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Tech Updates and Layouts

This week the web team is adding the finishing touches to our initial ecommerce system and putting a bow on top. The last of the receipt and order history work is being completed, and the last of the lingering bugs are being squashed. With a few more days of styling work, we hope to have our shopping cart rolling before the end of the week.

We ran into a number of old and new issues with the Friends feature this week. Currently, the system isn’t displaying relationships with current friends correctly. It will let you add friends you are already friends with, it doesn’t show connections properly, and sometimes friends aren’t showing up if you have a large list. Jared and Jesse will be digging into the issues over the next couple days to straighten everything out.

Speaking of friends, we received the first draft of some of our portraits for the about page that tested the boundaries of good-natured ribbing. Jared appeared to be suffering from some sort of facial paralysis, Jesse looked like he evolved from a subterranean race, and my eyes looked like they were copied from a 12-year-old anime character. Strangely, the artist did a great job with Terry’s portrait. We asked for revisions and questioned what it was about Terry that made him so easy to draw. We talked briefly about building a Careers section, but decided to have more human looking portraits first, as to not scare away potential co-workers.

Like last week, much of our time was devoted to talents. We worked on a basic layout and talked over design options for displaying attributes and skills. Jesse made layouts showing what the talent page would look like. We looked at and discussed options for showing how talents would buff skills and attributes and vice versa. We have a collection of talents to start, and the team is working on integrating them now.

There was a lot of work on inventory and crafting screens, as well as the quick bar too. We made some adjustments to the crafting screen to clean it up and make it easier to navigate. Crafting will soon be a much less cluttered process. We’re cleaning up parts of the old inventory system as well. We worked on attachments for all of your tactical light and bayonet needs, and looked at a layout of how the system would work. We’ll be doing the same with the Settings menu later this week.

After much consternation and banging our heads against walls, brick or otherwise, we have moved to UE4.17. In addition, Terry finished up Wwise and TrueSKY source integration. San spent most of the weekend focusing on camera work, and has a really cool tactical camera system up and running. We discussed some future use cases and options, but it works great already as a security camera for a base, or to see snippets of what your House members are looking at.

We have almost all of our persistence work done with the exception of item persistence. We discussed different options and how much equipment a player should keep after they die. The team is finishing work on the building generation system, and are adding some editor tools before moving on to completing the core materials and item spawning system. We’re testing the materials system now on foliage. Shooting a tree will give you wood, and one day soon you’ll be able to smash rocks to get minerals. As you can see below the building system and foliage are looking great inside and out.
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We’ll be back later this week with more updates and screenshots

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Bug Hunting and Adjusting Designs

With Labor Day this week and the launch of our Friends and Family Alpha last Friday, there isn’t a whole lot of new stuff to show off for this update. Most of our time was spent squashing bugs and running through the game tutorial, making sure that everything works as expected. It’s one thing to envision how something will work, but quite another when people start doing things you hadn’t considered. All in all, everything went well and some interesting conversations came up.

We found a few issues like: bow strings going through your arm when you’re aiming at something, rain falling inside buildings, and some weird looking patterns on the ground if you were holding an item and turning around in the rain. However, there weren’t any major malfunctions and the handful of people we let in the game ran around, made splints, shot things, and had a good time. As you can see below, the fires in the tutorial area make our welcome sign look great and reflects nicely off a machete blade.
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One of our topics of discussion was the need for some sort of interaction bar for hot swapping items and weapons. We talked about the balance between usability and reality when it comes to being able to quickly switch things in and out of your hands. We plan on siding with realism most of the time, as long as it doesn’t interfere with gameplay. While it might be physically possible for you to carry 6 long guns if you throw away all of your other gear, having them all magically appear in your hands instantaneously with a turn of your scroll wheel isn’t what we’re interested in making.

We also talked about key mapping and what keys players expect to do common things like move, crouch, and jump. We talked about the pros and cons of changing those keys around, and the need for making those controls customizable so players can change them to whatever works best. It was decided that our current inventory and crafting UI needs a few tweaks. Right now it’s a little cluttered in there. We have some readability issues, and the screen just needs to be more streamlined. For now we’re going to adjust the font, remove size and weight info on the crafting screen, and Jesse is going to be working on a few new wireframes.

Finally, we talked some more about ecommerce and setting up an online store. We looked at a number of different print-on-demand services and other more traditional merchandise options. Having a store that offers a combination of real life things like shirts, bags, and hats as well as in-game currency and items has it’s own set of difficulties. We talked about our desire to reflect real life purchases in the game for certain items-e.g., if you buy a certain type of Hawaiian shirt you get a similar shirt in the game. Our goal is to have our vendors and services sorted out, and have a working online store up and running by the end of the month.

That’s it for now. We’re still working hard tracking down bugs and figuring out what is working and what needs some attention. As usual, we’ll have another update next week.