shirts Archives - Fractured Veil

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

Reporting Crimes and Minting Coins

The push to create the Veil News Network (VNN), an interactive real-time service that reports on major game events and announcements, continues this week. The news API is collecting more metadata, and Jared’s story template library is growing to cover a variety of happenings and events. Jesse is working on animations for a newsticker on the front page, and a VNN news overlay for videos.

We discussed possible latency issues once the ticker is up and running, making sure live alerts don’t feel spammy, and some interesting game tie-ins. We talked about a “citizen reporter” type system, in which players could report crimes. Think of it as a sort of neighborhood watch with a healthy dose of extortion, witness tampering, and murder thrown in to keep it interesting. San had some clever ideas about how players might eventually manipulate the news to their advantage as well that we’re going to keep an eye on.

Overall ui work continues as well. We’re finishing up drag and drop for items in the inventory, and adding alerts for dropped items, so you don’t accidentally drop something important like a claymore before you go out into the bush. We’re adding finishing touches to a new fullscreen ui update, finalizing the new HUD, and adding some shadow/light scalability settings in the game settings ui.

We’re wrapping up the initial merch offerings this week too. Jesse is working out some details on some all-over shirt designs, finishing up a Kula coin (our premium currency), and completing our catalog with all images of available products, and game packages. We ran into a bug that was keeping shipping options from being displayed during checkout as well. Jared is hunting it down and the fix should be in soon.

The item spawning system is ready to fill your backpack with items of an appropriate power/usefulness level at an appropriate rate. While they can be fun for a few hours, getting rocket boots on your first day can make any game too easy, and ultimately not very fun to play. Terry focused on map builds and integrating Wwise and TrueSKY. We’re working on a handful of needed animations for long guns, and prone combat too.

Lastly, this round of map and game performance optimization work is just about done. We’re replacing the last of the old building components with parts from our programmatic building system, and adding audio support to the few remaining silent places around Lahaina. The safe sewer spawning area is done for now. Players can find a canteen and a few basic survival tools there, and take a minute to get their wits about them if they’ve just been killed in combat. As you can see from the pictures below, it’s not bad a far a post-apocalyptic drainage systems go.

February 27, 2018

Player Death and Taxes

The first full week of the new sprint saw everyone fixing any lingering issues, and moving on to the next big project. The functionality of our online store is done. We just have to add the images of the new shirts and the other merch. Jared has the ledger for the player wallet up and running, but it needs a little refinement to make it easier to read. We were finally forced to take a walk down the long and complicated road of collecting sales tax. We ran down a home state, inventory, and employee nexus trail, reading all the rules, before turning back and looking at the the three categories each state in the U.S. falls into regarding tax rules. It’s all as clear as mud.

Jesse finished work on an updated logo and is updating all the merch with the new image. The first iteration of House banners is ready, so soon you can have a cool looking custom flag for your group. We finally uploaded the portraits we commissioned on our About page. Those of you who were curious, can now put a face that is somewhat representative of our actual appearance to our names. There were some minor vanity changes made to some that I won’t call out, but everyone is at least moderately content with how they look now. Chris, in a fit of pique recolored a particularly white/grey hair. It was en-youngificationing for him.

The automated building system is still in the bug hunting phase, but we’re also looking at what happens when we increase the level of detail and ways to increase performance. This version of the system is almost where we want it, and we talked a bit about potential next steps and uses. This includes streamlining the system and letting players use a version to construct bases in the game. Terry continues LinuxServer/WindowsClient work, fixing any bugs as they appear. Chris has assembled a pile of machines for build and game servers. They’re not as loud as you think, and soon, geographically distributed.

Jesse showed off a new inventory ui and screen, with new buttons and a recycling options for certain items. We talked through the recycling workflow and talked at length about possible issues. The target of most of the discussion was the issue of item dimensions when assembling/disassembling items. These items would always have the same weight but things like a disassembled rifle, or a board made from smaller bits of wood, take up different amounts of space than the item/s they came from. After some back and forth we decided to just not allow a player to recycle/craft something if there was not sufficient space available for it. Jesse created a warning notification for such a case. With that decided, the goal is to have the new UI ready by the end of the week.

Finally, we started work on the initial character spawn sequence experience, and smart respawning. Lahaina is dangerous enough as it is, without popping up in the middle of a firefight or interrupting a Green Lady picnic. The team continued work on a tunnel/cave/sewer system for players to explore, fight unspeakable terrors, and gather loot. All of our persistence work is just about done. Soon players will be able to keep everything they’ve stolen, crafted, bought, or acquired after they log out. While we encourage long play sessions, we understand that the realities of life force even the most diehard fans to attend to work, bathroom and relationships occasionally and we’d like you to be able to keep your stuff when you do decide to stand up.

Having finished up work on the communication tower, the art team moved on the the next big building, the Veil Station. As you can see from the shot below, the interior needs a little lighting work, but it looks great for a first pass.

We’ll be back on Thursday with more art and updates.

December 5, 2017

Spawning Loot In Scary Rooms

With Thanksgiving coming up in a few days, everyone is pushing hard to fix last minute bugs and finish up items during a short week. Our item spawning system is getting a few tweaks. We’re working on making loot lists specific for containers ensuring that refrigerators are filled with food instead of ammo. We’re also making area specific loot tables, allowing us to have locations where players are more likely to find: crafting related items, hunting equipment, medical supplies, or whatever theme we want.

The team is incorporating that item spawning system into the automated building system and testing them rigorously for bugs. A funny thing happened when one of the team was generating some random buildings looking for problems. A building was created that had a long hallway which led to a small windowless room, free of any furnishings but a single rocking chair facing the wall. As everyone knows, the sound of a child laughing in an abandoned basement, a dog staring at a closet while whining, and finding an empty room with a single chair facing the wall, are all universal signs that something terrible is about to happen. We appreciated the accidental creepiness, but we need to replace the generic chairs with something more Hawaiian, like this before including punishment rooms in the game.

The web team is putting together the last of the images for packages and shirts. Jesse is finishing up the last of the logo work, box models, and is looking at some other shirt designs. We discussed our ongoing issues with finding quality Hawaiian shirts that we could customize for the game without having to buy thousands of yards of custom fabric. We’ve decided to table them for now, and replace them with some sort of allover style shirt design. Jared finished work on the last of the minor shopping cart issues, and is almost done with PayPal integration.

We finished some of the animal AI work, so they will act more naturally and stop running straight into the sea whenever a person walks by. Speaking of straight in the ocean, we have swimming animations done, and they should be up on production soon. Right now you can go in the water, but standing straight up when you’re cruising around looks weird and isn’t very hydrodynamic. The armor system is ready on staging as well and we have a clothing system in place to make sure players can stay warm and dry.

Finally, San and crew continued working on persistence. Currently, attributes and traits are working, and the inventory is almost done. We just need to include talents, wounds, diseases, and effects after that. While item persistence is on the verge of being completed, we talked about design options that would let it scale better in the future than what we have now. The art team finished up the last of the shading and audio work on the communication tower, and Terry fixed our latest trueSKY issues so hopefully the view from the top looks better. As you can see below, the tower has come along nicely but the scenery still needs a little work.

That’s it for this week. We’ll be back next week with more pictures and updates. For those of you celebrating turkey day, we hope you enjoy the holiday!

November 21, 2017

Armor, Audio, and Audacious Kitchens

The web team continued their polish work on the shopping cart this week and made a number of minor fixes and improvements. As I mentioned in the last update, we decided to try a new brand of t-shirt that we think will be more comfortable. We now have both men’s and women’s shirts instead of the just the one unisex style that we had before. Jesse designed new logos and we picked out some new colors for both styles of shirt. We’ll be adding some more new shirts, posters, and other merchandise soon. In addition, we made another pass at box design, and Jesse is adding the finishing touches now.

We talked a bit about our future server needs, and went over a few options to get us where we plan to be. San continued to work on persistence and we should have an inventory that stays with your character very soon. With the end of the year approaching, we took some time to go over a 3 month development timeline, to make sure everyone was on the same page, and that we weren’t missing any low hanging fruit. The team discussed messaging systems and what we’d like ours to do that isn’t readily available with other options. We went over different short and long term goals and solutions.

The ambient sound system is nearing completion and it’s sounding great. We have a number of different sounds for various areas and times of day. Players will hear different noises traveling at night than they will in the morning, and we have separate sounds for both birds and insects. Even buildings have their own associated ambient noises. The automated building system is almost ready to be deployed as well. The tech team showed off a number of screenshots from randomly constructed buildings and it’s looking good. Their still loading our game-specific furnishings and props so everything we looked at used generic placeholders, which led to this magnificent kitchen you see below. One can only imagine how many years of their life the cabinet maker gave to complete this kitchen. There’s enough counter space to hold the contents of another entire kitchen, and we’re still trying to calculate how many shark-toothed frying pans will fit in the lower cabinets

We talked some more about integrating a game camera on the website and discussed getting more House and player data on the front page. We’re collecting a lot of useful data right now, but we’re not doing much with it yet. We discussed displaying player metrics and events, things like: who crafted the most of X item, who did the most damage, announcing that Chris got more head shots than anyone else, and so on. Displaying user data can be tricky though, and we went over the different privacy options we’d need for those of you who don’t want your character info shared.

Our armor system is now in place and we’re going through and adjusting different damage mitigating outfits to make sure the game remains balanced. As I mentioned earlier this week, we had some issues with drag-n-drop in the inventory. Those problems have been worked out, so characters can drop anything they want instead of being stuck in a permanent item dragging hell. Finally, the communication tower shading and sounds are done, just in time for us to run into some lighting issues. It’s looking great even if it’s a bit dark right now.

That wraps it up for this week. We’ll be back with more updates Tuesday.

November 16, 2017

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.

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.

Here’s a bonus shot of the Cherry keyboard that stirred a larcenous urge deep inside of Chris.

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.

September 26, 2017

Tag: shirts