It’s been another busy month here at Tau Station! We’ve reached the point where we can really start seeing how everyone’s work fits together to make our universe come alive. It’s an incredibly exciting and motivating time, and development will continue to speed up from here. We’re getting close to wrapping up the game flow and roadmap work that we continued through January, and are much closer to announcing our Alpha launch date. We’d originally planned that for this status report blog post – but we want to be as accurate and realistic as possible when we share the news with you, so we’re going to hold off a little longer as we finalize things. Information on the Alpha launch will go out through our newsletter before we share it anywhere else, so if you want to be among the first to know make sure to sign up.
In other Tau Station news, Curtis will be attending FOSDEM this weekend to give a talk about our project. He’ll have some great stickers to hand out so keep an eye out for him if you’re there. We were also very pleased to talk with E-Access News about our approach to accessibility, and they just published the interview on their site.
January Work Updates
Gameplay
- Continued Alpha release game flow mapping
- Wrapping up public shuttles work
- Implemented emergency shuttles from Government Centers
- Added item weights and encumbrance effects
- Resolved bugs in the combat system
- Updated combat system with changes to looting and XP gain
- Implemented metric time
- Implemented Employment Center, Career Advisory, and Side Jobs
UI and Art
- Implemented Employment Center, Career Advisory, and Side Jobs designs
- Implemented hyperspace background for the travel screen
- Designed inventory UI
- Implemented first pass at mission dialog UI
- Designed stickers to give out at FOSDEM conference
- More medical item artwork
Frontend and Accessibility
- Improved page speeds
- Improved UX for bribe and priority care actions
- Improvements to mobile and desktop layouts
- Refactored the Gym page to resolve UI bugs
- Fixed UI bugs on Bank page
- CSS improvement
Backend and DevOps
- Added dynamic XP calculator to mission builder
- Improvements to game email templates and system
- Improvements to Forums
- New action system incorporated into mission builder
- Fixed caching bugs
- Created an image uploader
- Additional API work
- Work on Forum and blog moderation
- Performance testing and scalability work
- Selenium testing
Narrative
- High level plot mapping
- Added lore around government affiliations, anti-clone organizations, and more
- Onboarded two new narrative designers
- 6 more missions written
- Career Tasks
Planned for February
- Finalize roadmap to Alpha launch
- Send out first Tau Station newsletter and announce Alpha launch dates
- Begin work on instanced NPCs
- Begin integrating combat into mission builder
- 12 more missions written and ready for testing
- Continue plot mapping
- Migrate current missions, descriptions, and jobs from narrative server to dev server
- Finish University design
- Implement Inventory
- Finish public shuttles
- Employment Center, Career Advisory, and Side Jobs improvements
- Implementation of mission dialogues
- Art for NPCs