package Archives - Fractured Veil

Grungy Buildings and Ricocheting Bullets

While Terry kicked off the week poking the monster that is the UE 4.20.2 upgrade and updating trueSKY, the rest of the team was busy switching over audio to Wwise. We’ve made a number of audio improvements across the board. The amount of noise a player makes when doing various activities has been adjusted (there’s no quiet leaping from the top of a structure), and we’ve made improvements to some other environmental sounds too. You can now occasionally hear a bullet ricochet, (a strangely pleasing noise when firing a weapon), and we’ve added a little flying blood when you successfully cause damage with a shotgun.

We’ve been polishing the area where our first quest takes place, fixing bugs, and doing some general UX work. The shot below shows you what the neighborhood surrounding the Communication Tower looks like as you approach, looking for quest items.

A few of the bugs we fixed already this week include: Medkits will now heal poison effects. Sometimes a player would start to lean to one side like they had just maxed out their credit card on mai tai’s, at Beachcomber Bob’s Tiki Tavern. We made sure everyone now stands up straight. Occasionally a mutant would refuse to climb stairs, so we worked on their confidence, glutes, and quads to make sure they could run stadium stairs with the best of them. Lastly, we fixed a problem with crafting recipes turning up empty.

While we were working on the crafting bugs, we also put in some UX time and addressed a number of layout issues on the crafting screen. We nabbed a lingering bug with the player inventory grid, added some improvements to the queue, made rollover info for items more clear, made some navigation improvements, and added subtle changes to the color scheme to help differentiate items actively being worked on, and those waiting for repair.

The web team made some changes to the front page, including upgrades to the slides, colors, and navigation layout. We talked about incorporating a badge/achievement system to encourage players to explore the page, and all the various social tie-ins available to them. Jared started work expanding our notification system so players can get alerts every time something new happens in their House, or to one of their friends. He’s also making sure there is a setting for those of you who don’t want to get notified of anything those people are doing, so long as they’re helping you shoot things in the jungle, and bandaging hurt limbs. We discussed the need to give the VNN drone the updated geographic information of the new map, so it will stop traveling through the Earth while making its path around the island.

Our SEO work is starting to pay off and we talked at some length about user flow improvements. We’ve addressed some of the confusion our packages page had inadvertently caused. After some initial feedback, we learned that some wrongly thought they’d have to pay a monthly subscription to play the game, instead of a one-time fee. We’ve addressed the problem, and updated the page to make it clear that a player doesn’t have to pay every month to play the game. We discussed offering some sort of game bundle which would allow a player to buy multiple copies of the game for their friends at a discount. We looked at a number of examples other games were using, and are deciding what we think would work best for us.

Being the temporary social hub in the game, the Thorcon Power Plant is getting some minor touch-ups, and we’re building out the surrounding areas to make sure there is plenty to loot, explore, and fight. However, we plan on moving the main meeting point to the Veil Station in the near future. The art team is hard at work making all the performance and texture improvements necessary to make that happen. The shots below highlight the building’s exterior transformation from normal wear and tear, to what 60+ years and The Great Fracture has done to it.

That’s everything for now. I’ll be back with more updates at the end of the week.

September 18, 2018

Time To Go On A Quest

This week the team started off by circling back to refine and build out a number of player and social features. We’re looking into ways to highlight our affiliate program, and improve its usability. We looked at how a few other games use theirs, and discussed at some length what would work best for us. This led to a conversation about gifting Kula, our premium currency, to other players, and using it to buy packages or merchandise to give to your friends or fellow House members.

We looked at the House sign up and creation process. Remember, if you want to go fast in Lahaina, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. We started a list of House improvements, and other issues we found too confusing in other social aspects of the game. We talked a bit about bundling game packages to make it easier for people to buy copies of the game for their friends, as well as clearer notifications to tell when your friends are online, or playing the game.

Jared cleared out a few bugs on the web page, and dug into some form validation work. After finding a bug with how the forums work last week, we decided to take them out of iframes, and figure out a better way to incorporate them on the page. Jesse finished the design for the ingame shipping/logistics company Alohagistics. Instead of the boring old crates, and boxes found around the map, players will now find a good mix of packages from 2050’s cheapest shipping solution. Alohagistics – Get There Eventually.

We continue to push ahead with crafting improvements. Jesse has finished the last of the wireframes and we just need to hook them up. He’s still doing some rollover work on inventory items, and addressing a few minor bugs. With a little ui polish, we hope to have the first iteration of the system working by next week. We also took a look at our old keybindings, and made a few minor changes to make certain actions in the game more intuitive, while keeping things like shooting, running, jumping, and crouching in the usual places.

After a lot of hard work on our quest demo this sprint, it’s completed and moved from staging to production. Certain Trophy Hunters now throw things at players more macabre than pineapples, and we fixed a bug that would crash the game when a player would throw a weapon. We’ve worked out the bugs with the zipline, so you can now enjoy a panoramic trip from the top of the Communication Tower, and actually stop at the bottom. We’ve: fixed some audio issues, finalized the quest dialog, populated the areas around the tower with loot and quest items, and worked out the lighting as you can see from what’s left of this tiny park near the tower.

We’ve completed models for the next group of mutants to chase and murder players, as well as fixed many of our weather issues (before we upgrade trueSky next sprint), and made a lot of performance improvements. However, with all the work we put into the quest demo, we didn’t quite finish a few goals. We’re carrying over a few things into the next sprint including finally biting the bullet and updating to UE 4.20.2. We’ll have more on that later this week.

September 11, 2018

Opening Doors and Finishing Quests

As the week nears the end, the team is making a big push to tackle some of our lingering performance issues. We’ve already stripped the entire map of vegetation, and did some major material upgrades to make things less resource intensive, but there are still a few areas for improvement. One of the biggest, is the Municipal Veil Station. The huge building still needs a bit of work to make it the main social hub without setting your GPU fan spinning. We’re making good progress, but the building is one of our largest, and it will take some time to make all the improvements we want.

In the meantime, the Thorcon Power Plant is mostly ready to go. The spacious safe area and social hub has everything a person restored to life over 60 years after a worldwide cataclysm could need. It’s roomy, with plenty of areas to explore, and virtually radiation free. The plant will be the social hub of the game for a while until the Veil Station is fixed.

I say the power plant is mostly ready because we are still having some door issues inside. Wrongly sized, doors that won’t open, and inner doorways that magically lead to the outside are all being fixed this week. All of us have been playing to hunt down any remaining bugs. We’ve found a few new ones including: Guns echoing when you fire them even when you’re not in an enclosed area, sometimes you lose the ability to walk after you respawn, making it extremely difficult to escape danger, and Chris found a group of Trophy Hunters who didn’t seem to mind being shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned, because they couldn’t die. All of these, plus a few other minor issues should be fixed soon.

The team circled back to some crafting improvements, and our work on refinements to the queue layouts making it easier to see what your building, and when it should be done. Jesse is finishing up box designs fitting for our shipping company, Alohagistics. With the tagline, “Get There Eventually” players will soon see many branded boxes across the game area.

We talked briefly about making a trailer, and the best options for an initial one as well as trailers down the road. We talked about some different forum options and improvements as well, and found an inception-type bug that has us rethinking having the forums in an iframe on the page.

After some outside feedback it became apparent that we need to make the wording on game packages clearer, specifically when it comes to the premium subscriptions. Many people thought they’d need to pay a monthly subscription to keep playing the game after the initial purchase, which is NOT the case. The monthly subscription simply gives you a number of, as yet undetermined, benefits and bonuses to your character. Nothing that would make your character indestructible, we hate pay to win games, just things that would make life easier for a player.

With much of the area surrounding the Communications Tower in the final stages of completion, the art team showed off some concept images of the next part of the map to be built. We talked about taking advantage of already existing structures in Lahaina that we could use in the game, places like: water treatment facilities, junkyards, theaters, industrial parks, water holding tanks, and smoke stacks. We talked about which areas would be the most interesting to include and what sorts of things an enterprising group of bandits could do with a smoke stack hideout.

Chris and I have finished the dialogue for the upcoming quest, and the rest of the team is fixing things, and working out any kinks rapidly. We’re seeing updates many times a day as we work to make the scenario as enjoyable as possible. Below is the latest look of what a player will see at the beginning of the quest, when they first come out of the underground respawn area.

September 6, 2018

News Streams and the Roads Most Traveled

With the Veil News Network (VNN) newsticker working across the front page, the team is focusing on getting a live video system working for specific news events. We have a fixed camera live stream on our YouTube page with some terrific, (for some definition of terrific), Hawaiian elevator music for accompaniment. Jesse needs to rework the overlay to give access to the video controls, and make it responsive for people with smaller screens and mobile, but the view can be quite beautiful when the sun is rising.

We plan on recording a few videos of certain areas to highlight places to explore, and cover any holes in our live coverage. We talked about ways we could adjust and present the service to make it look and feel like a real news organization. The team discussed in depth how it currently has more of a public access/small local channel vibe to it, than a super-polished large news network feel. We’re going to make some slight changes in size, and placement on the front page in the coming weeks, but are pretty excited about how things are looking so far.

We continue to work on a system for team play, and Jesse showed off the latest stage of the team ui. Right now, it has an indicator when someone is talking, map markers that show the relative position of team members, basic information of cohorts, (for people not in your party only your name appears), and a noise indicator on the minimap. We want to be careful to not show too much information about other players crawling through the underbrush, or waiting to snipe a target however. So, we talked about ways to let more social players find new friends, and let the creepers creep.

We completed a big pass on crafting and resources this week. Virtually everything in the game is craftable now. We’re still having some trouble with very large trees and rocks giving up resources, but we hope to have it worked out soon. We also adjusted the weight of resources, as everything was way too heavy before. Now players can feel free to make enough twine to put together a shirt without becoming overburdened and an easy lunch for the wolves.

We are finishing up our shopping cart improvements this week as well. Every game package is colored coded, and has images of everything included now. We plan on having a table style view for comparing them ready for production soon.

Lastly, the art team showed off the latest concept drawings of the spawn area, and other parts of the map. We plan on expanding the spawn area from just one room to three, and we looked at the first iteration of an explorable mine area. One of the benefits of using an actual map of Lahaina is that much of the map layout work is done already. We discussed which areas, such as farmland, we need to alter for the game and which we can use as a template. We plan on leaving a few main roads for travel from one place to another, and converting some of the ones off the beaten path into dirt trails through the jungle. You can see below what the fracture, and 60 years of neglect has done to some of the residential roads in Lahaina.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back later with more updates.

March 29, 2018

Team Building and Bots

This week the web team turned their attention to the next step in our Veil News Network (VNN) service, live streaming the news. We’ll be focusing on “Travel and Leisure” stories at first since there aren’t a lot of people running around shooting, hunting, and looting yet. We talked about having a few “previously recorded” videos of noteworthy areas to support the live streams, and different ways to integrate videos for Houses and players. San will be revisiting the work he did on the drones and camera bots to get automation working smoothly. The video must flow!

Getting team play up and running is one of the biggest goals for this sprint. Jesse is working on some layouts and an overall ui for teams. For now we want to keep it simple, with information about player states, distance away, whether or not they’re transmitting VOIP, and other basic stats. We have a “knocked down” player state almost complete. Previously, when players lost too many shock points the screen would just go black, which isn’t a lot of fun. Now you’ll be able to crawl around screaming in agony until someone helps you, or drag yourself someplace safe to hide until the horrors of the forest move away. The goal is to have a simple ad-hoc team system in place next week.

We had a long discussion about player anonymity, and specifically in regard to groups. The team went over many possibilities on how players might identify other players around them that wouldn’t lead to knowing their exact location. After all, having your player name pop-up on the minimap while you’re trying to snipe others from an opposing House isn’t exactly ideal. We discussed using distance for getting different levels of player info: far away, you know players exist in a general area, medium, you know what House they belong to if any, up-close, you can see their player name….We also discussed how you could interact socially with unknown players when you are in a group.

The web team has a table style view of game packages just about finished. Jesse is adding the last of the merchandise icons and images, and the final layout bugs are being squashed. Soon you’ll have a quick and easy way to see what each game package includes, a brief description of each item, and a way to compare them all.

Lastly, we’re just about done with our initial crafting work. Players can harvest rock, wood, metal, and twine. Cloth can be made from twine, basic armor is craftable to protect your soft parts, and players can build a bow. There are so many craftable items now, that we’re adding a quick filter to help players find things faster. We’re making sure that there are plenty of things to harvest throughout the map, to keep players moving around. As you can see from the shots below, the beach has plenty of resources for players to take advantage of, as well as some beautiful scenery.

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

March 27, 2018

Building Better Buildings and Body Armor

As we approach the end of the week, the web team is making good progress on finishing up two projects: The Veil News Network (VNN) newsticker, and a table style view of game packages. We’ve fixed some overlap and spacing issues on the ticker, and have completed some styling work to make it more consistent. We plan to have links to live streaming video of news events, and a quick way for you to save pictures to your profile in the near future, but our first pass at VNN work is almost done.

The new game package view is almost wrapped up as well. Jesse showed off the latest color-coded iteration. Each item included in a package will have its own description and icon, making it easy to see what your getting with each purchase. We’re working on the icons currently, and making sure that the layout properly resizes for various screen sizes, and mobile devices.

We talked about upcoming 3d work and water effects to help add a bit of polish to the environment. The team discussed our item spawning system and the current state of the programmatic building system. They are both very close to the point where we can quickly customize playable worlds with any number of: structures/buildings, environmental items like trees and rocks, and loot controls, from what’s inside a warehouse full of crates, to how much food is in a refrigerator.

This led us to a discussion about a few of the large villages/areas we have planned for the future. We talked about the how fun a big village is, and how maddening trying to navigate a huge one can be. The last thing we want to do is create a place where it takes 20 minutes to run through a maze of stairs, ladders, and levels just to get a bottle of water or a handful of bullets.

The first version of our crafting system is fleshed out. There is a sizable list of items players can create to make their time in Lahaina more enjoyable and survivable. You can harvest: stone, cloth, metal, wood, and twine to build a wide array of weapons, armor, and gun parts. We fixed the bug that made the sky fill with wood when you chop down a tree, but discovered that a few rocks refused to give up stone or ore no matter how long you beat on them.

Finally, the art team is focusing on polishing up the entire map grid by grid, adding finishing touches and working out any bugs. We’re making sure that there is something of interest to explore, or a resource to gather in every area, keeping players moving around the entire map. As you can see from the shots below, we are making great progress with our global lighting and post processing work.

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

March 23, 2018

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

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.

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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

Tag: package