Originally posted here.
We’re off to EGX
Tomorrow is the big day for the SIG team – EGX 2016! The UK’s biggest gaming event!
If you’re attending come and visit us in the Rezzed zone on the Greenman Gaming stand.
If you're attending on the Thursday make sure to catch our talk live on the Rezzed sessions stage at 13.30 on the topic of Surviving survival: building a community in Early Access :
Steam Early access is overstocked with survival games, but Small Impact Studios launched into it anyway – and The Black Death has built a player base as it approaches release. Small Impact’s Cameron Small, Mitch Small, James Rowbotham and Pete Harries discuss the double edged sword of early access, speaking to a community formed around an un-finished game, world building versus procedural generation, environmental storytelling in a multiplayer setting and planning towards shipping a finished game.
So what are the SIG team excited about at the EGX?
Emily: As this is my first gaming event I am very excited to be attending this years EGX! I cannot wait to see The Black Death on the show floor, I am looking forward to seeing players reactions to the new classes especially the Knight as I know this is going to be my new favourite to play.
Jon: I’m looking forward to seeing people explore the new areas of the game and seeing what they think of them, how they react to some of the new places we’ve been building. I really want to check out Dishonored 2 as well!
Cam: meeting fellow survival fans and showing them the black death and queuing for dawn of war 3 with my fellow space marines!
Pete: For me, it’s seeing people’s reactions to the new professions, I’ve always loved the idea of playing a Knight or an Outlaw in the Black Death. I love how they are directly opposed to each other and how the skills of each profession represent the opposition between them. I think in an open world survival game setting this will lead to some really interesting situations for players! I just can’t make up my mind which to play first…
James: I’m looking forward to checking out the new indie games!
Luc: I’m excited to hear the talk with the dishonored 2 art director Sebastien Mitton. Oh and I’m actually pretty excited about the toy stalls. See if I can find some sweet figures!
Community Questions
As part of our dev blog we’re going to grab a bunch of questions from our community (thank you to our community mods for organizing this!) and get you some answers! Every week! How about that!?
Without further ado, let’s get into it!
Steam community: “How much work is actually needed to fix certain bugs/how big is your dev team? For example, fixing storage in houses; is it a simple thing to fix, do you need hours, days, months for things like that?”
SIG: It totally depends on the bug itself. A floating bush can be very quick to fix but sometimes very difficult to actually locate! The example you give of the storage in house – I take this means the fact that storage can be stolen by players server hoping – is more difficult. Firstly there’s multiple ways to fix this issue, for example implementing a system that moves any character that spawns in a house to the outside world. However, we chose to modify our server code as part of a wider update that will introduce multiple new features and tools (see more in our last dev blog). This meant that the workload was substantial, it hinged mainly on programming it did touch on other areas of the game such as UI, because of this it has taken weeks to address. As any big system or feature update there’s a whole bunch of unforeseen issues that can crop up on top of the base work.
Our team is currently 7 strong! With everyone dipping into various areas of the game but a core of 5 people whose primary responsibilities are development, the other 2 people are myself (Pete) and Emily who’s main responsibilities are production, QA and Community focused.
Steam community: “Hai! Are you gonna make the farming really immersive (?): i.e. s***loads of stuff to plant, different ‘crop ready’ times, crops require watering, weeding, crops require intricate fertilizing, etc.- generally simulating the medieval farming process as closely as possible.”
SIG: Hai 2u! Expanding on the farming system is something we definitely want to do. Its a core part of playing the peasant class and lets players play the game it a totally different type of way. More crops and crop ready times are something we are already working on implementing. Watering, weeding and fertilizing are definitely cool ideas!
Steam community: “Do you have any plans for new classes that haven’t been announced?”
SIG: Yes we do 😉
Steam community: “Will it be a dynamic, changing world in the future (events) when the game is released?”
SIG: There are already dynamic events! Currently there are only a few in game but we definitely plan on adding much more. Look out for a hunter who will sell you pelts!
Steam community: “Is the Bug submission link on the main menu the correct way to submit bugs? I have submitted several bugs with no confirmation of receipt OR follow-up. I’ve seen the comment that the devs are normally quick to respond, but I submitted the first bug like 2 or more weeks ago. Am I doing something incorrectly? Is the link on the main menu not working?”
SIG: The community have been excellent with bug submissions, we’ve have thousands since launch! Unfortunately because of this we can’t individually respond to each submission 🙁
As we collect these bug submission forms Emily painstakingly collates them together and filters out any issues we’re already aware of and any duplicates. Once this is done we add them to our bug tracking database – which you can view here! Once the issue is there we can steadily work through what we have to do. I hope that helps clarify the issue!
Survey for players
We’re doing a survey! We want to know all sorts of bits and pieces about your time with The Black Death! It’s only short, so won’t take very long at all and will help us out a HUGE amount! Link below:
Click here to take the survey!
Super charging the Dev Blog
I wanted to add this as a final note on the current state of the dev blog. We’re a bit light on juicy in game details in this particular post but fear not! As we go on I will be gathering tasty bits of info from the team, stealing screenshots from their PCs and generally annoying them until they give me content for the blog so keep an eye on this space – lots of cool content coming!
Until next week!
/Pete
/Emily