merch Archives - Fractured Veil

Creature Calls and Putting It All Together

As the week comes to an end, the team is hard at work making improvements to the crafting system. We discussed adding a few new recipes to the list of craftable items, and talked about different ways players could discover new recipes. We’re working on the drag and drop system to shake out all the bugs, and introducing sorting options to make the player inventory screen more manageable for those who believe in leaving no trinket, or piece of garbage behind. In addition, Nelson is making it easier for players to see what items in their inventory are equipped.

We briefly talked about game merchandise, and a few different Hawaiian-esque products. Jesse showed off the work he’s completed on the Paddle Creek Games bumper trailer, and it’s coming along really well. We talked about making a few audio changes, and possible animation tweaks. The web team fixed some bugs, and made some layout improvements too. The group discussed the problems we’ve been having with the Veil News Network (VNN) live stream on the front page. We’ve made sure that a prerecorded video of the game area plays when the live feed is down.

With a landscape as beautiful as Lahaina’s, we want lighting, and a weather system that is equally striking. Few things can be as scary as hunting something, or being hunted by something, in the fog. The team is working out some of the issues we’ve had with the rain and mist, to make it feel more realistic, and make it a potential factor in gameplay. We want the nights to feel dark and ominous, with players never sure what might be lurking in the brush just ahead, but we don’t want it so dark that you can’t move around without running into trees, or falling into a ravine. To that end, we’re adjusting light sources, and making sure the stars are bright enough to allow players to operate at night.

All of our loot drops are ready, and they’re being tested in the game to work out any remaining problems. Soon, players will be able to harness their urge to shoot, ambush, maim, and kill for certain rewards, not just a general love of mayhem. We’ve added more audio to our monsters so they sound as gruesome as they look, and discussed giving certain individuals in a group extra abilities, like using ranged attacks to keep players on their toes.

With the Wash Bench design complete, the team is working on a 3D model so players will be able to repair/clean clothing, and maybe even change the color of something down the road. Sorry, tie-dye lovers, we don’t have any plans, as of yet, that would allow you to set up shop. The Thorcon Power Plant and the Lahaina Armory are being placed on the map, and the team is working on incorporating some basic gameplay elements around them. They’re also adding placeholder lockout tiles around the border of the map to let players know that they’ve gone as far as they can go in one direction. We plan on eventually using natural boundaries like the ocean, lava fields, and cliffs as well as impenetrable ruins, poison clouds, and radioactive fog to mark the boundaries.

Since we stripped down the map, and were rebuilding much of it during the last sprint, we talked about areas of exploration that we could add to the mountains, and more remote locations. The group discussed, quarries, canyons, mines, and other places to loot and pillage. We also briefly discussed clearing land, and possible base construction at some point in the future.

Finally, we’ve finished adding the improved plants and road remnants to the map, and we’re ready to push the whole thing from staging to production. The new environmental work, and foliage looks absolutely incredible as you can see from these screenshots below.

We’ll be back with more next week.

July 13, 2018

Blue Skies and Beach Roads

The Team continued their work on adding new design features, and talking through the crafting process. We’re updating a few icons to give players a good visual representation of what they’re working on to avoid any confusion. We discussed adding additional recipes, and talked some more about using trash as a resource when crafting. We worked on a few features to make the player inventory easier to work with while you’re busy improving your rifle with: a new scope, a bipod, kitty decals, or whatever else speaks to you.

We looked at a few examples of wash benches that the art team had mocked up, and discussed different aesthetics from: futuristic high capacity machines, to piecemeal chic, and even the latest in radioactive-water-conserving designs. We discussed what features we want in other crafting/repair machines/benches and some possible ui issues to look out for.

The Team had a brief discussion about expanding the merchandize we currently offer in the store. New shirt designs, some additional Hawaiian themed offerings, and a few improvements to already existing products were discussed. We also put some more time into reworking the drone HUD. While we love the way the Veil News Network (VNN) live feed looks on the front page, we’d like to organize the information shown in the HUD a bit better. We want to give players easy to read information about the places they are looking at as the drone camera travels its path across the play area.

We circled back to our discussion about roads and paths in the game, and how important having a robust backbone of paths across the map is. We’re concentrating on including reimagined versions of Route 30, better known as the Honoapi’ilani Highway, and Route 3000, the Lahaina bypass. 30 hugs much of the coast offering players good access to the beach and coastal structures, while 3000 parallels through the heart of Lahaina. We talked about adding signs to help players navigate and warn players of any dangerous boar crossings.

We continue to make improvements to our AI. We have improved animal reactions when encountering people greatly. Since we no longer have issues with bears rolling over on their backs before mauling players, and small animals don’t charge into the sea when they see people anymore, we’re focusing on making the horrors of the jungle a little smarter. Everyone has played that game where the monsters are too stupid to go around buildings, jump, or climb to reach you. While shooting a bloodthirsty creature 100 times through a crack that it is too big to fit through is fun, and hitting it in the head with a bomb every time it tries to squeeze through can be a joy, it’s only entertaining for a few minutes. We don’t want mindless killing machines, we want at least nominally intelligent ones. We discussed what level of combat smarts would be the bare minimum, and the level of tactical know-how we aspire to in our monsters.

Lastly, we made a lot of progress on weather in the game. We’re making improvements to how storms work, and fixed a bug that was causing the rain to be invisible every so often. We’ve made lighting adjustments to make the stars stand-out and pop more at night, and highlight that famous “Hawaiian Blue” to the sky and water during the day. The shots below show off how much that work is paying off.

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

June 7, 2018

Blue Skies and Deep Mines

To wrap up the week, we’re making some minor adjustments to the Veil News Network (VNN) drone camera. Showing off major structures, and points of interest in real time inside the game, the VNN live stream is a great way to see what’s left of Lahaina, and what’s happening around the game world. Our first pass on the drone HUD is complete, and is looking good. We talked a bit about future view options with things like infrared or low light, and adding different bits of information to the HUD as the drone makes its rounds flying above the island.

We talked about a few new items that we could add to the merchandise selection down the road, a number of different Manimal products in particular. This led to a discussion about the current state of crafting in the game. We talked over ways players could learn new recipes, and the possibility of rewarding those who like to experiment on the crafting bench. In a related topic, we’re adding more recycling options to items in the game. Currently, when you’re done drinking a beverage, you can recycle the can for a small amount of metal. We plan on increasing that list this week, so players will be able to reuse a number of objects for basic materials. However, we still have no plans to allow players to recycle troublesome House members for their meat. We’re not monsters.

Our spawn area is getting some attention. We’re adding the finishing touches, and discussed leaving a few more survival items lying around, to give players a reasonable chance of making it on the surface. We’re adding some audio support to the area, as well as other spots across the map. Soon players will be able to enjoy the sound of buoys softly clanging in the waves, while being chased down the beach.

We looked at some concept art of the entrance of our cave area, and talked about what and who we’d like to add to the upcoming spelunking spot. We continue to make progress on AI work. We’d like to give the unfortunate creatures twisted by the fracture, a fair shot at taking down players with sound tactics and battle strategies, instead of charging in straight lines to their doom. We’re expanding the mutant loot lists as well, so you never know what things you’ll find on them other than really old lint, shiny bits of plastic, and strips of chewed meat.

We continued our work on Team play too. We’re wrapping up any lingering bugs with our loot drop scenarios, (currently we’re having some AI troubles. The waves of enemies who are supposed to test the defenses of players in one scenario, tend to walk around like they are at a meet and greet, instead of charging the gates and breaking down doors.) and we’re finishing up the Team ui soon. We ran into a couple stamina related bugs that we should have fixed soon. Right now, a player’s stamina doesn’t regen properly if they are crouched or prone.

Lastly, we’re doing a complete materials review across the game. We’re stripping out all the remaining placeholder foliage for performance issues, and making sure it is replaced with the correct plants. We continue our lighting and weather improvements too. We’re adjusting the ozone to allow the blue skies to be a bit more blue, and make the stars shine a bit brighter at night. Below you can see just how good the morning sun looks in the game.

That’s all for this week. We’ll be back later with more updates and screenshots.

May 24, 2018

Performance Improvements and Cloudy Days

To finish out the week, the web team is completing performance improvements on the web page. Jared has made some caching improvements, images have been optimized across the page, and we’ve made some changes to the Story Timeline view, in order to make it quicker to scroll through. We talked some more about a secure player to player trading system, and what things we need to avoid when creating such a mechanic. We also briefly discussed new merchandise options, and what things we’d like to see available on the Shop page in the near future.

The team made some melee weapon and crafting updates as well. We looked at some options for destruction effects for trees being chopped down for wood, and rocks splitting apart for metal and minerals. Soon players will see a tiny explosion of rock when their pickaxe work bears fruit. We added a few more weapon animations and improvements, so spears look great when you throw them, or thrust them into the horrors of the jungle up close. Chris did run into an interesting bug however, when his hands started to produce a blurry aura, like they were about to go into stealth mode, but got stuck midway through their transformation. We’re addressing the issue, and will get a fix in soon. Here’s a screenshot of his sneaky hands on the bottom right.

Our AI work continues to make creatures fight and act more tactically, and we’re wrapping up ui improvements to the Settings page. The team is still working on ui for leveling up your character, and a way to claim buildings for one of our loot scenarios, as well as some other potential applications down the road. We had a longer discussion about ways other games handle currency: weight, where it is kept (taking up an inventory slot or not), how much you lose upon death, if any, and how much other players should be able to loot from your lifeless corpse.

The art team showed off a number of concepts for specific areas on the map. We talked about how to best use existing structures, and the landscape to funnel players to and from different areas, and where we need to add a clearly visible path. We discussed natural and manmade structures that would have survived the fracture, and would make good “hero” areas, where players could either get supplies and quests, or rampage through and explore. We discussed different options for work/wash/crafting benches and we talked about whether we want to go with a futuristic looking design or something a little more jury rigged.

The team is working on map, grass, and foliage improvements across a wide range of Lahaina, and we’re making some lighting improvements in those areas too. Our large buildings: The Communications Tower, Municipal Veilstation, and Thorcon Power Plant, are all getting some attention. We’re working on some performance improvements there in order to make them better able to handle large groups, without making your GPU fan spin like a top. Lastly, while the weather in West Maui is mostly beautiful, it has been known to get a few cloudy days and some rain. We haven’t been satisfied with the way things look on a cloudy day, so we’re working on a few things to make the game look beautiful, even when the sky is grey. Below you can see a screenshot of the beginning of that silver lining work.

We’ll have more updates next week.

May 17, 2018

Throwing Machetes and Holding Territory

This week the team is finishing up our first pass at a crafting system. We’ve fixed some issues we had with crafting timers running too long, or not resetting, so item production should flow in Lahaina once again. We’re adding a repair/wash feature so you’ll be able to fix chips in machetes, clean gummed up firing pins, and scrub the Shrig blood out of your cargo shorts, extending the life of all your gear. We talked about a design for a repair bench, and the possibility of having a group crafting system in the future.

We did some performance improvements to the player inventory, and started work on a tier 2 loot drop system. While our first loot drop scenario is a scramble to get to the gear first, this second option is about holding an area for a set period of time. A flare will go off letting players know what area needs to be defended. Creatures and players will attack the area until the timer goes off, and a loot chest or hidden cache will open for the successful defenders. We added a way for players to throw melee weapons to help them fend off invaders, and because throwing a shark-toothed koa axe at someone’s head is awesome.

San added new camera rotation algorithms, and a few other improvements to the VNN live feed on the front page. The drone coverage has never looked better, and gives a great view of many places of interest in the game. Jesse added some improvements to the animations on the video overlay, and we discussed adding a few more bits of information to what it already displays.

Lots of other animations were included to other parts of the game too. Various player movements including: going prone, a number of weapon actions like stringing a bow, and racking the slide of a gun, and new ladder animations were added this week. We discovered a great bug this weekend too. When you kill a rabbit in the game and try to harvest its meat or fur, it explodes and reforms again. While an endless supply of small exploding animals sounds like a good hook for some sort of rodent throwing warrior class, it’s not a feature that we want to keep in the game, and has no basis in Hawaiian history or culture.

The web team made some improvements to the Shop page. We optimized images for all products and packages, improving performance, and Jesse fixed a few lingering layout issues. We then turned our attention on making a 3D game map for players. We talked about different layers that we could add to show different types of information like House, and friend locations, as well as landmarks and key buildings.

Audio improvements continue throughout the game, and we’re doing some AI work to ensure that the horrors of the jungle aren’t just terrifying, but smart too. We’ve made several HUD updates to make things look and play better. In addition, we’ve updated the Settings ui so you can personalize the game to you liking. Finally, with the first iteration of our programmatic building system up and running we talked about what we’d like to improve next. As you can see below, buildings on the beach are looking great.

As always, we’ll have more updates and pictures later this week.

May 1, 2018

Dropping Loot and Making a Nicer Respawn Room

As the end of the week approaches, San and the web team continue to focus on improving the automated camera drones, and making the live streaming experience as nice as possible. Our live stream tour of the island is still broadcasting on our YouTube channel, and we’ve been working on some overlay options to add a touch of realism, and in some cases, make the view more closely match some HUD elements. Jesse has been working on Veil News Network (VNN) layouts to better highlight the live video feeds, and make the look and feel more consistent with what you’d see on a real news network.

The web team has also been hard at work making some revisions to the home page and refactoring. There are a few older sections that don’t follow the overall design layout. Jesse is making sure all the layouts, images, and formatting across the site is consistent with one design and feel.

The art team has been working on improving our spawn area. What once was a rather drab one room cement space, with brown water highlights, and the latest in crate furniture, is getting a big facelift. The Nuuskin respawn beds are getting some animations and a little color. We’re expanding the area into multiple rooms, giving players a little more freedom to think over what went wrong after they were brought back from the dead. We’re adding some decoration, Hawaiian colors, and improving your seating options. The importance of a good chair is often overlooked after the fracture, especially with food, water, and medicine being so rare. However, nothing can help you relax from a run through the terror laden jungle, like a good sit in a comfortable chair. Our materials improvement work has made it to seating, and not just in the respawn area. Below you can see the fruit of our latest work, including before and after shots of some of the hottest post-fracture Lahaina styles.

Jared has been digging into some email issues, and doing some pagination wok too. Players should receive email reminders when they get invites from players and Houses now. We’ve even hooked up an “Exiled” feature for Houses. House leaders can now boot an unruly player, or one who isn’t pulling their weight, and leave a brief message explaining the players shortcomings, if they so wish.

The art team continues work on the look, and performance of our large buildings. The Communication Tower has been the recipient of most of the work so far, but the Thorcon Power Plant is starting to get some attention now too. Both will be excellent places for players to practice their survival skills against each other, before adding the additional animal, creature, and environmental dangers of the wilds of Lahaina. We’ve completed an initial loot dropping feature designed to make sure that players around the map are coming together to make new friends, strengthen alliances, and sometimes slaughter each other over limited resources, or for fun. We talked at length about other loot scenarios, and ways to accomplish the same goal without dropping a box of shiny gear into the world.

Finally, we have started to turn some of the in-game products into real merchandise. Last week we got a big box full of Manimal cans, the extreme energy drink in the game. The art team is busy working on making models for inclusion in the game, and we’re pretty pleased at how they turned out as you can see below. With a taste that can best be described as an “overly salted, aggressively sour lemon/lime punch to the face,” they’re sure to be a hit with extreme athletes and mathletes alike.

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

April 19, 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

Hold Music and the Cost of Money

As we near the end of the week, the web team is pushing to complete the last of their work on the Community Page. The push on House customization is done for now. There’s a new prominent callout for Houses with links to the FAQ explaining what they are, and how they work. House founders can: load images, design banners, create charters, manage member roles, and pick a color scheme. Players will also be able to see when their friends are online, and what House, if any, their friends belong to. Friend requests and House invitations are now more prominently displayed. Jesse updated Bootstrap and did some refactoring work to keep things neat and tidy as well.

Work on increasing performance by sectioning up the map, and replacing old buildings with structures created with the programmatic building system continues. It takes a while, but the positive impact on gameplay will make it worth it. The last thing we want is for your GPU fan to kick into overdrive everytime you explore the ruins of a subdivision. A few last touches were added to the Thorcon plant interior too. Here’s a look at how it looks inside.

We talked some more about how the Veil News Network (VNN) would work in the game, and how best to display information on the website. We came up with a few new ideas regarding how we’re parsing the data coming in from the news API, and some additional templates for various types of stories. We discussed how we want to tie notifications into the VNN system to make sure it is fun and useful, without players feeling like our news drones are spamming them with weather reports.

We went over the last few items we need to finish up in regards to merchandise, namely challenge coins and Manimal cans. One of the requirements for our real-life Manimal distributor is that we have a business number on the can. So far, nobody has volunteered to use their personal number for the official Manimal info contact, but we did have quite a lengthy discussion about an appropriate hold message and music. Metal seems to be the consensus as far as music goes, but we didn’t decide on a specific genre: death metal, black metal, deathgrind, or other types of distorted screaming. If you have a suggestion we’d love to hear it in the Forums.

Our talk about merch led us to a discussion about rai, our in-game money. We discussed how other games handle money after you die, and how it affects your encumbrance. San brought up a couple interesting ideas about how players could manage money, especially very large sums, in the game. We talked about possible vault or banking systems, loss of money after you’ve been killed, and how those features could impact things like theft or extortion between players in the game.

Finally, with all the new weapons introduced recently, we’ve been pushing to include some body armor options for protection. Below you can see one of the latest iterations of a high-end armor to protect yourself from the slings, arrows, and bullets of outrageous fortune while running around Lahaina.

February 15, 2018

Tag: merch