Greetings citizens of Mercia and welcome to Dev Blog #49!
We’ve got A Community requested features teaser, our new Discord Server and “Founders Channel”, our Weekly Q&A and an extension on our Feedback Survey.
Let’s get right into things!
Requested Features Teaser
We have been working on your Community requests as well as polishing our current systems and mechanics. Without spoiling too much we have been working on the Chat system, World Map features and also a rework to our Female characters.
We heard your requests for a change to our Chat system, as there is a lot plugged into this behind the scenes it is a big one to make changes too! As you can see there is a “General” tab, we hope to add more of these for Regions and even Whispers to other Players in the future. The 0 and 9 will act as key bindings to switch between channels.
Here is a cheeky preview of our reworked World Map of Mercia! You may notice a new addition to the map in the form of “Most powerful Lords”. This new feature will be unique to each Server and will show the top Players taking into account your acquired Gold and land ownership. We have still kept elements such as the Regional zone outlines, roads and rivers too, and the catacomb raid areas also now have more prominent name areas.
We feel the overall look of the new World Map is more akin to the days of old with its worn parchment effects and terrain markings for mountainous areas. Player owned houses will also appear on the World Map! These will be shown with the Players name and a red glow and house icon at the location of the House. Your own owned houses will appear with a white glow behind them too.
Following on from our previous Dev Blog here are some of the new Female character combos showing off the new hair, head and clothes. We will let the screenshots do the talking for this one!
The New Official Black Death Discord
We are proud to announce our new Official Black Death Discord!
Join the ranks today! Join The Official Black Death Discord
We welcome you all to join us and bring your friends along to our new Discord Server. We’ve been getting this ready for you all! We have the usual channels as well as Server specific channels for meet-ups and events. The new Discord has rules, ranks and lots of channels, these channels should appeal to current players and new ones too with a Help channel and also a Meet-ups channel which we will be utilizing for future Community events.
If you’re still on the older Community Discord, come join us on the official one as well, we can set up private server channels with specific permissions and far more controls for your groups/guilds.
- Rich Presence Integration -
We have integrated Discords “Rich Presence System” into The Black Death, this is up and running now. We hope to integrate more Developer API tools into our Discord in the future.
More info on that here: Discord: Introducing Rich Presence
This will allow Players to see each others profiles with a live feed of days survived, how much Gold you have and more! Eventually you will be able to invite each other into a gaming session when playing The Black Death, all through our Discord! We are currently tidying this up behind the scenes.
With the introduction of the Rich Presence integration this will help us to use more of Discord’s Developer features in the future and also get Verified too.
- Founders Channel -
As always we would like to give a massive thank you to our Community and everyone who has supported us, whether that was before our launch into Early Access back in April or if you have joined us recently. Your support and time means a lot to us all here at Small Impact Games. We say it a lot, but we really do appreciate your activity on our forums, reading our Dev Blogs, joining us for in game events and for your time reporting bugs and issues to us through our Google Form. We do our best to reply to all your emails and reports too, the more information we get the more we can feed this back into what we do.
As a token of our thanks we would like to give Players the opportunity to receive an in game Golden name, if you fall into one of these categories type your Steam ID into the Founder's Channel and we'll do the rest!
- Are a long standing member of the Community
- Have been helpful to other Community members and shown kindness
- Have submitted Bug Reports to us through our Google Form or by Email
The deadline for submissions is the 15th December 2017 at 6pm GMT .
Your Steam ID should look something like this, unless you have not set a custom URL, then it wil be displayed as numbers.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/SIG_Emily/
http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198318030488/
We will be verifying all Community members to check your status on the above categories. We will be flagging your SteamID's in a future update and these will be included in our Patch Notes.
Join The Official Black Death Discord
Weekly Q&A
Here’s this week's Q&A!
Despite the many many many complaints about the server hosts you all use, and even your own blaming them when things go wrong, why haven't you taken steps to move to a new company instead of giving them free advertising in the game and attempting to steer players to their company for hosting services?
We never would place the server hosts as the cause of our problems, they provide great services for hosting, problems that we encounter with servers are usually shortcomings of making a multiplayer game on such a large scale with a small budget. This is something that has become a lot more stable over time and would be a shame to throw that progress away for another provider. We are extremely grateful for how understanding the community is when it comes to issues of lost progression and network performance but it's always at the top of our list when those problem arise.
How many different housing systems can we expect before you settle on one to keep?
I feel this is the strongest version yet and will be the one to build upon, the main reason for the latest version is how expandable it is including the kingdom variations that are currently in and are coming in the near future. So you will no longer have to worry about another completely different housing system but instead look forward to new content being added to the current one.
Currently if being raided you cannot get out of your house without opening a door to expose yourself, maybe a second floor balcony/ archer tower?
Great suggestion! We are currently developing additional tiers to build including the possibility of second story windows and more exits to use to avoid bottlenecks when it comes to defending your home! Also we are implementing the ability to build and hire archers within towers.
Is there any chance we may also see burned down villages be cleansable, and built up by all the players to restore new towns?
This is something we want to include within the kingdom system, large areas that are dilapidated and abandoned in which players can purchase, build up and repair to improve the world itself for themselves and other players!
Feedback Survey - Extended
We said we would be closing our feedback survey today at 6pm, however we have made the decision to extend this for a further 2 weeks. If you have not filled this out we would really like to hear your thoughts, if you already have, thank you!. Your feedback is important to us and will help us to shape the future of The Black Death and what we do here at SIG.
As a reminder from Dev Blog #47, this feedback will be gathered up by Dmitri & myself and will be sent over to the team in a report. Your responses will be fed back into what we do here at SIG. There are a total of 7 questions for you to answer and the form will be open until the 13th December 2017 at 6 pm GMT.
The Black Death Community Feedback Survey
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
See you in Mercia.
// The SIG Team