ecommerce Archives - Page 2 of 5

Survival Tools and Game Packages

This week the web team continues their ecommerce work. They’re working on improving the look and flow of everything in the Shop section. Jesse showed off a design that has each game package color coded to quickly and easily tell them apart, and a table style view highlighting each specific item, making it easier to compare what comes with each package. Jared is still hunting down a few bugs and layout issues, but the new look should be ready, along with a mobile layout, by the end of the week.

The spawn area is getting some attention too. While it may not be as beautiful and vibrant as the flowered wilds of Lahaina, the sewer starting area provides a safe and somewhat smelly place for players to collect a few basic items, and to respawn safely away from whatever might have torn them limb from limb. We’re adding some final details and audio support to make the slime and dripping water more authentic. We talked about what items should be available to players, and you can see in the shot below where we plan to drop a few survival tools.

The conversation about survival gear led us down a rabbit hole about the perfect item and survival food. We discussed: the pros and cons of including an emergency potato, whether or not there was a better food or tuber to have after civilization has been wiped out, how compact it was by natural design, and the many other uses the root vegetable offers. Luckily, before we spiraled into a completely potato themed meeting, San joined, added the potato clock to our long list of uses, and made us move on. However, if you think you have a better idea for a survival food, let us know in the forums.

Speaking of teamwork, we’re working on creating a team system. Our goal is to create a game that inspires group play and cooperation to survive. The team is working on a way for you to keep track of the location of group or House members, so you don’t get separated in a firefight, or during an ambush. We’re working on some campfire improvements that will help a team regroup and resupply, and a way to revive gravely injured players, so you won’t have to leave anyone behind. You can still ditch the carless or tactically unsound of course, but you don’t have to.

The web team is wrapping up the last of the work on the Veil News Network (VNN) newsticker version 1, as well. We talked about making it more factual until we figure out a good solution for randomizing the language of headlines, and worked out the last of the layout and overlapping issues. We discussed adding video and focusing on including a live stream link for specific highlighted stories in the next version.

Finally, with the last of the performance improvement work finishing up, we turned once again to adding new places to explore, and things to chase you when you get there. There will be a mine and an oil tanker in the game soon, and we took a look at some concept art of other Lahaina hotspots. Here’s a look at what Front Street could look like soon, although we’d change the graffiti to make it a little less death metal, and a little more island appropriate.

That’s it for now. We’ll be back later with the latest tuber news, updates, and screenshots.

March 20, 2018

Getting Groups Together

As the week comes to an end, the web team worked on making our ecommerce system better, and adding a few new features. Jared built a cron job to address an order processing bug that could leave some orders in limbo. Everything seems to be working now, and orders are being fulfilled through the store as they should. Jesse focused on cleaning up the packages page and highlighting the differences between them. He showed off designs for a table style view of game packages so players can quickly see what each offers, as well as a new and previously viewed products feature.

This was the first full week of sprint 21 and one of the things we’re working on is building a team play system. As the proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Although it’s not strictly required, we want to do everything we can to encourage players to group up and cooperate to survive the dangers of post-fracture Lahaina. We’re working on: a team making feature, map markers so you can keep track of team members, a VoIP system, and a way for you to revive other players if you happen to let them get mauled by a shrig while you make your escape.

We’re also expanding our crafting system. The team is adding cloth and twine harvesting, rock harvesting, and have a smelting system on the horizon. We’re adding recipes for a number of basic craftable items too. Chris found an interesting bug when he was out cutting down trees for a little firewood. In addition to filling his pack with wood, the entire sky filled up with logs. We have talked about a number of strange worlds that might have been born from the fracturing of reality, but we never considered the possibility of Woodworld before. We talked about it for a while, but the only thing we could agree on is that there would be no trimarans under any circumstance. Ultimately, we decided to just fix the bug, but not before grabbing the screenshot below.

Of course we continued work on our near real-time game news service, the Veil News Network (VNN), as well. Jesse worked on some lingering layout and icon overlapping issues, while Jared continued working on ways to randomize the language used in the newsticker. Making language sound unique in an automated system is not easy, but we’re working on it, and continue to look into different solutions.

While the art team adds the finishing touches and animations to the underground respawn area, we looked ahead at a few different areas and places of interest. The game will soon have new weapon parts to modify your favorite gun, a mine to explore, and an old oil tanker. We looked at a number of intriguing concept drawings of downtown areas and buildings. Below is a look at what one of our luxury hotels might look like 60 years after civilization collapses.

We’ll be back next week with the latest updates and images.

March 15, 2018

Newstickers, Grunge, and Greywater

As we near the end of the week, the web team continues their push to create our real-time, in-game news system the Veil News Network (VNN). We hope to make VNN an interactive tool for players to keep track of important events and happenings regarding their friends, Houses, and the world they’re playing in. Jesse demoed a first run at an active newsticker design, and it’s looking good. Jared is building filters so players will be able to see only news regarding Houses or Players, and we discussed other filtering options. I’m not sure we’ll get as specific as having a setting for animal only news, to keep you updated on all the latest raccoon gossip, but we’ll break it down with some useful granularity.

We discussed a few bugs that we found already, and we’ll be spending the next few days in squashing mode. We’re working on icons specific to certain types of stories passing through such as alerts, weather warnings, and breaking announcements. We decided we’d have a permanent “weather desk” section with the current weather conditions somewhere alongside the newsticker. Jesse is working on the design and layout now, and Jared is working on creating an rss feed for your convenience.

With so many components coming together, we had a discussion about the direction we’re going, possible future uses, and potential problems with the VNN service. We talked about the issue of keeping the news specific to different game worlds, how often the news should refresh, and creating a realistic news cycle in the game. The team went over some different options for classifying stories, and adding visual cues to certain types of stories on the front page.

In non-news related news, Jesse is doing another pass on the Manimal can design after the proofs came back a little distorted from the distributor. He’s also still working on finalizing a kula coin design (our premium currency). You’ll see both on the merch page soon.

The art team is focusing much of their time on adding a number of needed animations. We’re adding them for a number of harvesting tools, including the pickaxe so you’ll finally be able to live out your favorite murderous miner fantasy. The Nuuskin booths in the respawn area, and spawning itself will get some animation love, and so will shooting in a prone position. Right now when a character goes prone to steady their shot, they end up lifting the front part of their body off the ground, taking on what we’re calling the “Cobra Pose” when the bullets go flying. While it’s enough to make even the most die-hard back muscle enthusiast jealous, it looks a little weird, and seems hard on the hip flexors, so we’re going to fix it.

Finally, we’re adding some touches to the sewer respawn area. We plan on including a few more Hawaiian touches to brighten the room, and make your brief stay more comfortable. In addition, we thought the room in general could use a bit more grunge, and we dirtied the water, to make the experience a bit more authentic. The stream passing through the room is now the questionable grey we had always intended as you can see below.

March 1, 2018

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.

February 27, 2018

Please Do Not Pet The Wildlife

The web team spent some time fixing bugs that popped up during the Community Page update, and adding a few little improvements. We’ve: added pagination to the Friends section and others, fixed some layout issues, worked out some problems with social media links not working properly, and did some form validation work. We should have all the kinks worked out and the improvements done by the weekend.

The art team was busy improving the look of our underground respawn area this week as well. Designed to give players a moment of respite after death, instead of being thrown back into the meat grinder while you load, the space is really coming together. In addition to a stream of questionable water, and soothing industrial lighting, the sewer hideaway got a major upgrade this week with a Nuuskin machine. We still have to include some animations for it, but soon players will be able to enjoy being put back together cell by cell before running back to their doom. There’s no doubt that it really ties the room together.

We continued work on the Veil News Network (VNN) system for the game. San’s news API got a few tweaks and is now returning a bunch of play data that is pretty funny to read through. Jared is hard at work constructing a news template library suitable for any event, announcement, and occasion, while Jesse works on a news ticker layout and ui. We plan on having the interactive news service offering personalized game news, and highlighting happenings across the island in real-time in the near future.

We did some work on merch and the merch store this week too. Jesse showed off some new t-shirts including an all-over Manimal design. Speaking of Manimal, we completed a can design so you’ll be able to “Slaughter Your Thirst” with the extreme taste of Manimal in real life soon. Jesse is finishing up a coin design, and we talked over a few other shirt, poster, and merch ideas too.

We took a look at the latest HUD overlay, and listened to a few options for player death sounds, ranging from a subtle electronic humming when your player dropped, to a deep booming when you crashed to your death. As our work chopping up the map, and replacing old buildings to increase performance nears its end, we had a long conversation about rebuilding it. We talked about specific building placement, what things were necessary, and which were more aspirational at this point in the game. With all the work we’ve put into building systems, modeling, and writing stories, it’s going to be a joy to create a post-fracture Lahaina that is exciting, beautiful, and most importantly, fun to play in.

Lastly, San discovered that we have a big bear problem. While he was running through the brush looking for team members to fill with arrows, he came across one of the resident bears. However, Instead of charging him and ripping off his face immediately, the bear took a moment to lay down, apparently asking for belly rubs. Not having his rubbing hand hot keyed, San was a bit too slow, and the bear got up and mauled him. Still, we’d like to keep the wildlife from begging for attention before they go into kill mode. Here’s a look at the lounging animal in question.

February 22, 2018

Better Houses and Power Plants

To finish out the week, the art team has been hard at work completing the new underground spawn area. Designed to allow players a safe place to respawn, away from itchy trigger fingers looking for loading characters, the place is coming along nicely. We’ve added a few shelves, tables, and a ladder leading up to the surface. If you added a guy skipping class while obsessively playing Mario Kart in the corner, it could be a picture of my first college apartment.

We found some issues with our shipping system this week. Shipping to certain areas was broken, and we ran into some eyebrow raising shipping estimates. Jared fixed the API so everything is now working as it should, and we’re adding tests to ensure it doesn’t happen in the future. The web team is digging into a few other problems that popped up with the shopping cart as well.

Jesse and Jared are finishing up the last of the work on House banners. They look great, and most of the work is focused on editing tools, and making the customization process for Houses and banners as streamlined as possible. This led us to a discussion about making easy to understand, step-by-step tutorials to explain the more complex systems in the game. While everything is covered in the FAQ, there are a few things that could use an additional clear explanation.

Jesse worked on a green screen streaming overlay for the game. After watching a show from their office for a while, we discussed ways we could use it other than embarrassing Jared. We covered possible Veil News Network (VNN) uses, other possible marketing applications, and a number of Jared based spinoffs.

We discussed a few new weapons coming down the pike, firearms in particular. We want to have information about each weapon that matches as closely as possible with their real life capabilities. However, the reality is that many firearms have numbers that match very closely, particularly with guns of a similar style and function. We talked about the possibility of slightly tweaking some statistics to make a hierarchy of weapons in the game.

Lastly, after a lot of detail work the Thorcon plant is going into the game. Below you’ll find a couple of the latest shots of the interior. This place is huge and should be a blast to explore.

We’ll be back next week with more updates.

February 1, 2018

Armor, Banners, and Arrows

A few critical bugs regarding Houses popped up over the weekend, so the teams started by squashing them and a few other lingering problems. Charters, and members should now show up on the House page, and a bug that made banners move oddly was addressed. Having just about finished the first tier of customization, Jesse showed off some mockups including a theme gallery which would automatically choose complementary colors and make sure that the chosen colors and text work together. We talked about the next step of an image uploader for custom banners or crests and the pitfalls of allowing people to add images. We want to make sure things stay on the decent side, so Chris and I volunteered to scan images for the naughty and abhorrent. I’m sure everything will be fine as long as we have some emergency eye bleach within reach at all times.

We did some more work in regard to inventory and crafting as well. For all you bayonet fans, weapon attachments are done, and we’re finishing up drag and drop for them. We have the same drag and drop system inside the inventory now as well, to make moving all your sweet loot around easier. We found a few bugs that need work yet, but for the most part we’re just adding a little polish before it’s done.

We added a little shine to our ecommerce system too. The web team made all the forms and fields look consistent, and upgraded the address book so you should be able to autofill your billing and shipping address after you’ve made your first purchase. However, we still need to switch out the old logo for the new, in several places on the page.

Work continues on the new map, and integrating the building and item spawning system. The shots below show how easy it is to create a neighborhood on the fly now.

The new HUD is coming along nicely and should be ready soon. We’re adding armor in the next few days, and are nearing completion on the compass so players will never get lost. We’re still have to add a few images and alerts, but the design is coming along nicely. We’re adding support for the new storm drain respawn area so players won’t have to stay down there and create a new society. We’re not interested in making Sewer Sims.

The team continues to work on the talent system. We have most of the 12 new talents in, but need to build out new systems for a few yet. The remaining animations for things like swimming and crossbows, should be done by the end of the week too. Finally, we have a lot of playtesting to do to work out the kinks. Some of us have started already by running around and shooting each other with bows and arrows, because if you can’t shoot your friend in the head with multiple arrow at 10 yards while playing a game, what’s the point in playing. As San says, “The compound bows are fun as f@#k!”

January 24, 2018

Streaming Video and Spawning Loot

The team started the new year with a new sprint, some bug hunting, and a little ui work to existing systems. Jared is tracking down a few bugs in the upcoming timeline view for game stories on the blog. You’ll be able to read the numerous tales about the game world, and key individuals in chronological order very soon. We’re tracking down a unicode bug, and working on decreasing load times to make the page more responsive as well.

We’re adding a new package between “Princess Bernice” and “Makaha” for those of you who want to support the game, and get some cool stuff. Jesse is busy uploading images of all the merchandise and generating 3D images of everything in the store. We ran into a bug that is making images not render occasionally, and are chasing it down. We made a few changes to our all-over t-shirt design and are including our new Paddle Creek Games logo.

Our item spawning system is close to being completed. We’re just making sure all the new loot: skinning knife, axe, pickaxe, grenades, armor, clothing, and various ranged and melee weapons, are loaded and being dropped in the proper areas, at the proper rates. We’re adding some ui improvements to the inventory screen, and introducing some new alerts too. We talked about some new bits of walking audio coming down the pike, which will make it harder for bloodthirsty players, and the horrors of the forest to sneak up on you. In addition, we talked about tweaking some of the sunset colors a bit and increasing walking speed. It turns out Chris has some very specific ideas about slow walks on the beach.

The art team continues working on sectioning the map and adding detail to our large buildings. Despite needing some lighting work and a bit of grunging up, the shot below shows how well the inside of the Thorcon power plant is coming along.

We talked at length about our upcoming real-time game newsfeed feature, and discussed how we’d implement the service. Jesse showed off a few options for “Veil News Network” video overlays and some color options. The team discussed different streaming options and using Open Broadcaster Software (OBS). Having put together a nice streaming system over the holidays, Chris has been on a video sharing mission. He’s put together a number of videos working out the kinks in his rig. The video below is from one of his lengthy staring at the water session, where he contemplates the perfect walk along the beach.

Click here to display content from YouTube.
Learn more in YouTube’s privacy policy.

Always display content from YouTube

That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with more updates and pictures.

January 4, 2018

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.

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.

December 28, 2017

Crossbows, Timelines, and SCM

With a couple of short weeks coming up because of the holidays, the team has been busy finishing up goals for sprint 18. Our latest pass at the inventory and crafting ui are in. We’re adding a little polish and trying to address the plentiful bugs we’ve found so far, including improvements to the crafting workflow.

We’re still hammering away at two of our biggest projects as well: the programmatic building system, and our item spawning system. We’ve fine tuned both and have worked through most of the bugs. After adding a bit of 3d art, both will be ready to go and we’ll be able to create a number of different structures complete with furnishings and loot on the fly.

Many of the team felt a gigantic thorn in their sides removed yesterday at 2pm when we stopped using a previous SCM system. There was a great rejoicing! We’re a little closer to our goal of having GIT and Perforce working by the end of the week too. San has been focusing on infrastructure stuff and moving servers around to help save costs and improve debugging speed.

The web team continues to be focused on creating a timeline view for the stories on the blog. They’ve added slider and calendar filter options, so you can quickly go through the 100 year time span that the story covers, and have included some scrolling improvements. Jared fixed a lingering data state bug that was causing some problems, and added some better logging to help us track problems. Jesse tweaked some layout issues with House banners, and finished up an image for stickers in our store.

Spawning, both initially and after things don’t go so well for you, got a little attention and refinement too. Most of the work we need done regarding persistence is finished as well. Players will be able to keep their gear and various bodily afflictions after logging out now. Speaking of gear, we’ve finished up our crossbow which exposed a lot of issues with it and the other bows in the game. We’re working on getting those fixed and a few new animations before we make it available to players. Our player compass work progressed too. We have a working HUD compass now and discussed having a craftable one in the near future. San shared his thoughts on how much fun it is to play a game that spawns you in a place where you need to use a compass to find your way back to your friends, and how that fun lessens exponentially every time you have to do it.

The art team stayed mostly focused on breaking down the map, but did continue working on adding detail to the game’s large buildings. The interior of the Thorcon power plant got a little more love this week. As you can see below the hallways are looking great, and are one set of mutated twins away from being terrifying.

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

December 19, 2017

Tag: ecommerce