Posts Tagged ‘State of the Game’

State of the Game (April 27th, 2009)

Monday, April 27th, 2009

I haven’t done one of these for about three months, so figured I should outline roughly where things are headed.

First off, we’ve grown into a pretty healthy user base and people seem to be enjoying themselves, which is definitely the important part. The server hasn’t started slowing down, that I’m aware of, or costing an arm and a leg. And we topped over 1000 encounters and 500 items in the database recently, which makes me smile.

Have three short term things that I’d like to clear up before the Survivor’s Quest:

  • Adding the rudiments of in-game networking, including interacting with the Auction House/Mall. This means item trading and starting to apply requirements on newer items.
  • Add another layer of PvP rewards. This means more vigilante encounters, more uses for old coins, and more hideout options mostly.
  • A revamp of the University Quest. Basically, the ganger route is going to have some more content added to it so it’s more equal in length to the normal route. Also, cash rewards from selling Eclipse will be scaled back \to be more in line with the street price of Eclipse for (a couple credits a tablet).

The Survivors quest is a the next leg in the main quest line. It’s a chance to really dig into the existing characters and areas, I’m looking forward to it.

When the Survivors quest goes in, I’m going to be handing out the first wave of Beta Reset awards, then changing the rules a bit (it’ll be a surprise). That’s a change from what I said earlier, but you should still have quite a bit of time to speed run in the current environment if you’d like.

After the Survivors quest I’m going to go through another batch of sidequests, small content improvements, and interface stuff like I’m doing right now. This is where the Asylum gets reopened post Dr. Amundsen.

Once we get that nice polish again, the OldTown quest is next. Might change the rules on the Beta Reset contest again, might not, but I’m thinking I’ll hand out another batch of prizes after each main quest line chunk.

Cheers!
Kinak

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Posted in State of the Game

Contacts Revamp

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

I just rewrote a lot of the code on the back end for how Contacts work. So, from a testing perspective, just make sure they’re not doing anything weird.

If you’re curious what I did, I added another level of control so it also dynamically decides which choices are displayed (in addition to choosing which conversation you get and how it responds to your choices). I could do it before, but it was a gigantic pain, so this’ll make it way easier for me to put in relevant dialog options.

I’ll probably be going through over the weekend and creating some new dialog in places I wanted to before. And probably also apply similar code to the choice adventures.

Just as a general status update, after I’m done with fiddly stuff, I’ll be doing all the content that I wanted to do before the Survivors quest. Two side quests (one small, one big), some crafting and related things, some PvP additions, and the groundwork for Net access (including a trading system). I’ll keep everyone posted as we’re ready to roll each bit out.

Cheers!
Kinak

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Posted in Updates

State of the Game (January 15th)

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Just wanted to give everyone an update about where the game is and where it’s going, since it’s been a while.

What I’m up to:

  • Getting Gang Warfare (PvP) in is my first priority. It’s basically all in except half the rewards, but I’d obviously like to get those in. I’ll put out a full post explaining it when it goes in, because there’s a fair bit too it.
  • Next up is a pair of side quests. One is the scavenging quest I’ve mentioned before as a way of turning unneeded equipment into crafting ingredients and the other is a larger side quest on the order of the Ghoul quest.
  • Then we get the Survivors Quest. It’s the next step in the main quest after the Slags and branches pretty notably based on who, well, made it out alive from the University quest. People dying isn’t bad, I’ll note, just different. Hacking will get slipped in here along certain branches.
  • There’ll probably be some more side quests here, including the follow-up in the buried asylum.
  • After that, the Old Town quest will be coming in, which carries the choices from the Survivors Quest forward. Cybernetics will probably slot in during this.

There will be some more crafting sprinkling in there as well. On the long front, the chat pane will start doing something with Gang Warfare and will be slowly expanded into actual chat functions as needs demand it.

Cheers!
Kinak

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Posted in State of the Game