Got a bit of development done this weekend, and I'll bring you guys up to speed on what's recently been happening with the project!
First, EuchreJack and deMangler - you guys rule. These are some rock solid bug reports you've issued, and I've been able to reproduce almost everything you described. A great many of these features work for me and people who work on the project, because we have a very precise way that we conduct things like trade in-game. We hit the same buttons in the same order after fashioning the same sorts of landing sites every time, and whenever a new user picks it up, they tend to click on things in a slightly different order, or to build a landing site in a slightly different way, which often causes unexpected behavior. Some aspects of colonists' spatial reasoning need to be tweaked, but every time reports like this are made and issues are corrected, the system gets stronger and stronger.
I managed to get a little bit of programming done this morning, and I cut a minor release this afternoon. Version 0.5.53 addresses a long-standing bug with excess duplication of colonist names. I've changed things so that it's borderline impossible for colonists to name their children after themselves, and most colonists will even abandon their surname if necessary in creating a unique name for their child. It might not make the most sense from a world modeling perspective, but reducing the annoyance caused by having too many colonists with the same name was important from a gameplay perspective.
To exercise all the new code under extreme circumstances, I shimmed a test module in that really hammers the name generation framework. You can run it by way of a cheat code, if you're insane.
It's likely that no one cares much about this, but I really wanted to tackle this issue head-on, so I did!
Just wanted to say that the '99 Dodge Caravan is a great car.
Hahaha, that it is!! I'm not going to lie, I'm mildly embarrassed about enjoying a minivan this much, but I kinda' like driving it. With the 3.3, it's shockingly fun and peppy.
I love how the dev is committed to the idea rather than developing to a demographic market. Makes me want to commit to testing it.
Thanks for the kind assessment, man! This is what the project is all about - realizing an idea in working software. At the end of the day, Outer Colony is
not a product, at least, not in the sense that most AAA and III games are. The way so many games are built today, where development is driven by focus groups and marketing data, fed into massive teams of hundreds of 3D modelers and artists and programmers, manufacturing a product that's specifically designed to generate revenue - the whole affair seems to degrade the character of games, at least to me.
Don't get me wrong, AAA games are wonderful at being what they are. Many are unbelievably polished masterpieces of software engineering and art, fused to create experiences that induce people to pay $70 for them. But so many of them seem to lack the soul that games of 20 or 30 years ago had. Maybe this is just the nonsensical opinion of a crotchety, mal-adjusted lunatic, but I still think that the best games are the ones made by small teams, doing something they love. For software to really function as a mode of expression, it can't be built assembly-line-fashion by a corporation that employs thousands of people.
Certainly, there are pros and cons to the approach that I've taken. Sometimes, I make design decisions that I know are going to be unappealing to typical users. I don't want to compromise the vision significantly, for any reason. With that said, I still really hope Outer Colony can be fun for people, and I try to be as responsive as possible to feedback from testers, because I do want the game to be accessible. You guys are doing the core work necessary to improve the game, and if the system is so byzantine and broken that I can't share it with anyone, then it's also failed in its purpose.
So, development of Outer Colony is about striking a balance to create the experience that we want to create.
In my next update, I'll be making an immensely exciting announcement about a new member that's joined the team, one that's near and dear to the Dwarf Fortress community. She's taking over the role of the project's chief graphics designer, and I'm giving her borderline carte blanche to define Outer Colony's new aesthetic during the graphics overhaul. She's also contributing in a huge way from a game design perspective, and we've probably exchanged 10 or 20 pages worth of emails about addressing current design deficiencies.
We'll be focusing everything to make a more coherent, thematically consistent experience for users that better exploits the underlying technologies. Having someone with more significant domain specific expertise in designing games and producing a solid ludonarrative for Outer Colony should be a boon for continued development.
Outer Colony is at a crossroads now, and the decisions we make are going to completely define the path that the project takes moving forward. I'll aim to involve you guys, the testers, as much as possible in this process to incorporate your ideas into what we're doing, and to make sure that we improve the game in ways that current players will like!
I've got a lot of other work to do this afternoon, but keep your eyes open for another announcement in this thread.
Anyone get this running on linux?
I get "Error: Could not find or load main class com.voyagergames.tfr.TFRApplication" when trying to run the jar file.
Currently, the installer will not work on Linux, but Tchey has managed to run executable .jar from there. I haven't posed an updated jar to the download server in quite some time, but if you'd like, I can DM you the instructions I gave him on getting that bad boy to run.
Thanks again to everyone for your continued testing and interest in the project, and I'm looking forward to sharing more soon!
**Edit**
Oh, and Tchey, if you'd like a behind-the-scenes look at Voyager Games operations, I can give you the grand tour in a subsequent post. You might get a kick out of how we operate, man!
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Topic: Outer Colony (Read 66062 times)