We didn’t spend the entire holiday grilling food and shooting off fireworks. We did a lot of work too. Here’s what we were up to.
We did a lot of work on our alert system and its ui. This got us talking about our communication goals in the game. We broke down player states into 4 types: Offline, Idle, Participating, and Playing. Our goal is to not only have things you can do in the game when you’re not actively playing, but to have a communication system that serves users in all states. Whether you’re just chatting with members of your house, waiting for your friends to login, or (and this is a big theoretical at this point) operating some defensive system while carpooling to work, we want you to be able to choose through a list of available channels and talk with a click of a button.
We did some work on friends lists and discussed the importance of hooking up privacy settings. Nobody likes being bothered by some random person who bandaged your character at some point and has boundary issues. Having working privacy settings will help those especially needy to move on and bandage other people.
We talked about the need for click tracking and a heat map to help us see what navigation users seem to like or use the most. We always appreciate feedback but understand not everyone feels like telling us that they like or hate something we’ve done.
San did a bunch of patcher/launcher work. Loading the game has never been faster. We continued working on our game tutorial and did some more environmental work. We’ve made some updates to how we display our 3D models that you have to see and began some audio work. Soon the forest will be filled with better sounding birds and our Kükenroot will finally sound like a proper Kükenroot. We even did some work on respawning. We were getting tired of having to restart every time we died and figured you would too. Soon the time between falling off the radio tower and being able to climb back up, to jump again, will be greatly reduced.
