“Steam Marketplace I ended up working on the Steam marketplace all week. Steam's interfaces are from the 1990s and very poorly documented. I basically have to make a request, blindly parse what comes back, and fix bug after bug until it magically works. It's going well now, however. I can pull down Steam players, their stats, achievements, and item inventories, then add/remove items, verify ownership, etc. The next step will be figuring out how to link Spellbook accounts with Steam accounts. This gets more complex since a lot of people don't use Steam, or might share accounts. There will probably have to be a special "Move Item to Steam Marketplace" system, where the item is removed from your in-game inventory so it can't be traded or sold in the middle of a Steam transaction. Either that, or the Steam Marketplace transactions could all be done in-game through a new auction interface. I think it's worth the effort because players obviously want a way to buy and sell items for real money. This lets them do it safely with a real market exchange. Rings of Night I've always liked RON more than TIB. It solved many mechanical problems, is more casual friendly, and I think has more challenges. Capitalism disagrees with me, however. There's 100x more players in TIB than RON. We'll be investigating the idea of merging RON with TIB-X after the expansion has a playable beta available. Many of the changes in TIB-X are inspired by RON, such as the resource economy, and more difficult NPC challenges. Unannounced Cthulhu VR MMO Steampunk tesla-coil sniper rifles kick ass.”

09/21/2018

“Already done, as well as ignore list, and most of your general game settings.”

09/21/2018

“If we ever made TIB a paid game, it would be more like $4.99 app store and $19.99 on Steam. You'd still have all the same challenges and goals, but the items, experience, ships, and corporations would be earned through effort only. It keeps a lot of people from playing the game when they see you can buy good items etc. This would be a long ways off. The expansion is going to be free-to-play, and would have to bomb pretty hard through 2019 for me to consider it.”

09/20/2018

“Heroes of Dire The free-to-play version of Dire doesn't generate enough revenue to pay for itself. There's not much reason to spend money on it because everything is acquired fairly easily, and the original difficulty was nerfed in an attempt to be more "casual". We're going to revamp and republish the game under the name Heroes of Dire Ascension. It will be stripped of all micro-transactions and any "free to play" style mechanics. Difficulty will be increased to make the experience more meaningful, but also loot and quest drops will be increased to make winning more rewarding. PvP mechanics will be changed as well, but we're still gathering community feedback on it. The new version will be a one-time paid game with no subscription costs and lifetime server access. Existing players will get it for free. The Infinite Black The last 4 days have been spent developing our Steam Marketplace system for item transactions. This will let players buy, sell and trade equipment in any of our games on Steam with their Steam wallet. I estimate that it needs another 2 or 3 days of work before I move back to the expansion client. Unannounced Virtual Reality MMO Our other artist team has been working for several months on a massively-multiplayer online virtual reality game which will be one of the first VR MMOs ever. Based on the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu mythos, players will assume the role of a cultist plotting to summon an Elder God to destroy the world. It will (hopefully) support hundreds of players concurrently, all working together in VR to defeat tentacle bosses, open portals, slay demons, and sacrifice virgins.”

09/18/2018

“We have a lot of things going on behind the scenes here, but often it's not obvious to players what we're doing and why game development can take so long. I'm going to write short blog notes here as regularly as possible. This thread is locked, but feel free to create new discussion threads about anything I bring up.”

09/18/2018