The first full week of Sprint 15 found the team mostly doing what we did last week: fixing bugs, making little improvements and gathering feedback from our Friends and Family release. As expected, we got a lot of valuable information from letting people play through the tutorial, expose bugs, and find out what systems needed some polishing. One of the biggest problem we ran into was players getting stuck in the environment. We’re addressing those problems currently and adding a way to restart quests if you happen to get stuck during the middle of one. Most of the issues were minor ones however. As you can see below, we had some problems with campfires obscuring the inventory screen and occasionally the game would attempt to quick-bury a player upon death.
The homepage got a major facelift. There are a number of scrolling slides there now that do a better job of explaining the game, certain aspects of game play that we want to focus on, and some updated pictures. We’re working on an Admin console to make things easier for us to do, and continued our ecommerce work. We’re almost done with our shopping cart. It can now accept multiple items, both real and the in-game variety, and are starting to integrate merch vendor and fulfillment service API’s.
We made some styling improvements and fixed a few minor bugs like a scrolling issue on the front page cards. We discussed adding a timeline view to the stories on the front page to make the narrative easier to follow beginning to end. Right now you can click on a tag to see stories related by topic or even by game character, but they aren’t in chronological order. It can get a bit confusing unless you’re a fan of movies with an abundance of flashback scenes.
During our merchandise discussion we jumped down the custom topographical map rabbit hole. As one will. We looked at a lot of different options and explored the limits of what is available. This got us talking about what it would take to have a cloud based minimap service in the game.
The team continued work on our crafting system. From the feedback we got, many players found the “quality” bar under an item confusing or cluttering, so we removed it and made quality a number. We moved a player’s paperdoll away from the crafting screen to make things more streamlined as well. We’re adding a quick crafting menu for small items like bandages and we talked some more about a quick menu for weapons and equipment. The Diablo quickbar was mentioned more times than one would think possible. Jesse continued work on some new wireframes for crafting and inventory screens.
The tech team is working on the attachment system so bayonets and scopes could soon be a reality, and my dream of a tiki torch tactical light might finally come true. They are also making progress on an armor system to take a bit of the sting out of bullets, tools for crafting so you won’t have to punch rocks to harvest minerals, and refinements to our quest system. We’ll have working elevators soon, so players who don’t know or have access to the teleportation command can visit the top of the communications tower, as well as other tall structures. We began the move to UE4.17 and will be upgrading TrueSKY soon.
San has been focusing much of his time on player persistence and character life cycles this week. We talked about filling in the backend with everything you’d need: character name, alive/dead, where you are, etc. We discussed what things we might be able to do in the future once we have a good system in place for tracking player position/orientation. Finally, we talked about the different phases of a character and leveling up. It’s important to create chokepoints for characters at certain levels and common places of interest to encourage players to move around. Nothing is worse in a multiplayer game than having a place that is constantly crowded and farmed out or a bunch of lootable items that don’t serve a purpose at some point.
That’s it for now. With most of our bug hit list finished, we should have some new art to show you next week, including Comm Tower and village improvements, as well as the usual overview of what we’ve done.
