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Marketing, Badges, and Bob

As the week comes to an end, the web team continues to work on our achievement system. Jesse is finishing up some wireframes for Jared to hook up and is busy designing badges befitting each achievement. We talked a bit about giving extra rewards to players who join or start Houses, fill out their account profiles, and invite friends. We’re in the midst of a front page update with new navigation and some tweaks to the layout. The team is adding space for callouts, announcements, and contests. Jesse showed off some wireframes and we discussed revamping other sections of the website.

One of those sections getting a new look in the near future is the story page. In addition to offering something fun to read, set inside the game world every few days, the game stories are meant to introduce the people, places, and things that made Lahaina the thriving area it was before the Great Fracture. Through emails, transcripts, and news stories, players can find hints as to what caused the accident that nearly wiped out mankind, learn about places worth investigating, and a little about what happened to those who lived through the cataclysm. The team discussed ways to make that more clear, and how to organize all of that information so it is more useful for players trying to survive, and rebuild civilization.

With the game approaching the point where we’ll invite a few alpha testers to run around and face the terrors of the jungle soon, we’re focusing more heavily on marketing. We discussed a few different contest ideas, and fun ways to get players involved. We’re grabbing more videos of our mutants, weapons, and places, as well as extended gameplay sessions, and Jesse is busy chopping them up for promo videos and GIFs. We posted a brief introduction about us and the game, with a few shots of the island, and some of our concept art, and got some useful feedback.

One of the things we shared was some early animations of Big Bob Abramo, one of the first mutants that we fleshed out. Many of our upcoming creatures are based, at least in part, by Hawaiian mythology, but Bob and his troop of cannibals were born from a number of concept drawings. Once a meat-obsessed restaurateur, and real estate mogul in Lahaina, Bob was twisted by the fracture both mentally and physically. Don’t let his cane or the gout-ridden leg fool you, Bob is still quite limber and quick for his immense size. Cursed with unnaturally long life from their mutations, Bob and his crew of cannibals scour Lahaina for the slow or unwary to devour. Here’s a shot of Big Bob on top of the Communication Tower, running with his signature cane.Responsive image

Terry and crew have worked through our crashing issues on staging, and are pivoting back to remaining weather and wave work. We have a new drone streaming the game world on our YouTube page, and it should be on the website as soon as we work out a few kinks. We still have to fix some pathing issues, as the drone will occasionally still dip too low or phase through a rock. Jesse is also working on a new standby video to use when we’re experiencing technical difficulties.

Lastly, we looked at some more concept art this week of places and natural features surrounding the Thorcon Plant and the Communication Tower. We discussed adding some natural boundaries in places like rivers, deep ravines, or sheer cliffs, to help funnel players around these areas, and the map in general. We talked about a number of buildings, and special areas that could draw players in and would be fun to explore down the road. We talked about where our ziplines go now, adding more lines over interesting geographical features, and to different locations. That’s it for now. I’ll be back next week with the latest news and updates.

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Building Decals and Disappearing Skies

The team has made a number of inventory improvements this week. We have a completely new ui on your inventory screen. Things have been streamlined and rearranged to make better use of space, and make it easier for players to quickly change gear and grab items. Information about each item is easier to pull up, we have new selectors for the inventory and quick bar, and everything is semi-transparent. You now have a chance of seeing a creature charging at you, if you stopped somewhere to organize your hat or knife collection.

The art team put together an extensive decal library to quickly age and mark up buildings, especially ones made with our procedural building system. We have decals for wood, concrete, stone, and metal, covering a wide variety of things like: scratches, dents, mold, moss, rust, water streaking, and even dulled colors. This should allow us to add the right amount, and specific type of weathering, to any building and save some artist time in the process.

We took a look at a few refinements done to our newest batch of mutants. We talked about what models and items we need for the areas we’re building out around the Thorcon Power Plant to make them complete. We dug deep into our old model and art folders to start an unused asset inventory. We found quite a few things that were put on the back burner for one reason or another, and planned out where these items could be used in game. The team made a list of what models were ready to go and which still needed a little work before being game ready.

The web team remains focused on putting together promo and game videos. We’ve been hard at work cutting up and editing existing videos for GIFs, and spent a fair amount of time coming up with captions. We discussed a number of possible videos in the future: highlighting important aspects of the game, differentiators that highlight the beautiful danger of post fracture Lahaina, and things that are just funny to watch.

In addition to putting together blooper reels and getting glamour shots of some of our most horrific mutants, the web team is working on the upcoming achievement system. Jared is setting up the backends and compiling a list of web specific achievements ahead of ingame ones. Jesse has been working on layouts and the ui, as well as designing reward badges for each achievement.

We’ve fixed a number of bugs discovered while running around shooting things that moved in the jungle, and each other. Medkits will now heal virtually any status effect that your player gets, including poison, but you’ll still need to make a fire to get yourself warm and dry if you’ve been standing in the rain, or went swimming. Ammo boxes will have ammo inside them, as one would expect of an ammo box. You will no longer find that some crafting recipes are empty, leaving you to wonder what items were supposed to be there. Double click looting should work soon as well, so you can quickly strip everything of even remote value from a corpse or bag. This should be very useful if like me, you’re a loot hoarder, and only begrudgingly drop items once you can barely walk from the crushing weight of the junkyard on your back.

Our march toward UE 4.20.2 hit a bit of a snag last week when the staging build suddenly found itself without any sky. There’s no doubt that it makes the game look much more ominous, and might be a good storyline for an alternative world down the line. However, one of Chris’ mantras is always that we make things look more Hawaiian. While a skyless dark world is scary, we didn’t really see a Hawaiian connection. In fact, none of us could remember ever seeing a picture of Hawaii with the sky a dark formless void. It’s usually pretty sunny. We’re working on bringing the blue back currently, but here’s a shot of “Dark Lahaina”.
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Videos and Voices

To get the week started we had a lengthy conversation about game videos. We have some landscape and test footage, as well as a few bloopers, but we need to make quite a few more. We looked at what we already have in the folder, and talked about what aspects of the game we wanted to highlight. Putting on their editor hats, Jesse and company are working on a few more videos, and cutting them up to make GIFs. We’ve already shared the “Can Gun” video from a few weeks ago, with most people expressing interest in having it as a weapon option in the game, and wondering how many beans a second it could fire.

We briefly discussed which one of us had the most pleasing voice for doing voice overs, and came to a consensus rather quickly, avoiding a lengthy reality-talent-show-like process. In addition to the GIFs and videos, we talked about creating websites for the larger ingame companies like: Manimal, Duracave, and SSHAM, and what we’d like those sites to look like, and offer players.

We made a few play improvements recently too. We adjusted hitmarkers to make them easier to use, made some enhancements to points of interest visibility on the map, and have a brighter, more noticeable beam showing the location of loot drops in the game. We discussed the possibility of including a basic melee weapon, like a club or rock, in the player inventory when they spawn, so they always have something to defend themselves with. The led to a conversation about punching your way out of, or into trouble, in the game. Chris lamented the lack of a punching option, for when you’ve run out of ammo, and want to feel like flailing your arms around will help.

Jared is finishing up the last round of improvements to the email and notification system, as well as the settings options necessary to support them. We talked about setting up a RSS feed to add to the forums and our Discord channel. We continued work on building out an achievement system, both for the game and the web page. Jesse is currently working on layouts and designing badges while we compile a list of achievement worthy activities like: joining a house, inviting a friend, or filling out your profile.

Terry and crew continue our march towards the upgrade to UE 4.20.2, but the audio transition to Wwise is done, and we’re making the final push on our trueSKY update. We circled back to a few lingering play features that needed some attention like blocking player notifications from the annoying and needy, and various minor weapon fixes. We discussed ways to improve our iteration time, and solutions for NPC voices (see the conversation about pleasing tones and articulation in the second paragraph above.)

One of the team’s main tasks this sprint is improving performance in structures, and building out the game area around the Thorcon Power Plant, our temporary social hub.
That work continues this week, as we focus on adding details to our ruined neighborhoods while being mindful of being kind to your GPU. Here’s a look at a few houses and some roof detail work.
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