Just jumping in quickly to say that this weekend will be the AVAIL public beta/preview weekend. We need to get some attendance up so we can break the game before the final touches on the expansion are made.
Avail pack post from Eskil via GL.
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Hi!
I have been slogging away at the Avail expansion, and I'm coming up to a crucial junction of the development. The player tracking and upgrade system is about to be done, and it includes new interfaces, a lot of back end tracking, and some new interaction.
The main thing that is left is that all tokens, that now can be upgraded has to be tweaked so that they actually work differently if they are updated or not. This will mean that the number of flavors of tokens you can get will sky rocket, but it also means that some old tokens will go away and some new one will appear. Pretty much all upgradable tokes will in one way or another change.
So far, all the new things have been added to the same code base used to build the clients and servers that are out now. All I do is to just turn off some of the new things so that you cant see them. Even though you cant access them, that turns out to be useful, because having them run in the background lets me make sure they are working.
If I'm going to add and change all t tokens, its a big hassle to keep all the old stuff, and make sure that it works at the same time as I'm adding all the new stuff, so soon I'm going to branch the project and have a separate AVAIL code base where i can rip out all the old stuff. That means its going to be a bigger hassle to make fixes, but hopefully it wont be for too long.
Before i do all that, I do however want to test all the basic systems, so next weekend i will run a AVAIL preview weekend where you can get a chance to try out SOME of the new mechanics that will be coming in AVAIL. Hopefully i will be able to squash some bugs, and you get the chance to influence the design a little bit by giving me feedback.
I am still figuring out how exactly to run a game like this alone, so I'm trying stuff out. I enjoy making updates often, but on the other hand people usually take more note when something significant is released. Sometimes you can code something really cool and significant very fast (like the content export stuff i released earlier on the week) but sometimes you can work for days on under-the-hood stuff like networking, graphics optimizations, or stats tracking, without having much to show for it. I'm fairly sure that AVAIL is going to be worth the wait, and I hope Ill be able to keep doling out some goodies on the way.
Cheers
E
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