It’s hard to believe that the end of the year is just around the corner! Work continues at steady pace here at Tau Station as we head into the final weeks of 2016.
We’ve been reviewing our gameplay over the last two months, and have come up with some additional features around Orwellian levels and resource scarcity that will bring a lot of richness to the universe. More features mean more work time is needed for implementation, though, which isn’t reflected in our current roadmap. So we’re calling a feature freeze in December, and from there we’ll reevaluate all our current and proposed gameplay elements to decide which ones we feel are critical to have in place for Alpha testing. Then we’ll estimate the workload and timeline to create a revised, final roadmap to Alpha launch.
More to come on that next month. This is what we’ve been working on in the meantime….
November Work Updates
Gameplay
- Genotypes system tested and implemented
- Began work on public shuttle schedules
- Improvements made to the reputation system
- Enhancements to the leaderboards
- Enhancements to the Sickbay and Gym
- More work on inventory
UI and Art
- Career and Temp Jobs page designs
- Mission dialogue UI design
- Inventory design
- New background art for the Gym and space stations, additional background art for ruins
Frontend and Accessibility
- Worked on the Starmap display for navigation with and without JavaScript
- Navigation improvement
- Created rooms in areas
- Room Tutorials
Backend
- Chat and contact list management rebuilt up on the game API
- Dynamic XP calculation for the mission builder is written and ready to test
- Ongoing work to integrate combat system into the mission builder
- Additional Mission Builder improvements to preconditions, action settings, user interface
- Worked on player bots for advanced testing
- Ongoing work to build up our infrastructure so that we can add server capacity in a rapid and consistent manner
- Improved backup options
Narrative
- 8 missions written and ready to test, 3 more in progress
- Temp jobs for Alpha nearly finished
- First draft of university courses for careers done
Planned for December
- Welcome our new narrative designer, Will, to the team!
- Implement Career and Temp Jobs pages
- Scalable action cost/difficulty code enhancement for the mission builder
- Begin UI work on item inventory and storage system
- 9 more missions written and ready for testing
- Begin large scale plot mapping for the narrative team
- Career tasks for all career paths
- Finalize university courses for careers and implement related skills
- Favor point redemption framework for careers
- Finish improved leader boards
- Implement metric time