Hi everyone, stuff that happened since last week:
- I started with 'Randomly Generated Fish Monday' on Twitter; this is the first fish the generator produced for it. If you want to see more, follow Olvand's Twitter stream!
- I worked on both racing and fishing, and the basic fishing mechanic is ready now:
- I discovered this excellent comment on a blog post from two weeks ago:
- And finally, since I'm working on minigames, I also have to do new music. It's still work in progress, but here's the tune for fishing. It's a quiet sleepy tune for the relaxing activity fishing - except fishing in Olvand is rather hectic at the moment :P. Anyway, you may remember Olvand's music is leitmotivic, and this melody too is a theme I've used many times Olvand's soundtrack. Testers may actually recognize it! Anyone who knows what this theme represents?
Now I have to link it to the fish generator, so all fish species will all have their own behaviors and appearances - each server will have several randomly generated unique species. If you want more details about the fishing minigame, see this blogpost.
taylrock wrote: It's just my opinion, but I think you deter people away by making it private. If it were open, more people including myself, would play it. When a massive amount of people use and work on something, they all learn quickly and can communicate new ideas (on improving).
This is probably very true; by letting in people in small groups, I'm probably scaring away lots of people who would have been great players. But I've actually thought a lot about this (and even more since I read this comment), and this is why I think it's better not open up the game to everybody: (1) The game isn't ready for lots of players. If all people who now visited the Desura page and the website actually could try the game, all servers would be incredibly slow or crash immediately, causing lots of frustration to everybody. (2) I don't know how my own central server, needed for logging in and other stuff, will respond to lots of people playing. It will go down eventually, but I'd rather have control over when this happens and why. By gradually increasing the test group size, I keep this control, so problems can be fixed easily. (3) There are trolls on the internet. These trolls will come to Olvand one day for sure, but I'd like to keep them away as long as possible. By making people do so effort and then wait before they can play, I can be a bit more sure they really ARE interested in the game. (4) This is a hobby project for me; I don't think I would be able to handle the amount of bug reports if everyone could play - they fanbase is already much bigger than I'd ever expected, and it's still growing.
