How my week’s been going!

How’s it going guys?

It’s astonishing to think that last week at this time I’d already managed to almost put out 4 releases and this week I’m just now starting to get to work on Dragon Fable with any kind of time to invest in it. I have spent the majority of the week working on necessary but completely boring behind the scenes work that has taken up most of my waking thoughts. I’ve been squirreling away hours to make sure I had all of Thursday and Friday for you guys and here I am!

We started an awesome adventure last week with the release of the Player Created Content System, PCCS for short.  As buggy as it is, a lot of you enjoyed this first glimpse. That said, I’ve been thinking about exactly how we’re going to manage to get it to the point where I can call it a final preview. What is missing before we can call this the epic success it promises to be?

I just happened to have a list:

Basic Dialogue Cut scenes – Use of existing front-facing NPCs and the ability to give both them and the player dialogue.

Save/Load quests – The ability to save your quests and continue to work on them / test them later.

Better Fail-Safe features – Some of you might have noticed that the quests would just call quest complete sometimes. This is called “failing safe” meaning that if things fail, they do so in a way that doesn’t cause the game to break. You might have also noticed that doesn’t always happen :-P Need to improve that.

Sharing Quests – You need to be able to share your quests and let others play them. This is FUNDEMENTAL to this whole thing and without it there is no way we can call this even a preview.

And finally, the big one, we need a community of players helping each other and helping the staff, on the forums. Quest Building isn’t a simple process nor is it going to go well every time. What I’d love to see is you guys working together to build amazing quests, and that requires good critiquing and above all constructive criticism. I'm expecting great things from you guys when the full toolset is delivered and am looking forward to playing all of them.

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As for what else is going on, if you want to fetch any more of the Lucky Day items or farm up the rest of your wave counts, I’d make sure I get to the Lucky Day book before Friday when it leaves for the year.

The quest this week is also going to be a big one, as I'm working on some new pads and code that will let us do some stuff we've not done before, and with an added element of combat stratagy added in.