing Cameras

This week the web team took care of all the remaining bugs discovered with the Friends system, and pushed the fixes to production. However, after some testing they found a few more bugs with the shopping cart. Jared is finishing up a little work on the checkout, and Jesse is tackling a few layout and flow issues. All the problems have been minor, so we hope to have the system up on staging by midweek. Our plan is to make sure the inventory is appearing properly before handing it over to Chris to see if he can break it. If all goes well, the shopping cart will go live on the site next week, just in time for the new t-shirt design Jesse is working on.

San has spent a lot of time hammering and tweaking our security/tactical camera system and it has really paid off. He has it working well enough now that we took a deep dive into its implementation, and possible uses in the future. We discussed the pros and cons of making them a purchasable item, something you have to craft or a combination of the two. We decided that security cameras should be tied to a base and require players to hook them up to a power source, instead of being able to drop spy cams all over the landscape. The team talked about having a limit to the number of cameras a House could have and maybe using a mechanic like character slots for them. There was a discussion about whether or not a camera could be jammed or destroyed, and a number of possible griefer scenarios.

We then moved on to how we’d like to integrate the camera system with the web and notifications. We talked about the need to have a list of usable and active cameras for House leaders and a possible new role for members, the camera monitor. Anyone who’s watched an action movie in the past 30 years knows how important it is to have at least a few security personnel to sit, and ineffectually watch screens before absorbing the first few bullets from an enemy attack. We discussed having a continuous recording and a triggered mode, as well as the ability to search archived camera footage, so you can see who’s been poking around your base. We talked through a camera notification system, because getting a text that the enemies are at the gates so-to-speak sounds cool. Jesse walked through some preliminary ui ideas and we talked about web page integration, with the possibility of being able to move camera field of view from the web.

We’re finishing up work on a lot of systems this week as well. The inventory screen is in the middle of an overhaul with various widgets, item data, and drag-n-drop features getting some final work. The team is wrapping up some loose ends on integrating talents and being able to heal specific body parts. Terry fixed the last of the build issues we ran into, and plans to complete the TruSKY integration that got pushed back because of a new update. Finishing touches are being made to the settings page, and the armor/damage mitigation system is being worked out. The last of the resource gathering work is also being done. You can already beat on trees with an axe until they give up wood, but soon you’ll be able to smash rocks with a pickaxe for minerals as well.

Finally, the tech team showed off the automated building system they’ve been working hard on all sprint, and even though it has a few bugs/issues yet, it is amazing. All you need to do is pick how many stories you want your building to be, and how many rooms it should have, press generate and it constructs a building using a huge library of building assets. The building comes preloaded with loot too. You can: change individual pieces as you wish, add/change windows, doors, and loot, and drag the blueprint into the game when your happy. This week they plan on adding an auto-furnishing feature (Bathrooms get tubs and sinks, kitchens get ovens and refrigerators and so on) and working out a bug that can lead to some maze-like corridors between rooms. We talked about adding some additional degrees of “ruined” other than the three that are built-in currently, and what we’d need to improve before it could be used for base building. As you can see below, Kalani beach has some nice fixer upper opportunities, but if all goes well, the neighborhood will get a little bigger and fully automated in a couple weeks.
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That’s everything for now. I’ll be back on Thursday with more updates and the latest screenshots from the art team.