mvp Archives - Fractured Veil

Why We Use Rai For Money

A long time ago there were no Tourist camps to trade with or Night Marchers, Menehune or even Green Ladies in the jungle. Everything worked everywhere not just up here on the hill. Everyone used money that was paper or on little plastic cards, but a long time before that people used things called Rai stones.

The Rai stones were carved out of limestone and they looked like wheels. Sometimes they were bigger than people but sometimes they were small enough to carry. Big ones or ones that looked good were worth more than others. There were even ones that were so big that they were really hard to move so people just had to remember who they belonged to.

When the Veil fractured lots of things changed. There were smart people like my grandpa who worked hard and knew that they couldn’t count on anyone to help them. They had lots of batteries and good strong fences. When things stopped working people like him kept things running up here so their families could have good lives but it wasn’t easy.

Some people down below weren’t careful so lots of them died. Some people were traveling and they got really sick and ugly but they could still speak if you talked to them. Some of them turned into monsters and started living in the jungle. That’s why it’s important to never go outside the fence unless you’re with an adult.

Everything went fine on the hill for a while but soon they started running out of food and they needed stuff to recycle to fix things or make new guns to kill the monsters. My grandpa and his friends knew where to find things down below but the Kanaka were always fighting with them or asking for guns that they couldn’t be trusted with. Nobody knew what to do.

Some people still used the paper money on the hill but lots of people just used it for starting fires outside the fence. The plastic cards didn’t work because everyone had to agree what they were worth and nobody could agree. Then someone remembered Rai stones. It was easy for people to agree on what the stones were worth and they were hard to lose and wouldn’t get wet in the rain. Even the Kanaka agreed.

Now when we clean the Kanaka’s water or give them things they want but can’t get into trouble with, we subtract it from the big stone next to their camp and when they give us food we add it. Everyone here on the hill uses little Rai stones when we buy things and so does everyone on the island. Rai stones helped people not fight and agree on things. Rai stones are an important part of our history. When I’m older I want a lot of Rai stones.

Akamai Mahelona
4th Grade
Pu`u School Lahaina

May 3, 2098

Banging Up Buildings and Working Out Designs

In addition to continuing some minor big fixes left over from our Friends and Family launch, there was a lot of iteration on inventory/crafting screens this week. After playing through the game tutorial ourselves, and listening to feedback from other players, it was apparent that the old screens were too cluttered and confusing to navigate. Jesse’s new designs clear a lot of things up, and make the process of finding or making things much more streamlined. We talked about: removing the character paperdoll completely from the crafting screen, adding a search function, grouping items that can be used to craft others together, including a timer to show you how long crafting will take, and having some quick visual way to compare two items in order to assess which one is best for your needs. In addition, we talked through what a “Trade” screen would look like and what it would need. Jesse also demoed an extra character slot screen, because if you’re like me, you’ll want to try out a couple different character builds.

Our ecommerce work continued this week too. We have a basic shopping cart layout now, and are buttoning up the last of the functionality that we need. We’ve integrated with a fulfillment service, and can now upload images of different types of merch. When you place an order we even collect your address now, something we haven’t been able to do before. Soon you’ll be able to look through different shirt designs in a number of different styles, colors, and sizes, and we’ll know where to send them.

The tech team continued their push to squash any remaining bugs and get things ready to upgrade to UE4.17. They’ve been working on shader changes and better crash reporting. San continued his work on persistence so your game experience won’t so closely resemble the movie “Groundhog Day,” but that led to some crashing issues that we’re still working through. We talked about the need for a dialog box to display errors when they pop up, so you won’t feel in the dark about why things might not be working, and including a bumper video during loading screens.

We worked a lot on the game map this week too. As we talked about last update, we want to make sure that we include the people, places, and things from the storyline, but we also want to ensure that those things are laid out in such a way that it’s fun to play. We’ve made a few changes to the Lahaina shoreline and other areas to show the devastating effect the fracturing of the veils had on the landscape. Buildings, points of interest, and quest hubs have been spread out in such a way as to form choke points in certain spots, and keep players moving through the map instead of collecting in a few areas. I’m sure we’ll make changes as more people play and we see their favorite places to go. What works for 20, is much different than what works for 200 or 2,000.

Finally, with most of the general play bugs squashed for now, the art team pushed forward with work on the Comm Tower, home/building ruins, and interior work on the Thorcon Power Plant. As you can see below, the lobby of the Comm Tower had a great maintenance crew and the onsite gardener did some amazing work before the fracture. We plan on scuffing the place up before we’re done, and ruining some of the flower beds, to show what happens when you don’t weed for 50+ years.

Speaking of roughing things up a bit, our ruined houses are looking great inside and out. If you’re looking for a 3-bedroom, 2-bath, in a 22nd century apocalypse style, we have plenty of options open. To be honest, the school district isn’t very good anymore, and some of the neighbors believe in a shoot first policy, but it’s a buyer’s market. Here’s a couple interior shots of available homes.

That’s everything for now. We’ll have more updates and art for you next week.

September 22, 2017

Upgrades, Shopping Carts, and Player Persistence

The first full week of Sprint 15 found the team mostly doing what we did last week: fixing bugs, making little improvements and gathering feedback from our Friends and Family release. As expected, we got a lot of valuable information from letting people play through the tutorial, expose bugs, and find out what systems needed some polishing. One of the biggest problem we ran into was players getting stuck in the environment. We’re addressing those problems currently and adding a way to restart quests if you happen to get stuck during the middle of one. Most of the issues were minor ones however. As you can see below, we had some problems with campfires obscuring the inventory screen and occasionally the game would attempt to quick-bury a player upon death.

The homepage got a major facelift. There are a number of scrolling slides there now that do a better job of explaining the game, certain aspects of game play that we want to focus on, and some updated pictures. We’re working on an Admin console to make things easier for us to do, and continued our ecommerce work. We’re almost done with our shopping cart. It can now accept multiple items, both real and the in-game variety, and are starting to integrate merch vendor and fulfillment service API’s.

We made some styling improvements and fixed a few minor bugs like a scrolling issue on the front page cards. We discussed adding a timeline view to the stories on the front page to make the narrative easier to follow beginning to end. Right now you can click on a tag to see stories related by topic or even by game character, but they aren’t in chronological order. It can get a bit confusing unless you’re a fan of movies with an abundance of flashback scenes.

During our merchandise discussion we jumped down the custom topographical map rabbit hole. As one will. We looked at a lot of different options and explored the limits of what is available. This got us talking about what it would take to have a cloud based minimap service in the game.

The team continued work on our crafting system. From the feedback we got, many players found the “quality” bar under an item confusing or cluttering, so we removed it and made quality a number. We moved a player’s paperdoll away from the crafting screen to make things more streamlined as well. We’re adding a quick crafting menu for small items like bandages and we talked some more about a quick menu for weapons and equipment. The Diablo quickbar was mentioned more times than one would think possible. Jesse continued work on some new wireframes for crafting and inventory screens.

The tech team is working on the attachment system so bayonets and scopes could soon be a reality, and my dream of a tiki torch tactical light might finally come true. They are also making progress on an armor system to take a bit of the sting out of bullets, tools for crafting so you won’t have to punch rocks to harvest minerals, and refinements to our quest system. We’ll have working elevators soon, so players who don’t know or have access to the teleportation command can visit the top of the communications tower, as well as other tall structures. We began the move to UE4.17 and will be upgrading TrueSKY soon.

San has been focusing much of his time on player persistence and character life cycles this week. We talked about filling in the backend with everything you’d need: character name, alive/dead, where you are, etc. We discussed what things we might be able to do in the future once we have a good system in place for tracking player position/orientation. Finally, we talked about the different phases of a character and leveling up. It’s important to create chokepoints for characters at certain levels and common places of interest to encourage players to move around. Nothing is worse in a multiplayer game than having a place that is constantly crowded and farmed out or a bunch of lootable items that don’t serve a purpose at some point.

That’s it for now. With most of our bug hit list finished, we should have some new art to show you next week, including Comm Tower and village improvements, as well as the usual overview of what we’ve done.

September 14, 2017

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.

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.

September 7, 2017

Alerts, Notifications, and Playing the Game

Our plan to have a “Friends and Family” release tomorrow is on schedule. That means this past week was mostly spent hunting down some final bugs, last minute fixes, and adding some final polish. While there wasn’t a whole lot of new features or assets added, a few noteworthy things were finished.

The web team ran down a number of bugs involving Houses, fixed broken links in the launcher, and tackled a lingering issue with token refreshing and timeouts. We’re hooking up images and House charters so they can be seen in public view, as well as making it possible for you to connect Twitch, Discord, and Steam to your House. We continued our ongoing discussion about how to best display member stats and what data would be most useful for House leaders. We’re tagging stories with game character accounts so you can easily visit the profiles of our fictional characters. The sidebar got some more polish, and your online friends should now show up at the top of the list. Lastly, we made the images in the Media section easier to share.

We spent some time talking about how much/little information to show for an item in your normal walking around view. We want to make sure that we don’t clutter all your screen real estate with item info, but recognize the need for detailed descriptions of things you might want to throw in your backpack. We talked about notifications, alerts, and finished up the icons for various ailments. Now, when you have broken ribs, a life-threatening disease, are about to bleed out, or could just use a sandwich, an icon will appear warning you that everything isn’t alright with your character. Because we understand that behind every character is a real-life human being, we even included an alert for players. If you’ve been playing the game for 12 hours a deep vein thrombosis alert will pop-up and urge you to go for a walk. We love that you love the game, but we want you to explore the real world too, or at least not sit in one place for half a day.

The lion’s share of our time was spent making sure everything works in the tutorial area. In this area players will learn basic systems, shoot, loot, and assemble items. We highlighted some lootable items to make them more visible in the environment. The team finished work on alerts, crafting, assembling, and cooking. They did some AI work, installing a sense of fear in some of our factions. Now if things are going poorly for them, there’s a chance that an opponent will run away and regroup, instead of recreating The Charge of the Light Brigade. Finally, we fixed some collision issues we were having with people not being able to go through doors. Here’s a look at the tutorial area and a close up of the cabin that had the impassable doorway.

We assume that we’ll find a list of new bugs after we allow more players into the game on Friday, and will be spending much of our time next week fixing them. We’ll be updating the sprints section with an overview of what we plan to be working on during the next month. As usual, we’ll be back next week with another report on how things are going .

August 31, 2017

Flowing Lava and Foot Guns

With our plan to have a “Friends and Family” release ready in just over a week, everyone has been pushing hard to work out the remaining kinks and root out any existing bugs. Our modular house/ruin system is done and we’ll be replacing the old sort-of-damaged buildings, with much more detailed and ominous looking versions over the course of the week. There’s even flowing lava now! As you can see, we still need to add some steam/heat effects and work on better interaction with the surrounding rocks, but the magma is moving.

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We talked through some of the game systems and made some decisions about mechanics. For instance, you can now fill your canteen from a puddle in the game, but there’s a chance that the dirty water might make you sick. The same goes for eating raw meat. Speaking of raw meat, we outlined some parameters around cooking. It’s bad news for slow cooker fans and people who want to “Set it and forget it,” we decided it will be possible to burn food if you’re not attentive. We also came to the conclusion that players making a clean kill shot on wildlife would get a bigger hunting bonus than someone running through the jungle wounding anything that moves.

A few crafting/recycling bugs were worked through so that we could avoid infinite item loops. Some AI work was done after it was discovered that enemies didn’t seem to care who was shooting them, and would go after anyone in view, no matter how many rounds were coming from the other direction. We’ve added a lot of refinements to the areas around the communication tower and our game tutorial area as well. As you can see below, the tutorial area is looking impressive.

On the website side of things, we did a lot of debugging since the last update. We added some sticky navigation in a few places to make things easier, and worked on some House improvements. In the near future, Houses will have new choices for banners and members can pick from a variety of background options. We added a number of characters from the story as players, so don’t be surprised if you eventually run into a few while exploring post-fracture Lahaina. We’ve added a Sprints tab under the development section to be as transparent as possible about what we’re working on, what’s already done, and the issues or features we’re tackling next.

Finally, we addressed a number of game play bugs. Players can feel confident in knowing that they will no longer sink into the ground when going prone. It’s virtually impossible to get stuck on a rock sticking slightly out of the ground now, and the days of getting stranded in the middle of a ladder are gone. Like last week, we thought we’d include a couple of screenshots of our best bugs. First we have a look at what happens when inventory mesh and automatic camera placement collides. We assume that this guy’s head is in his hat somewhere.

Also, for a short period of time, if you were in first person mode and pulled out your M1911, the pistol would be replaced with your feet. Luckily, your foot gun was still capable of filling something full of lead, but it wasn’t the best look.

That’s it for now. We’ll have some more updates and improvements for you soon.

August 24, 2017

Tag: mvp