Ovid

So, it turns out that working full time on a great contract, overseeing employees/contractors on other contracts, trying to build an MMORPG, working through legal issues associated with said MMORPG, preparing conference talks, and trying to be a good husband and father is a wee bit time-consuming. That's why I probably didn't answer your email or write a blog post in the past month.

So to let those interested in Veure know that it's not dead: we have bars! (Amongst many other things). Read on!

Note that a couple of the following screenshots have odd whitespace issues where I deliberately hid some information. Sorry about that: legal stuff. Legal stuff takes time and money to work through and that's something we have to worry about. Pro-tip: if you want to get into gaming, get your legal crap sorted before you launch the game. It's amazing how many don't and lose everything because of lawyers. Getting a good lawyer is amazing: it's like someone whose willing to sell you fire insurance when you're living in a wooden house, in a drought, and there are lightning strikes all around you.

I've been fairly busy on Veure. I wake up early and hack on it and I often hack on it after dinner. I have no idea what my wife looks like any more. Oops.

First, let's take a look at the home screen (as usual, clicking on any image will show you the full-sized version).

You can probably make all sorts of interesting guesses about gameplay just from poring over that. Also, note the names of the areas on the left hand side. Those don't match the standard names of areas I've created. Reading down, the default names are "Clonevat", "Training Area", "Port", "Brig", and so on. Every space station can now have custom names and descriptions for rooms. In fact, let's look at the Harbour (port) for København station:

You'll note the custom description of both the port, at the top, and just below that, of the station. When you fly into a new station you arrive at the port and you can see the station description and it might give you a hint as to what the station is like.

But let's take a detour to the bar in København station. It's named "The Little Mermaid", but a children's tale it definitely isn't. I've decided to take a shot of tequila.

Different drinks have different effects and yes, you can get drunk, sick, get in bar fights, and so on. I also like the fact that for many areas, the template for the bar is this simple:

[% title = area.name %]
[% WRAPPER area/wrapper %][% END %]

Yup. That's all the code I had to write to generate the HTML for the above. Almost everything else is handled at the model level, with a few minor things in the controller (and will shortly be moved back into the model).

But who's that Lunt person I see? Ah, what the hell. I think I'll attack him for fun (that involves clicking on this name and then clicking "Attack"):

That didn't go well. Maybe next time.

Veure is progressing well, we have what we think will be its official name, pending trademark research. There are multiple legal hoops to jump through and while much of the game works, there are a few "big ticket" items left before we can do the alpha. Still, it's getting closer and that actually presents a problem.

I haven't started the marketing campaign yet. That's because, well, legal stuff. We have the name, the domains are available, there appear to be no trademark issues, but it takes time and money to go through everything to make sure we're "safe". I can gamble and start the marketing now, but if I guessed wrong, I could spend a lot of time promoting the wrong name for the game and causing confusion. That's not good.

So the real marketing is blocked and that's unfortunate. There are a few other issues we also need to attend to and trying to juggle all at once is, um, not easy. Now it almost seems like a race to see if Veure is production ready before Perl 6. Not sure which I would bet on.

Update: As soon as I posted that template above, I knew I had to fix it. Now I can just do this:

[% WRAPPER area/wrapper %][% END %]

Setting the title is now completely optional and defaults to the current area name.