January Update

Posted by Citan on Thursday, January 22, 2015

There was a big game update this week with a lot of complicated behind-the-scenes tech in it, and it didn't explode! Woohoo! Not all the intended features made it into the update, though, including some things I thought made it in, like most of my potion changes. (The patch notes say potions are buffed... but they aren't buffed.) So we'll do another update in a few days with some odds and ends and bug fixes.

The majority of my effort right now, though, is on "all the other stuff" that needs doing besides the in-game features. There are three main prongs:

Steam integration exploration: it's fairly straightforward to integrate a single-player game with Steam. It gets trickier for games that aren't written in C++, but it's still not too bad. But add in the complexities of an MMO and it gets trickier. Nothing insurmountable so far -- Steam has all the tricks and APIs I'll need -- but I'm still figuring out what's possible -- and what's going to be easy versus what will be hard. For instance, for a long time we've talked about doing a $5 monthly fee instead of focusing on a big cash shop monetization approach. Steam actually has a monthly fee system -- can I use it? Will it work like I want it to? Is that the best fit for the game? These sorts of questions take a while to figure out. But it's getting there.

New Launcher/Patcher: I'm also at work on another rewrite of the patcher. This will be the third rewrite, and hopefully third time's a charm. The first version used some built-in Unity engine features that turned out to not be very robust. It crashed a lot. The second (and current) patcher uses open-source libraries that are more robust, but not super efficient or error-resistant. For the next one, I'm writing some very specialized code that's tailored specifically to this game in order to dramatically reduce patch time. (Hopefully!)

I also want to add a bevy of new features, including:

letting players choose an install location

having a "safe mode" option that helps you out if you screw up the in-game settings

a way to let you connect to alternate servers, so we can set up a test server down the road

And more. These sorts of things haven't been a big priority since we're in alpha -- and the original alpha players were the sorts of gamers that were comfortable editing INI files and fiddling with driver settings. But as we get a broader audience playing in the alpha, the launcher needs to become better capable of dealing with weird situations.

The launcher rewrite ties into Steam integration, too -- the launcher will need to work elegantly when launched from Steam, which turns out to be "a non-trivial task" as we programmers like to say.

Better Website Features: the current website is actually fine for alpha, but as we move forward I want it to be a lot more integrated with the game. Some of my early ideas about how to do that haven't panned out very well -- for instance, the idea that accounts on the forums are automagically accounts in-game and vice-versa... seems like a great way to reduce confusion, but it's actually caused confusion too. The problem is the Guest mode in-game: players create a forum account, then they play the game as a Guest instead of logging in with their forum account. And when they want to register their guest account, their preferred forum name is already taken, and they don't know why! So that whole workflow is kinda crappy and fragile.

The website will eventually have lots of other integrated features, too, like being able to see if your friends are logged into the game from the home page of the website, or reading your character's in-game mail, or syncing in-game job boards with the forums. I have lots of ideas for stuff to add! And while I don't plan to code all that stuff now, I need to plan out how everything will work so that everything comes together elegantly down the road.

So that's what's going on! We still don't have any announcements about pricing or so on, because, as mentioned above, I'm still exploring Steam. But expect more news soon.

As for in-game features, what's next? Well, the non-game-related stuff I mentioned above is what I'll be focusing on each day for a month or so, probably. But I can't handle just working on boring launcher code 60 hours a week -: - I need breaks! So I expect there will be more content coming down the pipe during the next month. Stuff like:

Major revamp of Sun Vale -- it needs to be much bigger and more interesting

More skills (Brewing, Crossbow, and Mushroom Box Farming are on the potentially-added-soon list)

More "lore injection" -- we have a ton of lore in the wiki, but until the last update almost none of it's made it into the game!

More stats tweaks -- the last update didn't finish the current round of skill revisions

Bug fixes, GUI tweaks, and so on

These are the sorts of things I can work on for just a few hours at a time. Bigger tasks will be handled later. I know stuff like movement, swimming, and pathing bugs are annoying and need work, but we'll get to them a few months from now when I can focus on them.

QA Help? We could use one or two volunteers to help with our bug database. We have a built-in bug reporting system, but there's been nobody to manage the bugs and track them. Unfortunately I let the ball slip, and so while I still read all the bugs as they come in (to try to catch high-priority ones and fix them immediately), I quickly lose track of things. At this point, there are several thousand bugs in our bug DB, but most of them have already been fixed, or have become irrelevant due to other changes in the game. This makes the bug DB much less useful. Our bug DB is also pretty limited -- it's a ticket system designed for a small number of issues, not full-scale QA of an MMO. We need to migrate these bugs to a traditional bug database.

So here's a request for assistance! We could really use a few people to help us wrangle all this bug data. The job entails a bunch of boring data entry (migrating bugs from our internal tool to a more searchable bug DB), prioritizing bugs (which requires some experience in-game, so that you know the difference in importance between "this rock is floating" and "this NPC sells items for cheaper than their value"), and also testing old bugs to see if they're still relevant. If you have experience with this sort of thing, or if you have lots of patience for boring work, please contact us!

I don't know how we can make that sort of volunteer work worth your while, but maybe we can think of something. If nothing else, you'll be able to push your pet-peeve bugs higher in the priority queue, I guess! :)

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With all that said, please don't stop sending in bugs! I read 'em and fix a few of them almost every day. Recently it seems like people are assuming that major issues they're finding are already reported. Sometimes they are (over a dozen people reported the broken graphics of NPCs before this last update -- thanks!) but many have only one reporter at most, and are in danger of getting missed, or mis-filed, or misunderstood.

As an example, apparently some enemy mushrooms in the myconian dungeon have gone invisible, but I only heard about it yesterday. (If it was reported before that, I missed it!) So please report anything glaring like that. And if you've already reported a non-trivial issue, and it STAYS broken in the next update, please report it again! I try hard to read all bugs and quick-fix any serious ones, but a few slip past me. There's a chance your gentle reminder will actually be the first I've heard of an issue!

Thanks again for playing, and thanks for your feedback! Oh, that's another thing: if you've gotten to level 50 with a skill and could take a minute to post your thoughts about the skill on the forums, that would be really helpful. I've been using spreadsheets to balance skills, as well as automatically-collected game data (like DPS and kill rates). But I don't have nearly enough first-person opinions about how the skills feel, and I can often accidentally take the fun out of something without realizing it!

Okay, back to work with me.