The shopping cart is live! After a lot of hard work and fixing some last minute bugs, we have the first version of our shopping cart up and running. Currently, you can choose from four different game packages, a Fractured Veil poster, and FRV t-shirts in four different colors. There are a few minor layout issues that will be cleaned up by the end of the week, but everything else is working great. We’ll have a few more shirt sizes, styles, and other merchandise available soon. We’re also working on PayPal integration, so you’ll be able to use something other than your credit card in the near future.
One of the “coming soon” items is our in-game sports drink, Manimal. Jesse has come up with an extremely awesome can design for the ultimate of ultimate energy drinks. We only have one flavor right now, and nobody has tried it yet, so we can’t comment on the taste. Let’s be honest, most people don’t drink that stuff because it’s exceedingly delicious, but just to help make vodka go down easier. We anticipate it’ll taste like unicorn tears and angel whispers (so good!) He’s also made a first pass at a Manimal poster that captures the intensity of anyone who’d drink something called Manimal. Cans and posters will be coming in the near future. We hope that as the game becomes successful that we will wrap some horrible car like a PT Cruiser in a Manimal wrap. That’d be something.
Jesse also continued work on package art and design, as well as mock-ups for some game related coins. Terry is spending some time digging into shaders too. The automated building system keeps improving every day. Buildings are now being populated with props and containers, getting us one step closer to having the ability to create game-ready buildings, loaded with loot, on the fly. We talked about expanding the system to cover: neighborhoods, regions, and eventually the entire map. The team discussed streaming level design and the best way to chop up the map when generating a world.
The new inventory is almost done with lots of work going into the ui, specifically the drag and drop functionality. The basic armor system is in and we’re working on defining: what blocks piercing damage the best, what protects against blunt damage, and weights. We discussed the degree to which putting a piece of wet clothing into a bag with dry things, would dampen them as well. I know what you’re thinking, do these issues of transient dampening matter to our players? The answer is clearly yes, deeply, lovingly as our players have a rich appreciation for the fungus’ and spores that define our lives in our world of shared mycology.
Finally, as you can see below, the last of the work on the communication tower is wrapping up this week. There are a few blending issues remaining, but for all intents and purposes the tower is complete. We’ll be adding audio specific to the tower soon. We’ve applied rust, scuffs, and grunge throughout the building to properly age the tower for all the decades it has been left empty. However, we have versions in various stages of disrepair from pristine, to overgrown with vines and completed rusted, for use at some point in the future.
That’s all for now. We’ll be back on Tuesday with some more updates.
