Twitter Updates!

[Administrator]

As many of you guys know, I'm fairly active on Twitter, posting new images and updates all the time. I understand that social media is a pain, though, and that it'd be easier for some of you to follow the updates if I post them here, on the forums.

If you'd like to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @VoyagerGames, but I'm going to try to post most of my imagery and significant updates to this thread. Feel free to reply here with comments or questions if you'd like to discuss any of my tweets!

I'll start out with today's tweet, a video of some multiplayer testing on #screenshotsaturday:

[Administrator]

Today's tweet, showing off a usability improvement to make OC's pause state more visible:

[Administrator]

Today I'm really deep in coding some new multiplayer mechanics, designed to make dedicated server play a better experience. I tweeted some pictures of the new cantina locations that I hadn't shared on Twitter previously:

[Administrator]

I spent yesterday and this morning working on a feature I call "colony stasis", which is basically a must for dedicated server multiplayer. It locks down all of your NPCs and active items / machinery so that they're frozen whenever you're disconnected. This way, when you log back in, almost everything is just as you left it. No one has aged a day, none of your machinery has decayed, no power or water have been consumed, and so on.

The blue shading that you can see in the colony on the right indicates that those NPCs and assets are in stasis:

[Administrator]

Tweeted a reply this morning to a question asked by Gamkedo, asking for a tweet summary of bio of yourself and what it is that you're making. Hard to do in 140 characters!

[Administrator]

Tweeted about our new affiliate, Pyroflame Games! I'm very excited to work with a retailer, and they're selling a bunch of awesome, vintage games. They're a vendor of some great classics, and I'm hoping to pick up a pair of my favorite SNES games here soon!

[Administrator]

Continuing multiplayer testing today, and I've been stuck on a really tricky concurrency bug that seems to only crop up in the client-server environment.

As such, today I tweeted out some of the pixel art we use in UI sprites. I really do like the way these turned out!

[Administrator]

For this week's #screenshotsaturday, tweeting a quick video of dealing with plague outbreak without any cure available.

Plague cure is difficult to manufacture and requires certain rare materials to make. In this case, I've got a colonist who's contracted plague, and no way to manufacture the cure or to import any cure before he'll certainly die. If I leave him alive, I run the risk that people from his social network will come to visit him before he expires, and I'll have to dispose of a contagious corpse. I solve both problems here by setting the hospital on fire with the patient inside.

Beyond any doubt, this is a reprehensible act, but it does ensure the well being of the colony as a whole. Sometimes, you have to make these sorts of choices in Outer Colony.

[Administrator]

Today, I'm giving a view of all the message formats that go into Outer Colony's networking protocol. As you can see, there are a lot of them, and this gives some idea of what's involved, from a data perspective, in making a game like Outer Colony multiplayer.

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[Administrator]

I've got a pair of Twitter updates so far today!

First, I've been pushing the dedicated server testing really hard this morning. I'm using the old Voyager Games utility server for hosting. It's a 6 year old build that cost ~$400 new, plus it's running VisualSVN and a remote desktop server at the same time. If this old thing can run a dedicated server that supports a few players, we are completely in business. I'll be posting its specs for discussion in the hardware thread soon, but so far, it's handling the demands readily.

The second tweet is to highlight a feature request Jennifer made earlier. I don't even have words for how good this is:

Arrow key scrolling and the scroll-wheel navigation have both been implemented, and it's really, really good. I'm working on an interface to at least tell the player what the controls are, too, because the thought never even occurred to me that someone might not know how to scroll. This is exactly the kind of thing that's so hard to think of as a designer, but that a real user will encounter in testing. I'm blown away by the quality of the feature requests and defects that Jennifer logs. She is far and away the best QA person I've ever worked with.