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Logos, Designs, and Elevator Safety

This week the web team has knocked out the last of the shopping cart bugs that they discovered last week. We completed work on the checkout screen. Now: you see the correct image of the merchandise you ordered, the item quantity counter is working correctly, if you order more than one item, each item is displayed, and the side bar no longer covers up the shopping cart screen.

We’ve added some additional shirt styles and worked on some flow and data issues when you order a package. We’ve included sizing information and made sure images of all physical merchandise is displayed when you choose a package. Jesse did some styling work to make the checkout experience a better one. We’re turning it over to Chris to mash on now and find any potential cracks. While he does his best to break the shopping cart, Jesse is working on a gallery to display the physical merch we have and what’s in the pipeline.

One of the items coming soon is our Manimal energy drink. Jesse is finishing up a logo and can art that is fitting of the “Slaughter Your Thirst!” tagline. He’s also working on a box design for packages and a new company logo. We looked at a number of different Paddle Creek Games options and we all seemed to like the same designs. We looked at some business card options as well and talked through which we liked best. Jesse had some ideas about things we could put on the back that I can’t talk a lot about. However, we plan on making sure it stands up to any other competitor’s card, even something with raised lettering, in a pale nimbus white, and a watermark.

We’re still working through some issues we’re having with TruSKY and some headaches with the patcher, but we’re making progress. We’ve added even more animals to the game. In addition to the: rabbits, rats, squirrels, foxes, bears, raccoons, chickens, and various birds included earlier, we now have cats running around to help keep the rat population in check, and sharks swimming around offshore. Sorry, we don’t have any head laser recipes in the queue yet.

We plan on doing a lot of audio work in the near future, especially for the animals. Strangely, the animals did not come with the sounds they might make when being shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned, or the noises they make when they tear into a player. We don’t advocate hurting real animals in any way or being devoured by one of course, but we figure it’s going to happen at some point in the game.

The art team continued cranking out a laundry list of game-styled home furnishings like: tables, chairs, tiki mugs, glassware, mats, and small appliances. They’ve also been making headway on the Communication Tower, and have things almost buttoned up as you can see from these night shots below. We still don’t have doors that close on the elevator, but it does go up and down. Luckily the Occupational Safety and Health division doesn’t have a strong presence in Lahaina since the fracture, because it’s a long way down from the top.
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We’ll be back next week with more pictures and updates.

DEV

Shirts on a Plane

This week the web team is focusing on clearing out the last of the shopping cart bugs and smoothing out any lingering rough spots. We’ve got most of the latest bugs fixed now, and are making sure the physical items we have ready, shirts and posters, are displayed correctly. The shopping cart will accept game packages now too, so those of you so inclined can help support the game, and get some cool stuff both in the game, and in real life.

We still need to integrate our virtual currency, Kula, and make sure that players can use it to purchase certain items. Jared is working to make sure that things that need an actual shipping address get handled correctly, so merch gets shipped out in a reasonable time. We’ll be hooking up players cash wallets soon as well, so you’ll be able to spend the money you get from our referral system (read more about how that works by clicking on the “Tributes, Affiliates, & Invitation System” link in the FAQ).

The cart is now working well enough that we turned it over to Chris for testing in the worst possible scenario, a 15 hour flight coming back from Australia. If his order and checkout experience goes well: using the airline’s wifi, while a bored child kicks the back of his seat, and the person next to him talks about how their life has been completely changed after visiting McKinlay, to see the real life Walkabout Creek Hotel featured in “Crocodile Dundee”, it will work anywhere, in any situation.

There was a lot of work done on player screens this week as well. Jesse made new wireframes for: Inventory, crafting, and talent screens. Our old color scheme got a new color after we decided that we needed one more class of items. We talked through some of the layout of the existing crafting screen, and discussed different color/display options. There was some discussion about whether or not we want some sort of visual cue for quality on different recipes, so you can easily see that one pattern is for the mother-of-all tactical masks and another is more mundane. We’re also cleaning up the crafting queue to make it less confusing.

We looked at a settings page mockup to adjust graphics, audio, and keybindings, as well as character status icons. Now you can easily see when you are poisoned, starving, hypothermic, or suffering from a bad case of rat lungworm disease. We’re still working on making sure that specific parts of the body can be treated, like an infection in your right leg. The Early Access disclaimer will be added soon too. We want to make sure that people understand that there’s a lot of fun things to do, but the game is still a work in progress.

Lastly, the art team continued work on the Thorcon plant and various small props and items. As you can see, the infamous boar tusk broom is ready just in time to help players keep the Thorcon locker room clean and orderly.
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We’ll be back with more game updates, and possibly more movie references next week.

DEV

Creating Old Ruins and New Words

So, and all hail our great god of mammon, the e-commerce shopping cart! This is our way of saying that we’ve almost completed work on our basic shopping cart. The core features are done and we have a list of initial physical and virtual products. Jared did a bunch of validation work and is smacking down some lingering bugs before deploying to prod. We have some styling work left to do, but it’s far enough along that we placed a test order with minimal headache. Jesse did some work on a poster design that will probably end up as one of the slides on the front page as well. We got into a discussion about creating a system to offer custom merch for Houses and players in the future. There are some hurdles in the way so it probably won’t be right around the corner, but our goal is to have a system that allows you to easily get shirts with your House insignia eventually.

We spent a lot of time in the past few days jumping with both feet into talents and skills. We looked at how different games handle them, and like with most things, it’s easier to know what you don’t like than what you do. We want to avoid many of the pitfalls that other games have run into. We don’t want any sort of list that you’d need to make notes to understand, but want talents that provide opportunities for different play styles as well. Too often games offer too many points or options, so you get people who can do virtually anything with expertise. Our goal will be to make sure people take a deep dive in one area or become a jack of all trades, by going shallow across the entire skill tree.

We discussed how and when players would be able to change their skills and some possible ui arrangements. This led to an interesting conversation about creating some sort of baked-in training/build system in the game. Many players in similar games spend a lot of time looking online for character builds, or trying to be like “Bob,” the best killer in their group. We’d like to give them an easy way to achieve their goal without looking someplace else. Having a course of sorts that sends players on the correct missions, or gives a template for creating the “perfect” medic, scout, or Bob, would be a cool and useful tool. The trick is doing this without doing ‘Grad School, the game’ ..

San continued his work on a having a player camera, and it’s almost done. Soon players will be able to broadcast a security cam like image of their surroundings to other players, even on the web. Much of the art team’s focus this week continued to be the automated ruin building system. In a week or so, all the bugs should be worked out and it should be up and running. As you can see below it is coming along nicely.
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We looked at mock-ups for a variety of smaller items, including a shark-toothed pan to join the boar-tusk broom in our post fracture homegoods store. It was during a discussion about the kukenroot model however, that we added a new phrase to the Fractured Veil lexicon. “It needs to be chickeyer” will join other phrases like, “I made the story more cannibally” to our collection of neologisms. In addition to creating a new word, Chris voiced his dismay that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of gore produced when he killed something with a machete or other large-bladed weapon. We talked about how to make the proper amount of arterial spray come from a gash to help Chris paint the walls of his rather sparsely decorated basement.
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That does it for now. I’ll be back with additional updates, (and possibly some more new words), next week.

DEV

Shirts, Skills, and Scopes

This week marks the end of Sprint 15, so everyone is pushing to fix lingering bugs and finish up as many items as they can before planning for 16 begins. There is probably going to be a couple things from this sprint that get pushed into 16, but the good news is that our bug list from the Friends and Family release will be completely done this week.

We have a base skill system in place now with organic growth built in. Jumping makes you become a better jumper, and climbing practice will eventually make you a perfect climber. We talked about skill trees, and looked at some amazingly complex examples that looked more like the string art you’d make at camp when you were a kid, than any sort of system you’d want to use in a game. We’re all big fans of robust skill systems with many paths, but assigning/choosing your skills shouldn’t feel like completing a maze. Jesse is working on some wireframes for us to iterate on.

There’s a lingering bug that is making it night whenever you play. While this might be kind of cool if we were making a vampire-centric game, we’re not. We don’t even have one vampire hidden in a cave, or a ruined blood bank somewhere on the island, so we’re going to fix the day/night cycle. Or add a blood bank. That’d be fun, or not. ‘Phlebotomist, the game!’, coming soon to a computer near you!

Soon you’ll be able to add scopes, silencers, and forward grips to rifles. We’ll have crafting tools (axe, pick, skinning knife) done by the end of the week, but we’re pushing the bulk of crafting work into sprint 16. We have elevators mostly working now and are finishing up the armor system. We’ve also started work on a system for spawning loot in buildings and areas. Just think of all the places we could hide stuff in a neighborhood like this.
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Terry is doing a little work on the libraries and San continued his work on persistence. We have location and alive/dead states working now but still need to finish up work on item persistence and the unconscious character states. He did some more work on the tactical map API so now House members will be able to send a message or an SOS flag to other House members through the web.

Our ecommerce work continued this week as well. We talked briefly about warehousing and fulfillment options and explored how much custom-made silk Hawaiian shirts would cost. We have a basic inventory system, various shipping options, and a product details page up and running. There’s some styling and layout work to do yet, but we hope to use it to place a few test orders by the end of the week and start collecting bug reports.

The prospect of having merchandise sent out raised a touchy subject, the bubble of bad luck that surrounds Chris receiving shirts. For some reason it takes 3-4 days longer than it should for packages sent through the mail to arrive at his house. Many months ago I had a package of shirts for him, and Jeff offered to deliver them personally since he was traveling to California. He forgot them. He forgot them the next time he was going out there too. After many more twist and turns of responsibility, Jeff finally mailed the shirts but they got lost for a few days. Eventually they found their way to his front door, almost a month later than everyone else. Fast forward to August. We get a new batch of Tshirts with better fabric and I send everyone a package. I joke that I’m giving Chris’ to Jeff so he should see them around Thanksgiving. A few days later everyone is giving their opinion on the look and feel, when Chris says his haven’t arrived. The timeline below sums up the ordeal.

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Here’s a bonus shot of the Cherry keyboard that stirred a larcenous urge deep inside of Chris.
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That’s everything for now. I’ll have another update later this week, assuming Chris doesn’t have me packaged up and sent to the dead letter office in Atlanta. The whole point of this story is to show that we care about that which we place on our torsos. A test with some online t-shirt companies is going on now, if they manage to ship a decent shirt to Chris, we’ll be amazed and will deploy the merch.