Hello again, This week we’ve enjoyed having a shorter week since we’ve had the ‘Swedish National Day’, a bank holiday here, which is nice, but have also kept us more busy here at the office the other days keeping up with internal deadlines. Our last post, the first in our developer blog series, has given us a lot of good feedback and ideas from the community and almost all of these have been implemented or is on the roadmap for the future. Below I’ll go into a bit more details about what these are and a little how we’ve reasoned when taking our decisions on how to proceed from here. Please note that even though we may go into specifics in features, nothing is set in stone, we might still decide to rework or completely eliminate some of these. #1 Manager Mode vs Career Mode As we’ve mentioned earlier, we’re trying to create a path where advocates for both sides will have an enjoyable gaming experience. Personally I’ve always leaned more towards the manager mode as I feel it provides a much deeper and larger game play focusing on the whole team instead of just one individual. But at the same time, a group has to be build on individuals if you want it to feel authentic and dynamic. Therefore we’ve put a lot of effort into making every character drafted to your team, and to some extent your organization, equally as important. We want you to become emotionally invested in them, how they feel, what they need, all the way from noobs to highest ranking professionals. We also want you to be emotionally invested in the team itself, with it’s development, selling and trading players, working for the collective success of the organization. So instead of separating the game into two game modes as it was before, we’ve merged them both to fit in the same one, making it richer and more enjoyable to play for all. #2 FPS vs MOBA This time around, we’ve made sure to build the game more modular and scalable than it ever had the chance of becoming before. But we can’t do it all at once, so we’ve had to pick somewhere to start. Without going into too much detail (we’ll show you how it looks and feel soon) we can tell you that we’ve primarily been focusing on the FPS part of the game. But instead of making a 'Counter-Strike simulator', we are trying to create something more original, something we feel confident you will both find entertaining, challenging and a joy to play. How are you going to play this in game game? The short answer is there’s going to be three ways of doing it: either you just simulate the game getting a quick result, or you watch the game being played ot for you letting the AI play the game from some kind of instructions you’ve given it starting off or you manage the game play by play until the match is over. As we can’t do everything at once we’ve had to prioritize between these as well so all game modes may not be present as we make the first alpha release. Still, I can’t wait to show you glimpses of this :) By building this smart with the basic rule that everything should be expandable, other game modes, by your request, won’t be hard to create and implement from a back end, programming, point of view. But we also want each game, or genre, to feel, look and sound unique, therefore we’re focusing on one at the time, and it happened to be FPS this time around. #3 Staff To be a successful pro gamer you need to be able to dedicate as much time as possible on gaming. Therefore it’s crucial to be able to hire support staff to help you do this. I mean, there’s no point in having a pro gamer cleaning the bathroom if they could be gaming :) We have a long list of professions we want to add, we haven’t quite settled on which one will end up in the game just yet, so I’ll leave it at that for now. But staff, as every NPC in the game, will have different skills and skill level, so you may for instance hire a one star maid or a five star maid, costs will vary depending on which as will the quality of the work they’re doing, #4 Sponsors Again, we don’t want to get into the itty bitty details of these things just yet, and this is a whole blog post in itself, but sponsors will be a part in how you manage your team. They will affect how much money you earn and make demands for you to fulfill if you don’t want to loose them again. Some deals will just give an extra income, and some will bring things like more fans or fame to the team. You may also get access to items locked for you otherwise or making them free instead of costing you a large chunk of your savings. But, as mentioned, sponsors also have demands, and if you don’t perform as agreed they will drop you making it harder for you to find a new one as your reputation will drop at the same time. These are just a few of the questions you guys have asked, and I’ll continue to answer a few each week in these posts. I’ll try to get to them all over time, but 4-5 in each post feels like a good amount to start with. Focus will be on the things we’re most sure of will end up in the game at some stage of development. With each day we draw closer and closer to the revealing of our first alpha build, to be tested in a closed group, and we’re looking forward to the additional feedback that will give us as we continue with the development. As always, a huge thank you for sticking with us, know that we all appreciate it. And know that we’re making great progress each and every day. Until next time! /Eyoel