Dev diary: January 15th 2013

Hi! Here’s the state of our current projects:

  • White Noise update approval progress is at 92%, meaning it’s almost ready for release!
  • Avatar Farm Online update approval progress is stalled at 0%, so it might take a while until it’s available :\
  • We have continued our work on White Noise Online.
    • From a code point of view, we’ve put together some basic networking code ( creating and joining games, and sending player position ), but there’s much work and tests to be done yet.
    • We’ve been working on some landmarks for the new scenario, trying to mantain the level of tension and weirdness of the first location.
    • We’ve also started work on the player characters (There will be 4 characters, 2 males and 2 females). I won’t make any comments of the design decisions of the characters, that’s for a future post :). But here is a preview of one of the male characters.
      WN_chara1_WIP

 

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WaaghMan January 15th, 2013 News Comments Off on Dev diary: January 15th 2013

Dev diary: January 10th 2013

Well, I’m a bit sick right now so pardon me if I get right to the point today :).

After having submitted the updates for Avatar Farm Online and White Noise, we’ve started development on our next project: White Noise Online.

We’ve received many requests to develop a multiplayer mode for White Noise, so we’re going to do it (or die trying :P).

After just 1 day, there’s not much to show yet, so I’ll just post some details on our approach to this online mode:

  • We have in mind a coop mode for up to 4 players.
  • There will be at least 4 selectable characters, much like Left 4 Dead.
  • The main goal will be still probably to pick up 8 items, but we may add new kind of items (not just tape recorders), so only specific players can pick them up. We’re not sure about this, since it introduces some issues (what happens if a player dies?).
  • A dead player will still be able to walk around as a Lost Soul and explore a bit ahead the players.
  • We’re thinking of adding new features to the maps (traps, batteries, decoys…), but we have yet to think about it.
  • The game will have 2 maps: A larger version of the one found in the original White Noise, and a brand new one.
  • The game will be still playable on single player, of course.

If you have any thought of suggestion for this new project, please tell us :).

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WaaghMan January 10th, 2013 News 6 Comments

Dev diary: January 8th 2013

So, what have we been working on these days?

We’ve been working on the next Avatar Farm Online Update as usual, and finished/tested most new features. These are the ones that we included these days:

  • New building: Winery , allows you to sell grapes.
  • Fixed an issue when showing a level 100 farm full of items on the world camera (too many objects were drawn at the same time and the game crashed!)
  • Finished the Pets feature: We have a total of 4 cats and 4 dogs available to select from. If this feature is popular, we’ll add new pets on next updates.

We’ve also spent lots of time looking for the root of the freezes some people have been experiencing on both White Noise and Avatar Farm Online, both related with online features. Sadly, we couldn’t pinpoint the cause (we’ve never managed to reproduce these hangs on our development systems), but we’ve added new measures that I hope will fix or at least avoid a total freeze of the console.

Tomorrow we’ll probably submit the update for Avatar Farm Online, and finish work on the White Noise one.

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WaaghMan January 8th, 2013 News Comments Off on Dev diary: January 8th 2013

Dev diary: January 2nd 2013

Happy new year! Now the new website is up and running, we’re starting a new development diary so you can know what are we working on.

I can’t guarantee updates on a daily basis, but we’ll try to keep a steady rate.

So, what have we been doing lately? After a week vacation, we’ve gathered many reports and feedback from users for both White Noise and Avatar Farm Online, and we’re working on updates for both games.

Today we’ve been working on Avatar Farm Online, with the following changes:

  • New animals (texture and stats variations mainly).
  • Users with pending friend requests are no longer granted friend permissions.
  • New feature: Move items.
    • Now you can move buildings, animals and trees (you can’t move plants or plowed land, it just didn’t seem right). The way to do this will be by pressing X. To sell items, you will have now to press LT+X. We’ll add this to the How To Play section, but it may end in some confusion for the users, let’s hope we make it clear enough.
    • When moving items, you’ll be in Move mode, you will have the preview of where to move, and can cancel anytime. We’ve had to check the system works in online (the move mode cancels if anyone sells or moves the same item before you do), as well as add new icons, new descriptions, etc.
  • New plant: Mushrooms (high level plant with 20 minutes grow time).
  • Fixed a minor issue with the preview of animal trucks.

There’s still a lot of things we want to add to this update, specially the pet feature (cute animals that follow the player around), and they won’t be finished until next week. Meanwhile, we have lots of pending bugfixes.

Ok, that’s it for now, and please let us know what do you think of this initiative :).

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WaaghMan January 2nd, 2013 News 1 Comment