As the week comes to an end, the team remains focused on the upgrade to UE 4.20.2, and is making good progress. We’re also upgrading trueSky, to fix some lingering fog and cloud issues, and moving all of our audio over to the latest version of Wwise. With all these different updates and upgrades, Terry and crew have been busy putting out fires as they appear, and working on documentation. In the midst of this flurry of updates, upgrades, and documenting, we briefly discussed server stress testing down the road, once everything is stable.
While the web team worked on fixing a few bugs that popped up with the new front page navigation, we talked a bit about some marketing ideas and options. We discussed a number of possible contests and giveaways for players in the closed beta, and further along in the game’s development. We’re putting together some videos, making sure we capture the best of game play, as well as the stuff that didn’t go so well, which to be honest, can be a lot of fun to watch.
We’re collecting feedback on all areas of the website: the account creation process, purchasing items and packages, as well as joining a House, from people who haven’t seen the website before. We’re hoping the fresh eyes will be able to spot areas of improvement and anything that is too confusing, that we’ve overlooked. So far it’s really paid off, and we’ve started a list of refinements to make all areas easier to use and more intuitive.
We also made some improvements to our “Points of Interest” map to make it a better design tool. Containing all the places and structures mentioned in the game stories, and a few other surprises, the POI map serves as an aspirational guide for building out areas, and the placement of buildings. We’ve added a few new layers to represent areas the art team have already finished, the places that are playable in the game currently, and different “loot zones”.
Distributing items and gear across the map in a way that makes sense, our loot zones provide players a dependable area to look for certain items they need for crafting or completing a quest. For instance, a player looking for shark teeth should check beach areas, and someone in need of some food or refreshing Manimal will have the best luck searching one of the many ruined neighborhoods. We talked about some refinements we could make to the system as it currently stands, and how best to adjust it in the future.
We also spent some time discussing crafting. With only a few minor issues remaining, like working on the ui for splitting stacks of items in your inventory, our first pass at the crafting system is just about done. We talked about new recipes and creating a tiered model for resources with items like smelters, various types of machines, and lab equipment. We have quite a few decisions to make for the next iteration, but we’re off to a good start.
Lastly, performance improvements continue on the Municipal Veil Station. The future social hub of the game is a huge building that the art team is busy making material improvements to, for better performance. At the same time, we’re marking up the outside to show the toll time and the fracture have taken. Below you can see some prefracture and postfracture shots.
