State of the Game - August 2013

[dayrinni]

Hello everyone,

We wanted to give you all an update on the State of the Game.

The first month of A Tempest Season has been very positive! The two of us are very happy with how things have progressed: many bug fixes, new features, new areas and some good times have been had. All of you have helped improve the game one way or another. Besides finding the bugs and testing out other aspects of the game, you all are doing another important activity: building a community. A game's code alone can only take the us so far. The rest of the journey is traveled by the community. We know over time, the small group of players we have now will bud into a larger community.

Code
From a code stand point, things are going well. We fixed a few major issues and crash bugs are being squashed every day. There is the still lockup issue present, but that seems to have mostly subsided – we had 1 lock up in the past week. Recent code I've added has prevented at least 5 other lockups. This was on last Sunday when a bunch of other odd things happened. I am not terribly sure but maybe the machine the game runs on had a hiccup. Even so, I'd like to wait a few more weeks before trying to flood the game with as many new players as possible.

We've also made good progress with putting in player's specializations. The Clerics are almost done, and the Mages have one already. For the rest of theirs, I just need to assign their spells to the specializations – the spells are already made.

We're making plans for new game systems and additional features for the future so stay tuned! One important feature is the Explorer class. This will be given out to people who demonstrate exemplary exploring capabilities!


Areas
Actinate has been working on a lot of new areas – many of which contain a whole slew of secrets and interesting places to explore. These new areas will come into play in the future role play events. Some of the more recent areas that have been completed and opened for the players are: The Stalker Cake and the Lake Fortune Streambank.

The Stalker Cave is a low level hunting area are for players who want to try something more challenging than mud stalkers. It was also designed so a Rogue can be taken along so they can unlock the treasure chests.

The Lake Fortune Streambank is a new type of dynamic mid-level area. It uses new mob programs to enact change in the area as time goes on. It also has a lot of secrets for the player to find. So far, the players who have hunted there like what they see!

Having said that, we have many more areas that will be released over the coming months.

Finally, we're going through the existing areas and adding more secrets and rebalancing them.

Role Play
This is probably what the majority of you have been waiting to hear about. We will be starting limited role play this weekend. Over the coming weeks we will slowly ramp up this up from a staff perspective, beginning next weekend with Verise's Great Mud Stalker Hunt. But please try to get into the mode and RP with other players. We'd like to have a nice RP base put in place for when we start to get more players.

As a reminder, a player over level 10 is required to have a brief description of their player. This text is seen when someone looks at you. You can set your description with the 'desc' command and then typing in some text there. If you need help with this or RP please see the Manual section under Role Play, contact Dayrinni/Actinate or post on the RP section of the forums!

In addition, we have an introductory quest series planned out for everyone that will be interesting and end up with a new game play feature! This quest will span at least a month. The major quests will mostly be held on the weekends and we'll be scheduling them on the main website's event calendar.

Advertisements and More Players
As mentioned above, we'd like to not flood the game with new players until few weeks go by. But we will be inviting the old ATS players back to play now! I'll be sending a mass email invite to the old player base letting them know about the game that we're back and ready to go! I've also posted on a few smaller sites about the game.

If YOU know someone who may want to try the game out please invite them to do so! Or if you know any of the old ATS players – drag them back!

We have a plan in place for when we begin attracting players in a few weeks. This involves posting on the various MUD sites, Facebook, and other gaming sites. If all goes well, we should have a large influx of players and begin building a steady player base.



Thank you for all you've done since we've opened – it means a lot and has had a huge impact on the game. I know that together we can build a game that will be really fun to play and be around for years to come. The game is nothing without you. Thanks for reading!
-Actinate and Dayrinni