skills Archives - Fractured Veil

Version 0.1.2147: Talents, Siege Updates, and Renovations

Aloha Thrivers!

We’ve made some huge changes to the game with the help of our first 2 waves of Kickstarter backers and testers.

FRV’s starting area, the Thorcon Power Plant, got a huge facelift and content update. The main room is filled with vendors buying and selling everything a player needs to survive, and the respawn area is almost unrecognizable compared to just a few weeks ago.

We’ve added a fresh coat of grime to the sewer dungeon, made big improvements to the siege system, and updated the mutant’s movements, and battle tactics to make them more dangerous. However, The most exciting new feature for this update is probably the introduction of the talent system.

Designed from the ground up with the direct input of the community, the first iteration in the game right now allows players to explore four categories of specialization for their characters. This is a huge step forward allowing you to tailor your gameplay into what role you like best or explore other options you normally wouldn’t.

Here’s a look at everything we’ve added to the game.

Thorcon Power Plant Update

Every part of the game’s starting area has had a major facelift.

What was a fairly empty respawn room is now filled with everything a freshly restored player needs to start surviving.

The locker room next door has changed quite a bit from our early concepts.

It’s now almost as vibrant as the jungle outside.

The work we’ve done in the main room however is probably the most striking.

This huge open space is now a multi-level area filled with vendors, shops, shrines, and places for players to group up. Here’s a before and after video that highlights the huge changes inside and the starting area’s incredible transformation.

Sewer Dungeon Renovation

The Thorcon wasn’t the only renovation we took on, the sewer dungeon got a lot of love recently and some expansions.

We take a lot of pride in making our jungles lush and vibrant and wanted to put the same effort into making one of our favorite dungeons a foreboding place to explore.

In addition to the twisting wet corridors, we’ve added defensible positions for players who need some cover from the mutants lurking around inside.

We’re still working on building out some of the lowest levels, but there are already plenty of places for players to explore, loot, and fight.

Talent System

All of these renovations make a huge visual difference but our new talent system has a huge impact on gameplay.

We built the talent system hand-in-hand with our amazing community. We asked for ideas about builds and ways they’d like to specialize their characters while keeping in mind that we wanted to avoid anything that would give an unfair advantage in PVP.

Here’s what we came up with after listening to your input. Right now we have 4 basic roles you can explore: Builder, Hunter, Stealth, and Support. We still have some UI and balancing to do but this is another huge step in allowing players to customize their characters and work better in groups.

Siege and Totem Improvements

Building a base that is big enough to attract a horde of angry mutants (or starting a siege yourself) is a lot of fun, and we’ve made a ton of improvements to the siege system.

We updated how totems work for singular and combined bases ensuring that endless waves don’t appear for larger complexes and made sure a siege ends once all of the base’s totems are reduced to 20% or less health. The siege manager now keeps proper track of contributing players and we fixed bugs that would cause massive server lag when a siege was started manually.

We added animals and beasts to the cast of characters that can show up to tear down everything you’ve built, made improvements to AI pathing so the horrors of the jungle don’t get stuck, and made sure the siege manager prioritizes ranged AI if a base is hard to reach.

Community

As usual, we’ve fixed a mountain of bugs with the help of our amazing testers since our last update. The team has squashed over 150 in a couple of months getting things ready for Wave 3. Join our discord server and check out the patch-notes channel for a complete list of fixes.

More About Fractured Veil

June 29, 2022

Shirts on a Plane

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

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

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

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

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

Lastly, the art team continued work on the Thorcon plant and various small props and items. As you can see, the infamous boar tusk broom is ready just in time to help players keep the Thorcon locker room clean and orderly.

We’ll be back with more game updates, and possibly more movie references next week.

October 26, 2017

Tech Updates and Layouts

This week the web team is adding the finishing touches to our initial ecommerce system and putting a bow on top. The last of the receipt and order history work is being completed, and the last of the lingering bugs are being squashed. With a few more days of styling work, we hope to have our shopping cart rolling before the end of the week.

We ran into a number of old and new issues with the Friends feature this week. Currently, the system isn’t displaying relationships with current friends correctly. It will let you add friends you are already friends with, it doesn’t show connections properly, and sometimes friends aren’t showing up if you have a large list. Jared and Jesse will be digging into the issues over the next couple days to straighten everything out.

Speaking of friends, we received the first draft of some of our portraits for the about page that tested the boundaries of good-natured ribbing. Jared appeared to be suffering from some sort of facial paralysis, Jesse looked like he evolved from a subterranean race, and my eyes looked like they were copied from a 12-year-old anime character. Strangely, the artist did a great job with Terry’s portrait. We asked for revisions and questioned what it was about Terry that made him so easy to draw. We talked briefly about building a Careers section, but decided to have more human looking portraits first, as to not scare away potential co-workers.

Like last week, much of our time was devoted to talents. We worked on a basic layout and talked over design options for displaying attributes and skills. Jesse made layouts showing what the talent page would look like. We looked at and discussed options for showing how talents would buff skills and attributes and vice versa. We have a collection of talents to start, and the team is working on integrating them now.

There was a lot of work on inventory and crafting screens, as well as the quick bar too. We made some adjustments to the crafting screen to clean it up and make it easier to navigate. Crafting will soon be a much less cluttered process. We’re cleaning up parts of the old inventory system as well. We worked on attachments for all of your tactical light and bayonet needs, and looked at a layout of how the system would work. We’ll be doing the same with the Settings menu later this week.

After much consternation and banging our heads against walls, brick or otherwise, we have moved to UE4.17. In addition, Terry finished up Wwise and TrueSKY source integration. San spent most of the weekend focusing on camera work, and has a really cool tactical camera system up and running. We discussed some future use cases and options, but it works great already as a security camera for a base, or to see snippets of what your House members are looking at.

We have almost all of our persistence work done with the exception of item persistence. We discussed different options and how much equipment a player should keep after they die. The team is finishing work on the building generation system, and are adding some editor tools before moving on to completing the core materials and item spawning system. We’re testing the materials system now on foliage. Shooting a tree will give you wood, and one day soon you’ll be able to smash rocks to get minerals. As you can see below the building system and foliage are looking great inside and out.

We’ll be back later this week with more updates and screenshots

October 17, 2017

Creating Old Ruins and New Words

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

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

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

San continued his work on a having a player camera, and it’s almost done. Soon players will be able to broadcast a security cam like image of their surroundings to other players, even on the web. Much of the art team’s focus this week continued to be the automated ruin building system. In a week or so, all the bugs should be worked out and it should be up and running. As you can see below it is coming along nicely.

We looked at mock-ups for a variety of smaller items, including a shark-toothed pan to join the boar-tusk broom in our post fracture homegoods store. It was during a discussion about the kukenroot model however, that we added a new phrase to the Fractured Veil lexicon. “It needs to be chickeyer” will join other phrases like, “I made the story more cannibally” to our collection of neologisms. In addition to creating a new word, Chris voiced his dismay that there wasn’t a sufficient amount of gore produced when he killed something with a machete or other large-bladed weapon. We talked about how to make the proper amount of arterial spray come from a gash to help Chris paint the walls of his rather sparsely decorated basement.

That does it for now. I’ll be back with additional updates, (and possibly some more new words), next week.

October 5, 2017

Attaching Cameras and Creating Talents

This week marks the beginning of sprint 16 and we spent some time going over what got done from our last sprint. The highlights include: completing the bug hitlist from our Friends and Family Alpha, weapon attachments for all your scope and bayonet needs, a quest system to give players a little purpose, a item spawning system to ensure that there’s plenty of loot available, and we finally have a working elevator in the communication tower.

We did find a slight problem at the top however. There’s a sizable area where a player can fall unexpectedly and inexplicably hundreds of feet to their death. We briefly discussed leaving it and putting up a “Mind the gap!” sign but decided it would probably be best just to fix it. We pushed our armor system and crafting tools into sprint 16 along with, finishing work on a programmatic building system, and designing a talent system. You can always see what we have planned and what we’re working on currently, by checking out our sprint section.

The team discussed notifications and talked about how to best integrate them with our tactical map and House command features. We want Houses to be able to send alerts to all members whether they are logged in or not. This led to a fairly in-depth conversation about base building and what features we’d need and want to be included. We discussed possibilities for customization and the game mechanics involved with a player building something from scratch instead of just taking over an abandoned building. We talked about how defending your base would work, and went over different scenarios involving automated turrets and defences, including letting players operate a turret via the web.

We continued work on our shopping cart. Many bugs were squashed including one in which duplicate items would break everything. We added address field validation and we’re auto-populating city with zipcode now. We’ll have chronological sorting to the story section soon, so you can read about events and people in the order in which they happened. Jesse is finishing up our Manimal logo and working on a ui design for attachments, before moving on to talent trees.

Terry is working through some issues he ran into with Plastic while trying to merge 4.17, and San continued working on APIs for persistence, as well as cleaned up things on the backend. We talked about how to best implement a camera that would provide screenshots at a certain frequency. We discussed the mechanics of how that might work and where we would attach it. The team talked how we could use such a system beyond just tactical purposes.

Finally, with so many systems getting into a working state and models reaching completion, we talked quite a bit about trailers and gameplay videos. We went over different types of videos highlighting certain aspects of the game and how that differs from a cinematic style trailer. We kicked around a few different ideas and Jesse is working on some possible storyboards. With the art team finishing up work on the communication tower, they’ll be focusing on some of the other large buildings. Soon players will be able to explore more than just the loading area inside the Thorcon power plant.

I’ll be back on Thursday with more updates and some new screenshots from our creative meeting.

October 3, 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

The Lights Are Low and the Pants are Off

We’re starting a new sprint next week so we’ve been busy smacking down bugs, finishing up systems, and adding a bit of polish to a variety of things.

We cleaned up and reorganized some of the navigation on the website, added a search field to the right hand nav and fixed a lingering scroll bar issue. Our basic quest system was completed. Players will now be able to gather various goods for money and experience, as well as explore the jungle with a purpose instead of just mindlessly shooting all day. Don’t get us wrong. We expect you to mindlessly shoot a lot. It’s really fun! But sometimes you need to take a break and accomplish an objective.

Speaking of mindless fun, we’ve made a lot of progress on the inventory UI and character models. Drag and drop is now working on almost everything from the inventory. You can apply bandages quickly and easily, but more importantly, the post-apocalyptic dressup portion of our game is complete. Players can now swap out and remove clothing. Many of us consider the ability to shoot boars along the beach in brightly colored shirts and underwear, a milestone.

Work continues on the crafting and cooking system and we’re working on skills as well. We’re putting together our FAQ and buttoned up some of our social APIs. One of our guys learned how hard it was to test out inventory UI in the game when you’ve wandered off the path and are being eaten alive by Trophy Hunter mutants. On the plus side, he got a chance to work out some AI bugs and went to watch Dunkirk, which he highly recommends, when he was done.

We want to focus heavily on group play in the game, and talked at length about the work we’ve done on our party system, and what needs to be done yet. We’d like people to be able to set up groups outside the game and spawn together regardless of whether or not they usually play on the same servers. We talked about what ACLs we’d need for ad hoc parties (like leader promotion and kicking members from the group) and our goal of creating a party messaging system including Voip and shared telemetry information.

Finally, the art folks added a lot of lighting and shadow work to their mountain of blending and texture endeavors. You can see just how good the sun looks now shining through the Communication Tower windows below.

The lighting and shadow upgrades look great outside too. As you can see below, the shadows in the sand and behind plants is looking terrific. The jungle at dusk and in the morning is looking amazing as well. We’ll have a lot more for you soon.

July 27, 2017

Data Tracking, Animations, and Gift Shops

It was a busy weekend for some of us but the team still got a lot done. Here’s what we did and what we talked about since the last time we checked in.

Tired of looking at blank avatar icons on our test accounts, we added Gravatar support. If you already use the service, you can use your favorite icons on Fractured Veil now too. If you don’t and you can’t decide which picture of yourself that you’d like the world to see, it’s an easy way to have a unique avatar icon that follows you around.

We did a lot of work on animations in the prone position. Now your characters can crawl forward and backwards, pick up items, use them, and eat and drink, with or without a weapon in your hand. We don’t really recommend chugging an ice-cold Manimal while face down in the dirt with a machete in your hand, but we understand that things happen out there in the wilds. We also did a lot of detail work to buildings to make them look better. You can see from this shot below how the bullet holes in the windows really add the right amount of menace to this lovely home.

The team continued work on the inventory ui with drag and drop bandaging on the way. Our quest system progressed this week too, with alert systems being integrated including map markers to show you where to go. We added colored alerts to help players know when they have been poisoned, diseased, or are suffering from some other ailment. We did some refinements to combat and are almost done with the framework for our quest system. There was a lot of discussion about our crafting system and whether or not our recipes would allow for some experimentation. We decided that allowing people to play around with recipes was the way to go.

There was also a lot of talk around player skills, and the possibility of having some character abilities that benefit everyone in a group. For example: someone with a high level of medical skill might be able to give others close by a bonus when applying a splint or bandage. We discussed how that mechanic might work and how it would be displayed to players.

We buttoned up the player death/kills data and are refining the graphs. San continued his analytics work and we discussed what data could be tracked and how it could be used. Of course, lots of you would be interested in being at the top of the “shark teeth found”, or “pineapples eaten” graph but this data could be really useful to Houses. House leaders would be able to see who their best killers are, who is gathering the most resources, and who is crafting the most items. This way it would be easy to find who your superstars are and also how many moochers you have mucking around, not pulling their own weight.

The art people worked on some of our lingering lighting issues and made another pass on refining plants and some sand/ground textures. Lastly, one of our largest buildings got some more attention this week. As you can see below, the communication tower is nearing completion and even got a gift shop this week. There isn’t much as far as merchandise goes right now, but we’ll get the shelves filled soon.