Thursday, May 24, 2007

Coming soon to a theater near you.

Would you like another peek at the future? Gaze now in to my magical crystal ball and all shall be revealed.



After some looking we noticed that the system to challenge somebody online to a game was a bit lacking. Lacking so entirely that it was just not even present as if we hadn't coded it. That was all due to the fact that we were working on getting a bunch of other stuff done instead. Now it is time to add the Challenge! screens in.

We built a screen that you can go to and choose the game you wish to play, then specify if its for cash, or tokens, and then who you want to challenge. Its pretty sweet, because now you can control who you play against just by challenging them to a game. The exception here is that they must not already be in a game, because once you challenge them the above pictured window will pop-up. That would be really annoying if you were playing Explodinator and that came up.

We have another major roadblock to Player Happiness that we are overcoming on this next patch as well.

If you have played Skill City by now, and hopefully you have because its linked all over the place, then you might have thought to yourself: "This place is really really empty. Nobody is logged in at all. I would really enjoy eating some Pecan Sandies right now."

After you return from your trip to the kitchen, bag of cookies firmly in hand, you sit down and keep playing and only ever see phantom people blink in to a game room, and then vanish.

That's because Skill City removes you from the main game room chat when you are playing a game and puts you in to your own private chat. So, there are plenty of people online. You just cant see them because they are all busy playing solo or with others.

We fixed two problems here then:
1. Finding a playmate is now ridiculously easy
2. You can now verify that you are not alone, and see who else is in Skill City with ya.

Enter the Players Online screen.



Here you can see who is on, what they are doing, and then have access to some easy little icons to click them and talk to them, or challenge them. Good thing the challenge system is being built now too eh?

You also have the options of hiding yourself from the Players Online list, if you wish to be invisible or whatever. The truly cool feature is the note. You can put in something like "I want to play Quadria, challenge me. I'm also up for Ants." so that people know what you want, and are not afraid to talk to you / challenge you.

We also continue to add about 10 or 15 new avatar items per week.

Who wouldn't want to look like this dashing Student Mage? He even has that Tom Selleck mustache that just scares the heck out of anybody who sees you coming.

1 comment:

The Mayor said...

We just had our 300th user sign up. Hooray! He also subscribed! Extra Hooray!