data Archives - Fractured Veil

Customizing Houses and Respawning Players

This week started off with the completion of the timeline view on the story page. We’re still working out a few minor bugs, but now you can read the game story in chronological order, instead of the back and forth over a hundred years of history and happenings, like before. Jared continues to look into improving performance and page load times, while Jesse is focusing on building out player profiles and Houses. We’ll be adding more color schemes, background and banner choices, as well as more image loading options. Soon players will be able to individualize themselves, and their Houses a lot better.

San and Terry continued their infrastructure work, migrating servers, and getting us to the point where we can start automating a push every night. With all these steps forward over the past few sprints, we started a more in-depth conversation about analytics and different data tracking options. We discussed the pros and cons of writing something specific for ourselves, and looked at a few of the software options available out there.

The team is still working on squashing the lingering bugs with our item spawning system, and are just about done. They’ll be moving on to adding stats to every item this week, and working on item attachments. Tactical lights, scopes, and the rare crossbow bayonet are coming up in the near future. They are finishing up the last of the recycling ui work, and are adding notifications, so it will be easy to know when your item has been broken down into its core components. With the initial handful of player talents in and working, we’re expanding options and adding new talents. The team will be working on balancing those, and play testing them this week.

Spawn points are a point of focus this week as well. We’ve put a lot of thought into having a system that will allow players to spawn back without getting immediately killed in a fire fight, or appearing in combat over and over again like an undying killer in a horror movie. The system is still in its early stages, but right now we are thinking a cave-like respawn area and a sewer drain protected area for starting over. It turns out exploring, and playing in storm drains was an important part of both San and Chris’ lives as children, so they’re both excited about the idea of respawning in the sewers. We have no plans on including teenage reptile martial artists of any kind down there, but there might eventually be a few mutants. Chris would like to ask that kids today don’t go storm drain spelunking. It’s a good way to get in trouble with the safety patrol, oh, and you know, die during a rainstorm.

Compass and map work continues, with focus on the use of both in the HUD. We’re working on some layout and ui issues, as well as fixing some remaining bugs. Speaking of bugs, we talked about some of our ongoing trueSKY issues and how best to address them without eating up a big chunk of engineering time.

Finally, we continued work on our Veil News Network (VNN) logo and overlays. We talked about expanding the service into specialty segments like travel, weather, or animals. If you think cat videos are cute, wait until you see the antics of an upset pig-shrimp hybrid, grumpy shrig is sure to be a hit! This VNN camera is set up on a bluff overlooking the forest and beach, with the bird songs and waves mixing together beautifully.

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We’ll be back later this week with more updates.

January 9, 2018

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

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.

That wraps it up for this week. We’ll be back with more updates Tuesday.

November 16, 2017

Alerts, Notifications, and Playing the Game

Our plan to have a “Friends and Family” release tomorrow is on schedule. That means this past week was mostly spent hunting down some final bugs, last minute fixes, and adding some final polish. While there wasn’t a whole lot of new features or assets added, a few noteworthy things were finished.

The web team ran down a number of bugs involving Houses, fixed broken links in the launcher, and tackled a lingering issue with token refreshing and timeouts. We’re hooking up images and House charters so they can be seen in public view, as well as making it possible for you to connect Twitch, Discord, and Steam to your House. We continued our ongoing discussion about how to best display member stats and what data would be most useful for House leaders. We’re tagging stories with game character accounts so you can easily visit the profiles of our fictional characters. The sidebar got some more polish, and your online friends should now show up at the top of the list. Lastly, we made the images in the Media section easier to share.

We spent some time talking about how much/little information to show for an item in your normal walking around view. We want to make sure that we don’t clutter all your screen real estate with item info, but recognize the need for detailed descriptions of things you might want to throw in your backpack. We talked about notifications, alerts, and finished up the icons for various ailments. Now, when you have broken ribs, a life-threatening disease, are about to bleed out, or could just use a sandwich, an icon will appear warning you that everything isn’t alright with your character. Because we understand that behind every character is a real-life human being, we even included an alert for players. If you’ve been playing the game for 12 hours a deep vein thrombosis alert will pop-up and urge you to go for a walk. We love that you love the game, but we want you to explore the real world too, or at least not sit in one place for half a day.

The lion’s share of our time was spent making sure everything works in the tutorial area. In this area players will learn basic systems, shoot, loot, and assemble items. We highlighted some lootable items to make them more visible in the environment. The team finished work on alerts, crafting, assembling, and cooking. They did some AI work, installing a sense of fear in some of our factions. Now if things are going poorly for them, there’s a chance that an opponent will run away and regroup, instead of recreating The Charge of the Light Brigade. Finally, we fixed some collision issues we were having with people not being able to go through doors. Here’s a look at the tutorial area and a close up of the cabin that had the impassable doorway.

We assume that we’ll find a list of new bugs after we allow more players into the game on Friday, and will be spending much of our time next week fixing them. We’ll be updating the sprints section with an overview of what we plan to be working on during the next month. As usual, we’ll be back next week with another report on how things are going .

August 31, 2017

Data Tracking, Animations, and Gift Shops

It was a busy weekend for some of us but the team still got a lot done. Here’s what we did and what we talked about since the last time we checked in.

Tired of looking at blank avatar icons on our test accounts, we added Gravatar support. If you already use the service, you can use your favorite icons on Fractured Veil now too. If you don’t and you can’t decide which picture of yourself that you’d like the world to see, it’s an easy way to have a unique avatar icon that follows you around.

We did a lot of work on animations in the prone position. Now your characters can crawl forward and backwards, pick up items, use them, and eat and drink, with or without a weapon in your hand. We don’t really recommend chugging an ice-cold Manimal while face down in the dirt with a machete in your hand, but we understand that things happen out there in the wilds. We also did a lot of detail work to buildings to make them look better. You can see from this shot below how the bullet holes in the windows really add the right amount of menace to this lovely home.

The team continued work on the inventory ui with drag and drop bandaging on the way. Our quest system progressed this week too, with alert systems being integrated including map markers to show you where to go. We added colored alerts to help players know when they have been poisoned, diseased, or are suffering from some other ailment. We did some refinements to combat and are almost done with the framework for our quest system. There was a lot of discussion about our crafting system and whether or not our recipes would allow for some experimentation. We decided that allowing people to play around with recipes was the way to go.

There was also a lot of talk around player skills, and the possibility of having some character abilities that benefit everyone in a group. For example: someone with a high level of medical skill might be able to give others close by a bonus when applying a splint or bandage. We discussed how that mechanic might work and how it would be displayed to players.

We buttoned up the player death/kills data and are refining the graphs. San continued his analytics work and we discussed what data could be tracked and how it could be used. Of course, lots of you would be interested in being at the top of the “shark teeth found”, or “pineapples eaten” graph but this data could be really useful to Houses. House leaders would be able to see who their best killers are, who is gathering the most resources, and who is crafting the most items. This way it would be easy to find who your superstars are and also how many moochers you have mucking around, not pulling their own weight.

The art people worked on some of our lingering lighting issues and made another pass on refining plants and some sand/ground textures. Lastly, one of our largest buildings got some more attention this week. As you can see below, the communication tower is nearing completion and even got a gift shop this week. There isn’t much as far as merchandise goes right now, but we’ll get the shelves filled soon.

July 18, 2017

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.

July 11, 2017

Tag: data