Clocks have been rewound once again in Europe and days gotten shorter, but even in the dark season, the moon is here to cast its light upon us and guide our way. While the whole path might not be visible, the next few steps are always clear and can be approached with confidence. I don't know where I'm going with this, let's just hear what's been happening at Eat Create Sleep this week:

Community

The month of the Community Module has started! Launching a big update is always exciting but right now feels a bit like the calm before the storm; where we're preparing our ships and make sure to have enough food on board. In that regard, we''re going to work together with the local university next week and have a QA day, where a few hundred students will try to find as many bugs as possible.

Art

Martin I've been spending this week with blocking out the different scenes I have for the trailer, thankfully I share the burden with Emma, would've been a lot of work to do all of the 19 scenes alone!
Emma After two days being home sick, I came back and started working on the new trailer for the Community Module. We are starting out with just blocking out each scene, to get a general feel of how it will look like and if something needs to be changed. After that, the polish starts; removing placeholders and starting the animation work.

Code

Johannes This week I did a tiny bit of progress on improving the island generation, namely, I implemented a random function that can be assigned a bias towards certain values. I've also started implementing Unity Analytics in the game. This will help us with QA and balancing. Lastly, with the help of Jens and Emelie, I found the root cause of a major bug that's been haunting us. Johannes W This week has mostly been about the new ending screen and generating stories, kind of like the previous week for me. Sentences in each story are now selected by the rate of events that had happened in the game, for example how often alliances between cities occured, the number of commandments the player made per hour, how many advices from the advisors that where followed, and more. We want the stories to tell the things that stuck out the most in the game. Our designer Emelie will decide what the normal number of events are per hour for each event that the story needs. These numbers are then used to calculate the rate of which the event occurs. We will also have this page in the main menu, called the "Graveyard", where the player can see all the previous games and re-read the stories in the ending screen. This is the last step for this feature. I began working on it this week and I want to be finished with it the next week! Tomas I have made it so that certain tasks require targets. Tasks such as cannibalism, killing followers, and hunting animals should now work more like one would expect when writing commandments. I have also finalized the solution for making followers with high faith unable to perform actions that the player tells them not to do. For example, if the player writes "... don't fish for food.", followers with high faith will not only deprioritize that task, but they will be forbidden from doing it. With those tasks complete I have begun working on the new tutorial. The first step has been starting to create a tutorial message window. I will continue with creating the basic functionality of the new tutorial next week. Be advised! The tutorial window art is placeholder.
Jens A lot of progress was made on the disposition system. We clarified the design goals at the start of the week and I have begun implementing it. These changes will hopefully give a better view of the relationships between cities as the system now tracks current direction of the relationship and what exactly is affecting it. It also keeps track of the complete history of the relationship. The affecting events are for the most part tied to faith and doctrine such as commandment interpretations and associations. Other areas concern in-game actions such as sending priests to convert, or other followers intruding on a cities border, as well as alliances and war.

Design

Emelie This week started with a discussion between me, Johannes and Jens regarding the disposition system. How we want it to work and everything that comes with it such as trade, war and alliance. Previously the system has been overly complicated so we talked about scaling it down a bit so we have the bare minimum which will make it easier to add more values and easier to balance. I've also worked on the new faith system, not much has changed design-wise but I needed to write it all down so I could wrap my head around it and see if there was any system that needed to be changed as well.

Production

Marcus This week I've been organizing the open QA session that we will hold at the local university next week. I've also been playtesting our latest developer build quite a bit to see what we have accidentally broken. _____________________________________________________________ Have a nice weekend!

[ 2017-11-03 14:41:07 CET ] [ Original post ]