Hello Everyone,
We've had some kind of major issue that occured during Friday's patch, and I was waiting to do a post about it until everything uploaded alright. Looks like there was a big problem and many of the games features broke, so we'll be addressing that today. Once that's been addressed, I'll make another announcement. You may get a series of patches throughout the day, so don't jump in until I make another announcement. More than likely early Tuesday or Wednesday we'll have that all sorted out, there was just so very much content that went into this patch it was likely something would break.
I'll let you all know as soon as it's sorted!
-EDIT:
Actually what I'm going to do is do the patch notes and dev blog below this sentence and delete the above when it's rectified.
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Dev Blog 12/21/2015
Animals, Items + Crafting, Persistence (Player, Unit, Structure, Inventory) and even Dynamic Infinite Terrain made it in this patch! Unfortunately, we experienced some major issues on Friday with the patch and it's been wicked weird all weekend. I've done some problem solving with it and I think I have some ideas myself, but ultimately it comes down to Jack tinkering with it to see what happened. This week has made leaps and bounds of progress, we really have most of the fundamentals down which will allow us to expand incredibly. Below, I'll give a brief description along with the major modules that have been in the works for the last couple of weeks.
-Animals.
-Items + Crafting.
-Persistence.
-Dynamic Infinite Terrain.
-Data
-This/Next week.
-Future.
Animals: We haven't had the budget or the sales to make our own, so these were outsourced some time ago; totaling 30+ animal variations across the entire spectrum. Each of the tiles of terrain are broken down into roughly 600mx600m chunks, with 156 of each variant on these tiles. So essentially we'll have a huuuuuuge quantity of wildlife all over the place. I'm not sure what other games come close to that number, but at 40-60fps that's pretty great.
Items + Crafting: Due to an obnoxious problem on Thursday and Friday, Allen is still costing us money. He tinkered around with the save/prefab settings that saves into Unity, even when you delete/redownload components and the entire animal system had to be reconfigured, organized, and arranged properly. Items and crafting are largely in, but there is some items left to do pertaining to them due to the setback. This week should have that addressed, so until then you'll see a crafting tab but it's not working.
Persistence: This is huge, we have the whole spectrum persistent minus minor things that don't interrupt gameplay; once we have the time, we'll make the entire board persistent. Your units, your inventory, your future ABD Coins & Non-Lootable inventory, your structures, most of the terrain, everything is persistent.
Dynamic Infinite Terrain: We took a large portion of the former area and made it seamless, then arranged it in a way that would be largely difficult to notice differences if you intend on traveling enormous distances. Essentially, you can walk (with supplies of course) for weeks, months, or years, build a structure, and that structure is persistent as well as reachable by other players. I'm really not certain if we are the first MMO with persistent, infinite terrain, but this should allow for people to spread their wings out from the spawn area and generate some truly unique data.
Data: I am going to be very vague with this, but we have a lot of plans pertaining to data tracking and it should really prove to be something wild. Our website is garbage right now, I was mostly focusing on game development rather than PR so I went with wix. In the near future, we will have a new website, pertaining to said data among other things, which should prove to be remarkably impressive.
This/Next Week: ALL of the above items have had presidence over the holiday, I'd rather gameplay functionality make it in even over my own personal wishes for epic holiday madness. Christmas is my favorite holiday overall, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa coming in as a close second and third. I'm certain next year will be better for us, we'll have more staff and be expanding with sales over the next few months to ensure we never miss another holiday again. We can probably make everything snowy and white for the holiday, but again, we've had some issues this last week that take presidence over making a bigger headache for Jack last minute.
Future: We are desperately close to checking off the final boxes on our editors, modifiers, modules and nodes. There really isn't a whole lot left before we refine/fine-tune/polish the game, to a point where we can litterally just let our scripts interpret new items and stats then push to live branch. What does that mean? We are close to tiers, after we do initial polishing we will begin working on tier progression.
It's too bad we had a break this week, Boris and I were going to capture footage for new gameplay video over the weekend and do a promotion on Steam. Anyway, this should get sorted out earlier on in the week, and we'll still be able to gather a trailer. I've got some work to do on Steamworks revising the game manual, but there are certain steps that need to be taken first before I go ahead and do that. I'll be removing the game manuals because they're outdated, both UI and functionality wise.
This is a long post and I'll wrap it up. Long story long, this has been an amazing week! I can't wait to see your reactions when this gets taken care of, we are so close!
-Robert Bonner
Creative Producer - ABD: A Beautiful Day
G.A.M. Entertainment, LLC.
www.GagAMaggotEnt.com
Twitter: www.twitter.com/gam_ent
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