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Respawning Rooms and Thatch Buildings

This is the first full week of sprint 40 and we will be working on finishing our investor trailer, improving the drone and performance, making another audio pass across the map, polishing up some older features, and adding posters and some personal touches to buildings and roadways. Our main goals will be building on the player construction system, and finishing up some of our gameplay features.

We kicked off the week by fixing many construction bugs including an issue with recycling the final piece of a building not cleaning up memory properly, the permission menu not opening properly, and various problems with floors, walls, and foundation pieces not rotating and fitting correctly. All of our time wasn’t spent on making Maui’s post-apocalyptic code enforcement happy however, we also made some substantial improvements to the system.

The team added curved floor tiles, a door lock actor, and an early version of a door password system, although we still can’t promise it is working well enough to keep out nosy siblings or parents on a cleaning binge. In addition, we imported thatch meshes for windows, walls, foundations, and floors. As you can see from the shots below players can build a great looking structure to house all their friends and loot.
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It’s not just player built constructions that got some love this week. We’ve added ambient sounds to a number of our main structures including the Communication Tower and the Thorcon Power Plant. We’ve added a lot of crafting equipment inside the plant and have been discussing further improvements in anticipation of making the huge building the social hub of the game. One of those improvements is adding a respawn area inside. Below you can see a few concept shots of what the new respawn areas might look like inside the Thorcon.
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DEV

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.
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Ziplines, Buildings, and Bears

The team made some good progress on streamlining crafting and improving ui this week. We added some improvements to how drag and drop works, highlighting items selected, and fixing a bug that offset where your gear got dropped in your inventory. We cleaned up some of the navigation on the crafting page to make things a little less cluttered, and made some upgrades to how scrolling works. A bug that would occasionally break scrolling was fixed, and we are adding a few context menus to help you sort through your gear and compare items.

We plan on working on a queue layout the rest of the week. This will allow players to see what they are working on, and help people playing at work determine if their gun mods will be done before their next meeting. We added some animations, and looked at background options to make the whole crafting experience look more authentic.

Terry continued his work on builds, and the East Coast mirror is up and running with a couple of us using it. Git onboarding continues with only a handful of contractors left who need to move over. We made a number of audio improvements, and discussed what still needs to be done, including a Wwise update. Chris had some concerns about our patcher, so we discussed its size and various ways we could handle it differently down the road.

A number of bugs were fixed this week in the game. The rain now actually makes a player’s clothes wet, and is visible no matter what your body position. We weren’t really feeling the 2D dry rain on the island. We also discovered a bug that sometimes makes party members flicker in and out of existence. While most of us are big fans of bouncing between worlds, it’s really hard to fix someone’s arm when their physical body is manifesting across the multiverse. At least with a traditional splint anyway.

Our new and improved campfire is almost done, with only some ui work left to do. Players will now need to feed wood to the fire if they want to: keep it burning, dry their clothes, grab a bite to eat, warm up, and talk about their day. We discussed the proper rate of burn to strike that perfect balance between having an ever-burning log, and allowing players time to do something other than harvest wood.

We grunged up many structures, and roughed up a lot of ruined roads, but we still have a lot to go. We talked about some procedural building upgrades that should save us some time, and still provide different types of damage and weathering so all of our ruins don’t look like carbon copies.

The group continues to add the final touches to the underground spawn area. We made some lighting and texture improvements to make it look appropriately dark and slimy, but still comfortable. We added some new audio so you can hear just how bad the electrical connections to the jury-rigged Nuuskin pods are. The team briefly discussed the starting equipment available to players in this area, and possible tweaks to your beginning gear.

We began work on our first quest scenario for the game. While we’re still working out the specifics, it is going to take place in the area around the Communication Tower. We looked at some existing real-world features on that part of Maui, and talked about what we wanted to include, and what we’d like to add. We circled back to our zipline discussion from last week, and looked at our first semi-working zipline demo. There are a few bugs to work out yet, as San kept going straight into the ocean his first time down. He probably would have made it all the way to what was left of Japan had he not drowned first. Even with the bugs, fast traveling from the top of the comm tower is a lot of fun.

Lastly, we continue environmental work to make the jungle and beach areas look as realistic as possible. Here you can see one of the escaped bears taking a little nap on the beach. Unless you’ve come loaded for him, it’s probably best to keep your distance.
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DEV

Towers, Trails, and Tarnished Buildings

The team has been putting a lot of work into our creature AI this week. We’re making improvements to both animals and monsters after discovering that we’re having a little trouble with AI senses. Our Trophy Hunters in particular aren’t acting like keen predators, tracking down players to collect grisly souvenirs like they should. Instead, you occasionally run into groups who aren’t stirred to action until you get up in their face, and invade their personal space.

We’re adding new models for a few unique types of Trophy Hunters who use different tactics in battle, and have different abilities. Right now you can tell the ranged attackers from your standard mutant because they’re wearing floppy hats. While a hat based hierarchy for creatures would be interesting, and unique, we’d rather add cool looking physical differences instead. We discussed future creature abilities we’d like to see down the road, like the ability to use weapons and gear.

Our underground spawning area is getting some attention this week too. We’ve added the finishing touches visually to your subterranean home away from home, and are adding new audio elements as well. Once they’ve collected the starting gear laid out for them, and climb up the ladder, players now face the Communication Tower. We’re focusing our next play demo on that area, and are working on a short quest scenario. As you can see from the shot below, the map leading up to the tower is looking fantastic.
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We’re making audio improvements in other areas as well. We’re adding new sounds for picking up and dropping items, and making sure that things made of wood sound different than metal items when they hit the ground. The team discussed updating all audio to Wwise, and briefly touched on the upcoming UE 4.20 upgrade.

The web team made some improvements to the shopping cart to improve user experience, and make sure everything goes smoothly with purchases. We took another look at our friend and referral system, and talked through some improvements we’d like to see down road. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to invite your friends, and reward you when they sign up and play.

Progress on filling in the game map continued this week too. The team has put a lot of time into material upgrades to improve look and performance already, and continues to put in a lot of road work to keep players moving around the map. With more time being put into the Comm Tower, we circled back to the idea of putting ziplines in a few key areas. We looked at what a few other games have done, and discussed how we’d like ours to work, as well as where they would lead. We’re currently using clouds of poisonous gas to keep players inside the areas we’ve completed on the map, and discussed other options for borders once the whole game area is complete.

The art team is busy taking the beautiful buildings and roads they made, and roughing them up so they better represent the toll of the great fracture, and decades of neglect. It’s a long process, but we’re coming up with some great ways to streamline the grunging. Below you can see some of the fruits of our anti-home improvement efforts with: cracked foundations, faded paint, weathered siding, and a nice layer of moss growing on the outside of one of our ruined homes.
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DEV

Buildings, Boxes, and Birds

As we begin the final week of Sprint 23, everyone is busy finishing up projects, and hunting down bugs. The web team has upgraded to the latest versions of Webpack and React, and are fixing some lingering layout issues. We’re improving our autocomplete feature to make it a bit smarter, and making some improvements to player/friend search as well.

We completed some more work on the crafting ui, and discussed adding a few more recipes to the already impressive list of apocalyptic arts and crafts projects available to players. The team fixed a bug on the loading screen, and updated the settings ui to make things easier to find, and adjust your game-play preferences. The HUD received some attention with a few new updates to make things less cluttered, and improve your field of view.

We’ve updated the team ui, fixed a few bugs, and included some new functionality into group play. A number of group features were added like messaging and auto-rejoin. In addition, we’re making it easier to find your friends and House members to help you rampage across the countryside, or whatever you’re in to. We’ve adding a few new weapon animations as well. Running a spear through your enemies, or throwing a club at their head has never looked better.

The team made some improvements to our second loot drop scenario. Players can claim buildings to defend against hordes of mutants and other survivors, in order to cash in on the prize when time runs out. We talked some more about the overall game economy, and distribution of loot and wealth. We’re spawning most of our loot in containers and boxes now, instead of just sprinkling weapons and goods across the map, exposed to the elements.

The team is almost finished with lighting and audio improvements in the respawn area, and our Hawaiification work continues with artwork, graffiti, and new furnishings in the underground haven. We have a basic recycling system in place for some items like empty beverage and food containers, and the art team is working on animations for turning trash into a usable resource.

We’ve made some AI improvements that have not only made things more interesting to fight, but have led to a huge increase in performance. We’re replacing many of the birds in the game currently to make those increases even greater. We talked some more about the map, and finalizing a backbone of surviving highways and trails to keep players moving. We want to make sure that players have a reason to travel over the entire map, and not get caught in a bottleneck, or congregate in one area.

Finally our lighting, weather, and foliage work continues to improve performance, and make the landscape look as amazing as possible while you struggle to survive. As you can see from the shots below, endeavoring to persevere has never had a more beautiful backdrop.
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We’ll be back later this week with more updates and screenshots.

DEV

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

DEV

Playing Well With Others

This week marks the end of sprint 22, and the team is busy adding finishing touches and hunting down bugs. We talked over issues with the live VNN feed and discussed what features we’d like to add next. We’re building out a “Live Feed” area in the Media section, and Jesse showed off some wireframes for different feeds and options. We worked on user flow for both House and player streams, and worked on a few different stream overlays as well.

We made a few more ui improvements to the HUD, and the Settings section. We fixed a few minor icon issues in the inventory screen, and we discussed the possibility of allowing players to access their inventory on the web page. The team discussed what that would entail, and to what degree a player would be able to do things with their items while not in the game. We also made a first pass at our ingame currency, rai, and talked about different ways players could find/earn rai in the game. Game economies are a tricky thing to get right. We talked about the flow of resources, and how that interplays with money. The last thing we want to create is an artificial shark tooth bubble on the island, and have the whole market collapse.

We made a bunch of animation improvements too. A bug that would keep a player trapped in a calf and shoulder burning ladder-limbo has been fixed, so players should be able to climb up and down with ease. We added numerous other player and weapon movements, and are fixing long-standing issues with how iron sights work. We’re adding an audio cue when an item breaks, so you don’t charge into combat with a broken machete, or a gun with a heat-warped barrel.

The art team continues work on the newly improved respawning area. As you can see from the shots below, players now have a bit more room to run around when coming back from the dead.
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Jared did a bit of maintenance and is hunting down a few bugs in the shopping cart. We added improvements to a House theme editor, and did a bit of ui work to player and House cards. We started work on a “Party” section on the Community page for group play. The team talked about easy ways a player could let his friends know that they were available to play, and simple ways to invite others into a group.

Numerous performance and material improvements continue with really good progress, as well as AI improvements to animals and creatures alike. We want to make sure the horrors of the jungle act in horrific ways. Lastly, all the lighting and environmental work we’ve done is really paying off, as you can see in this shot of a dock, and the crystal clear water below.
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That’s all for now. We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.

DEV

Arts and Crafts and Loot

The Veil News Network (VNN) live drone cam is up and running on the front page, giving you a view of what’s happening in real time in the game. We fixed some of the roller coaster like rotations, and it now avoids hitting the terrain to a greater degree. We discussed ways to expand camera drone coverage, and improving the feed, including: adding some more realistic information, temperature indicators, FOV adjustments, and other items. With that said, it looks good, and the fact that it isn’t prerecorded, but an actual look at what’s happening in the game, as it happens, is great.

Terry has been working through some merge and build issues this week, while the team has been focusing on crafting and recycling in the game. All items in the game now deteriorate with use, and provide different amounts of raw materials when recycled depending on their condition. Player’s machetes will now dull, armor will get worse every time you’re shot or stabbed, and guns get a little worse with every round run through them. We talked briefly about the inclusion of a possible repair system down the road, and how it might work.

Speaking of crafting, Chris has turned his house into the official Fractured Veil Arts and Crafts HQ with the addition of a 3D laser. He’s been cutting, engraving, and etching his way to mastering his new machine with some pretty good results as you can see below. We talked about some future projects, discussed how terrible burning acrylic smells, and Chris showed off his jury rigged exhaust system.
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The web team has been doing some refactoring and testing this week. Jared is finishing up some final work with our email and notification system, and Jesse has been focusing on some ui improvements. We talked about some new House features we’d like to add down the road. We’ve been working on adding a few more Hawaiian style touches to various logos and assets. Jesse demoed what some of those would look like, as well as a few future layout plans.

Our group system is fully operational and got some ui love this week. Group members can now see how far away they are from each other, their respective health status, can respawn on a group members name, and can revive a member who has taken too much damage to be useful in combat. Our AI work continues to make sure the creatures in the jungle are dangerous enough, and we’ve tweaked a few animations to weapons and player movements.

Finally, the art team worked on some audio issues that popped up this week, various HUD and settings updates, and other performance related issues across the game map. We finished our first loot drop system to keep people moving around the island, and creating a reason to fight other than just a general urge to murder others. Our day and night cycle and lighting work continued as well. Here are a couple of shots at the beginning and the end of the day, to show how good it is looking currently.
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We’ll be back later in the week with more updates.

DEV

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

DEV

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.
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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.
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That’s it for now. We’ll be back later with the latest tuber news, updates, and screenshots.