May 2015 Archives

Veure: Artists and Narrative Designers

This has been a busy week with Veure. As usual, my daily routine is:

  • Wake up
  • Hack a couple of hours on Veure
  • Work for $client
  • Have dinner
  • Optionally hack more on Veure

Hack, in this case, does not simply mean "write code." There are many other things involved, including research, research, and more research. And legal stuff. And writing. And hiring.

Yes, hiring. For example, we think we've found a great artist. If it works out, we can replace my crappy concept art of a space station:

New ships can be done, new background graphics, and so on. In fact, this could turn into a full-time job for him if Veure is successful. But that's not all we're hiring.

Veure: Arbitrary Mission Actions

This little baby makes me very happy:

That is a screenshot from the completion of a level 1 mission "Find Amaidoo's E-slate." The code was painful to integrate, but it makes things like the above simple to do.

Beta Features for Veure

There was positive response to my last entry about Veure, both on the post and in private email, so I'll keep posting.

Currently, we're pushing forward hard to try to get to the alpha release and get playtesters (let me know if you want in on it). Major things we need to finish to get there:

  • More missions and jobs (repeatable missions for lower rewards)
  • Auction Houses
  • Elite-style trading
  • More NPCs
  • More game balancing
  • Some legal stuff (expensive and time-consuming)

There's more we need, but those are the "big" items we need to finish. The content generation is some of the most time-consuming. Plus, I need to do a lot of work to make the mission system manageable for someone who isn't me. Right now it's complex (to put it mildly) and I'm adding a new feature to make it more flexible but which also increases complexity. If we can't have rich, compelling, missions, much of the game falls flat.

How I write custom quests for Veure

Note: If MMORPGs are of interest to you, please read through this and answer the simple questions at the end.

I'm still diligently hacking away at Veure. About a year ago I wrote that I had 17% of the alpha tasks done. Given that I've added a number of alpha tasks (and pushed some back to beta), I'm relatively pleased that as of this writing, I have 81% of the alpha tasks finished, with over 90% of the commits by me. It's daunting single-handedly writing an MMORPG, but we've a developer who's been working on it and will be returning to it in June, so that's going to help. We're also looking at hiring a narrative designer to flesh out content. Writing a game is hard, but filling it with content? Hoo boy! It's the difference between outlining a novel and writing it (well, not exactly, but cut me some slack, eh?).

And that brings me to content. Much of $secret_mmorpg_name (legal stuff, sorry) will be impacted by missions, but what are missions?

About Ovid

user-pic Freelance Perl/Testing/Agile consultant and trainer. See http://www.allaroundtheworld.fr/ for our services. If you have a problem with Perl, we will solve it for you. And don't forget to buy my book! http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Perl-Curtis-Poe/dp/1118013840/