This week we discussed different ways we could create a timeline view for the stories on the blog. Until now, the stories explaining the game world and the characters in it haven’t been posted in chronological order, but instead by whatever part of the game we were trying to flesh out at the time. Jumping almost 100 years back and forth can be quite a chore for even the most ardent fan of flashbacks. Hopefully, being able to read them in the order they happened will make the Fractured Veil story more clear. We went over various options for using the descriptive tags attached to each story for search purposes, and Jesse demoed a few different layout options.
You might remember that last week I shared the story of San’s new giant rack that was forced to stay in his garage because it was too big to fit through the hallway leading to the server room. This week bought some good news on that front. He’s having a contractor remove the window from the room and they plan on sliding it through that way. We talked about how toasty the mega-rack will keep the room this winter and discussed various venting/cooling options to keep the room at a reasonable temperature this summer.
Jared finished up tax integration on our shopping cart, so we don’t have to worry anymore about one of life’s two certainties. He fixed some lingering shipping issues, and fixed a bug that was crashing some purchases when users were trying to use their player wallets to buy items. Jesse finished adding the new logo to the old merch and showed off an image for subscription purchases.
We made some progress on customizing Houses this week too. Work on the fancy new waving house banners is done, and it looks great! We ran into an issue with existing House images not being transferred onto the new banners, but that should be fixed soon. We plan on giving players a number of ways to customize their Houses in the near future, but the banners are a good start.
Jesse did some more cleanup work on inventory, crafting, recycling, and the quick action bar screens. We worked through the crafting and recycling flow and made sure players wouldn’t ever be forced to play a bag packing mini-game when crafting items, or have to rely on some sort of phantom container when recycling.
Finally, the art team worked on importing another of our large buildings, the Thorcon power plant. Soon players can run around inside, trying to avoid being shot and getting radiation poisoning. As you can see below it’s almost ready for the game.
I’ll be back next week with more updates.