Website, instancing & new teammember
As you can tell by the somewhat schizophrenic post title, there is a lot going on! In the last weeks i've been busy roadmapping and finalizing the parts of our first development release soon to come.
Free to play, for extras you pay.
For this to be properly realized we still need finish some open ends we were yet to close. A payment system (for the future) is one of them. as most of you know from previous posts the game will be free to play with a microtransaction based premium features model. How exactly this will be implemented I can't yet say, what I can say is that the game will remain properly balanced and most "premium" features will be acquirable even without paying. The payment will be more of a convenience system. more on that subject later though.
New teammember
At the indigo fair we ran into some interesting people, one of those people was Yvon. Yvon is a 23 year starting illustrator and webdesigner in trade and a fan of the genre & style. After a nice long talk she offered to devote some of her available time to assist us in building Sagramore.... we humbly accepted :) As part of her introduction here is a message from Yvon herself:
"I'm excited to be a part of the development of this game. I can see its potential and share an extensive background with the development team in the same game genre. I'll first be working on getting a new website ready for Sagramore, which I'm sure Maever(Robin) will tell you more about ;p"
New website coming up
As Yvon announced we have been working on a new website from an entirely different perspective then the current one. The new website will serve more as a promotional community portal and thus will have it's focus more on simple navigation and user-experience oriented design.
Here is a small design mockup of what it will look like (somewhat).
Instancing
Whoo there cowboy! before I start saying that we implemented this feature, let me explain what it is, as there is some common misconceptions (thank you world of warcraft) on what an "Instance" is.
Instances (from a game development perspective) are separated user spaces (areas) in which one or multiple (party) player character's can exist. So instead of a general public area (where you see everyone) instances are areas in which you would only see yourself or your party.
So yes... we implemented this :) This is very handy for our new starting quest for example, where you as a player can learn the basics of the game on your own without other player pestering you which could even ruin the gameplay experience. But this could also be good for certain party specific missions or a battle/PvP arena.
A must have feature indeed.
I do have more news but will post about this later this week.