social Archives - Fractured Veil

Bigger Buildings and New Mutants

Sprint 27 is here and in addition to covering a few goals carried over from 26, our biggest tasks are: upgrading to UE 4.20.2, speeding up iteration time, upgrading trueSky to fix some of our lingering weather issues, and addressing any bugs from the last sprint.

We made a big push to get our first quest ready to play. Centering around the Communication Tower, players explore the surrounding area fighting off dangers, gathering loot, and completing quest goals. As this picture of the tower with a little morning mist shows, the area is looking great.

However, Lahaina is a big place, and we’re moving on to bigger buildings, namely the Municipal Veil Station, and the Thorcon Power Plant. Being a little bit more play ready, we’re working on building out the areas around the Thorcon. We plan on making it the temporary social hub for the game, and are working on filling it up with useful items for players, as well as making it an interesting place to explore. The team has a few concepts for the surrounding areas, and are working to improve materials for our procedural building system.

The Veil Station still needs a lot of performance improvements before it can become the main hangout for players. We’re working on a number of updates and improvements inside to help performance, while we work on grunging up the exterior to properly represent 60+ years of neglect and encroaching jungle.

We found some of our mutants to be a bit too tough so we plan on balancing combat a bit. Right now, you can shoot so many arrows into a Trophy Hunter that they look like a bipedal porcupine before running up to you, and ripping off your face. The team is going to adjust their damage and health values a bit to make fighting more fun, but still challenging.

We’re making some improvements to mutant models and animations, and are improving the existing AI in the game to help fix a few bugs we uncovered. We’ve upgraded ranged AI to help players take full advantage of natural cover, and all the hard work we put into buildings to hide behind. We’re adding another type of Trophy Hunter for players to deal with, as well as a whole new group of terrors to encounter in the areas we’re working on.

With the new and improved horrors of the jungle to deal with, we’re making some weapon improvements too. We’re adding a number of audio features like reloading sounds, and fixes to attenuation and ricochet sounds. We’re fixing a bug where a players M4A1 will move around independent of their hands. This is a great feature for shooting around corners, but we’re not really into phantasmal riflery. We’re adding impact decals for gunshots to make things look more realistic, and misses will sometimes kick up a little dirt now as well.

Lastly, we’re fixing some social player items and game features too. The ability to block players has just been completed, so you can now easily ignore the annoying or needy with the click of a button. Inventory stacks can be split into manageable piles, and we’re fixing a bug to make sure medkits will heal poison now. While it can be fun and tingly for the first few minutes, nobody likes to stay poisoned for however long they have left. We’re adjusting how far away the sound of jumping carries, and are making sure that all the ammo boxes now contain ammo, which isn’t the case currently. We’re also adjusting how easy it is to see campfire smoke at a distance, so you can provide other players with a live action version of your favorite scary campfire story, or just make new friends. Whatever you’re in to.

That’s it for now. We’ll be back next week with more updates.

September 14, 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

Please Do Not Pet The Wildlife

The web team spent some time fixing bugs that popped up during the Community Page update, and adding a few little improvements. We’ve: added pagination to the Friends section and others, fixed some layout issues, worked out some problems with social media links not working properly, and did some form validation work. We should have all the kinks worked out and the improvements done by the weekend.

The art team was busy improving the look of our underground respawn area this week as well. Designed to give players a moment of respite after death, instead of being thrown back into the meat grinder while you load, the space is really coming together. In addition to a stream of questionable water, and soothing industrial lighting, the sewer hideaway got a major upgrade this week with a Nuuskin machine. We still have to include some animations for it, but soon players will be able to enjoy being put back together cell by cell before running back to their doom. There’s no doubt that it really ties the room together.

We continued work on the Veil News Network (VNN) system for the game. San’s news API got a few tweaks and is now returning a bunch of play data that is pretty funny to read through. Jared is hard at work constructing a news template library suitable for any event, announcement, and occasion, while Jesse works on a news ticker layout and ui. We plan on having the interactive news service offering personalized game news, and highlighting happenings across the island in real-time in the near future.

We did some work on merch and the merch store this week too. Jesse showed off some new t-shirts including an all-over Manimal design. Speaking of Manimal, we completed a can design so you’ll be able to “Slaughter Your Thirst” with the extreme taste of Manimal in real life soon. Jesse is finishing up a coin design, and we talked over a few other shirt, poster, and merch ideas too.

We took a look at the latest HUD overlay, and listened to a few options for player death sounds, ranging from a subtle electronic humming when your player dropped, to a deep booming when you crashed to your death. As our work chopping up the map, and replacing old buildings to increase performance nears its end, we had a long conversation about rebuilding it. We talked about specific building placement, what things were necessary, and which were more aspirational at this point in the game. With all the work we’ve put into building systems, modeling, and writing stories, it’s going to be a joy to create a post-fracture Lahaina that is exciting, beautiful, and most importantly, fun to play in.

Lastly, San discovered that we have a big bear problem. While he was running through the brush looking for team members to fill with arrows, he came across one of the resident bears. However, Instead of charging him and ripping off his face immediately, the bear took a moment to lay down, apparently asking for belly rubs. Not having his rubbing hand hot keyed, San was a bit too slow, and the bear got up and mauled him. Still, we’d like to keep the wildlife from begging for attention before they go into kill mode. Here’s a look at the lounging animal in question.

February 22, 2018

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

Tag: social