Dev Blog: August 28, 2018

[srand]

Works in Progress, or, The Summer Doldrums

Hi, I’m srand, Citan's partner and more-or-less second in command. Citan is unavailable at the moment (although I think I hear muffled curses coming from his subterranean lair), so I'll be delivering the dev blog today.

In previous dev blogs, we've talked about our iterative style of development. During alpha and beta our goal has been to get something out the door every two to four weeks. But it's been twice that twice that since the last update, and we're still a week or two away from the next one. So what's going on? Is the game dead? Is Citan dead?

Nah, it's nothing like that. (See my note above about the muffled curses.) But the pace of development has slowed down this summer. I could blame the summer heat here in Florida (96F today!) or the lingering effects of our hard push to Steam earlier this year, but no ...

No. It's mostly the damned casino.

The next update revolves around a casino run by the Red Wing mantis gang. If you follow our Twitter, you may have seen a screenshot of a match-3 game planned for the update.




The casino started here, with the idea for several mini-games like this. That might have been the whole of the casino - a big room with some mini-games - but Citan wasn't happy with it. It didn't feel like an integrated part of the game world. This casino is supposed to be a place where we can add more minigames over time, but why would people keep coming back to this place? Locations in Project: Gorgon usually serve multiple purposes, and this one just didn't quite work.

There were some other interesting features we had in mind for the casino beyond the mini-games. For example, an early screenshot on Twitter shows what appears to be a deer on a stage.




This is indeed a deer on a stage. Here Panzy is showing off an early version of the Stage Management console, a prototype of the kind of community tools we're keen on getting into the hands of our players and volunteer guides. A neat feature, to be sure, but still not enough of a draw to keep people coming back.

No, if the casino was going to be worth doing, it needed to be something more. So much like the casinos in Las Vegas, the Red Wings would strive to make their home an all-in-one, self-contained resort destination - a city in its own right. And hey, wasn't Citan just talking about a new higher-level hub city? Surprise!

Of course, building a city requires quite a bit more work than building 'just' a casino. But it also vastly increases the benefits from that work - there's a better return on the resource investment, if you will. And it goes both ways: A boring town is never going to be a good hub. (It's going to be hard enough to convince some people to leave Serbule, no matter how good the amenities at the new location.)

Unfortunately I don't have a lot of sexy new screenshots of the casino to share with you today. We're in that awkward stage where a lot of the features are working, but the art assets aren't good enough yet - not even by our lax standards for first-pass 'programmer art'.




Besides, you probably don't want screenshots of a partially-built city anyway. You want to know the details: how much and what kind of storage it will have, where the portals will take you, where we're putting the player vendors, and whether you should be hoarding the existing game chips. But you'll have to wait just a little while longer for those answers.

(Actually, for the last one Citan says: "Those chips are the rough equivalent of 'home edition' poker chips -- they aren't casino chips. The Red Wing staff will trade them in for a pittance as a courtesy, but they aren't worth much. Don't bother trying to hoard them, as Councils will spend a lot easier!")

[INXS]

If you put 5 cows in new city, some people will move their mules and relocate to it.

[mrwarp]

If you put 5 cows in new city, some people will move their mules and relocate to it.

Make it a slots game! Every attempt to milk(spin) there's a chance to get 0, 1 or 2 bottles of milk!

And name the slot machine: Udder Madness!

[lileth]

If there's pole dancing, please provide curtains. The last thing I want to see ingame is these guys trying to fulfill rl fantasies ingame! :P

[Fifth]

Casino... Deer on the stage... With all those exciting minigames... Right. Yea! Uh!

* Turning around inching away real slow *

[Kryshael]

* Turning around inching away real slow *

Don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya!

Honestly though, this post only barely hints at what is coming and you are trolling negativity? You should be thankful that you have this "fun as hell" game to play and that they give regular updates. And when they don't give a regular update...they friggin update you with an update on the update!!!!

Some people just can't see the forest for the trees.

[Fifth]

Some people just can't see the forest for the trees.

Sry if I came across as overly negative. It doesn't mean I don't like the game as a whole. I do, I actually like it a lot. It's just the new direction I can't really dig... But that's prolly just me.

It's just one persons subjective opinion, nothing more. If everyone else is super excited about it then everything's fine.
I do believe, by the way, that the best thing to do if you really care about the future of the game is to give honest feedback.

Besides, we haven't even seen the end product yet. Let's wait and see... and hope for the best.

[Gardum]

Sry if I came across as overly negative. It doesn't mean I don't like the game as a whole. I do, I actually like it a lot. It's just the new direction I can't really dig... But that's prolly just me.

It's just one persons subjective opinion, nothing more. If everyone else is super excited about it then everything's fine.
I do believe, by the way, that the best thing to do if you really care about the future of the game is to give honest feedback.

Besides, we haven't even seen the end product yet. Let's wait and see... and hope for the best.

I agree with you mate, not sure why people think putting gambling into games is a great idea ?
I have been disappointed in the way the game has been going in the last few updates and this one is not giving me much hope for the final product.

We are allowed to give our opinion as we have paid to play and those morons that only want to hear their opinion repeated as they like to fan boy for some unknown reason.
The idea of these threads is to give feed back as I donated and then bought two copies as the game started as i hoped it would and therefore I was happy to put money towards it, now though I have barely logged in for the last month as it's just getting stagnant now and the last thing that would interest me is a casino.
Hopefully they wake up and go back to the game rather than waste of time fluff.

[spider91301]

I agree with you mate, not sure why people think putting gambling into games is a great idea ?
I have been disappointed in the way the game has been going in the last few updates and this one is not giving me much hope for the final product.

We are allowed to give our opinion as we have paid to play and those morons that only want to hear their opinion repeated as they like to fan boy for some unknown reason.
The idea of these threads is to give feed back as I donated and then bought two copies as the game started as i hoped it would and therefore I was happy to put money towards it, now though I have barely logged in for the last month as it's just getting stagnant now and the last thing that would interest me is a casino.
Hopefully they wake up and go back to the game rather than waste of time fluff.

Dude I know im one to talk considering ingame im probably the one that complains the most ingame about random crap but if the game dies it dies if it lives it lives all this negative sht is really uneeded do you even know how hard it is to code I do agree in terms of developing a casino might not be the best idea but its better then nothing also I would rather they take their time on what they work on in every detail so later we dont have issues with coding or its becomes a half baked product that sucks

[ShieldBreaker]

I agree with you mate, not sure why people think putting gambling into games is a great idea ?
I have been disappointed in the way the game has been going in the last few updates and this one is not giving me much hope for the final product.

We are allowed to give our opinion as we have paid to play and those morons that only want to hear their opinion repeated as they like to fan boy for some unknown reason.
The idea of these threads is to give feed back as I donated and then bought two copies as the game started as i hoped it would and therefore I was happy to put money towards it, now though I have barely logged in for the last month as it's just getting stagnant now and the last thing that would interest me is a casino.
Hopefully they wake up and go back to the game rather than waste of time fluff.

Constructive criticism is welcome. People try to show their support be being positive isn't frowned upon. Being negative and using words like morons is frowned upon.
The start of the game has had the most man-hours of work put into it, and has been reworked the most. The later content hasn't been polished and reworked yet, but of course, it will be. That isn't complex work (like creating new in-game systems), it is just very time consuming. I don't think the main idea is for the game to introduce gambling, I think the casino is more likely a testing ground for UI and puzzles. Think how cool it be if you had to solve some visual puzzle or game to unlock an area of a dungeon. Or if NPC had little mini-games you could play against them to gain favor or gifts. The concepts in the casino should be seen as an opportunity to imagine and suggest new content in other areas of the game. It is a building block in the overall game, a new set of tools to introduce fun content and express the lore of the game.

To your point about things getting stagnant. There is a finite set of content to the game at any given moment. But the amount of content is increased on an ongoing basis. So if you have done the content that interests you at this point you will get bored. But more content you personally like, hopefully will be added in the future. You could provide feedback on what you liked by submitting a suggestion using the in-game form for suggestions. Now it probably won't make the devs completely rewrite the order of their todo lists but it might influence them when decided areas to focus on.