Hi guys! So it's been a little while since this whole leak drama thing crested, and while we've been visible here slowly tasking away, no one has really updated you guys on what's going on here yet... So, lets start at the beginning.
One of the first things that happened for us as a dev team after the leak was several new devs got brought on to help us out in the vacancy of ficwill and KGtheway2b. Fic and KG used to do alot of art work, but they also used to do alot of design work, and in the case of KG he was an active proponent of community management for SF. In light of this we brought on 4 new devs.
First was Haza. Haza is a prodigy level coder who in the short time he has come here has solved half the problems on our 1.9.3 to do list already. He's alot of fun to chat with about different ideas and directions for the game, and he works great with louti, as well as anyone who's willing to help him find bugs and figure out solutions. Haza is going to be a huge help to us in the future.
Second we brought on Me. For a long time SF has had a hard time managing their public relations. Developer consistency in terms of public face was at an all time low, and immense repetitive dramatics and stress within the community was making it evident that we needed someone willing and experienced to manage the public face of the development team, as well as manage intercommunity issues and make sure everyone was getting heard in a constructive manner. In addition, for the first time since entro was fired, someone with direct competitive experience has some voice on the dev team... That being said, I'm going to stop here, one can only toot their own so much before it starts getting really gay
Third we brought back JLF. JLF is no newb to developing for SF, in fact JLF was lead dev of SF before most of this community had ever even tried the game. To our team he brings alot of modding experience and alot of coding expertise. Additionally he brings a sober second voice to all our internal development issues and is always able to evaluate things with a level head.
Finally we hired Runteh from our concept artist recruitment drive that was taking place just before Fic and KG left. While not having a full time 3D artist on board is sort of stumping what runteh is able to do for us right now... He's actually still a huge asset to us. Runteh brings ALOT of modding experience to the team. At one time he was the art lead for the Science & Industry 2 project, and he is NO stranger to working up concept art for games, and concept art in huge quantities as well. Runteh has already been able to help khuskan with some design problems for a map that's been working on, and we're thinking he may be just the man for the job to develop a coherent and dynamic visual style for what 2.0 will one day be. Good things are expected of this guy
That stuff behind us, let's talk about what we've actually been doing as developers. So far our development efforts have been split into 3 categories. First is improving and streamlining community issues and development practices that were allowed to slip previously. Second is designing and discussing the future of SF, and making plans to implement different idea's and concepts in the future. And finally is the actual construction effort of 1.9.3. Some major things of note in the first category... For the first time in nearly a year the SF team has appointed a lead developer to organize and oversee development as a total entity. The role of the lead developer is not a role of telling everyone else what the mod will look like, and then making them do work weather they like it or not, the role of the lead developer is to make sure tasks are done in an efficient order, to know what is already done, and to know what needs to be done next. Everyone composes as a group, the project manager conducts. This being said, we voted on the issue as a dev team and it was decided to invite JLF back to his previous role of lead developer for SF. No one else had the same experience he had at the task, and he's been doing a great job already.
Also in terms of dealing with community issues, we've started to plan some interesting things for the I&S forums. Within the next few weeks idea's posted will begin to find their way organized into one of 3 categories. The idea here is to organize things in such a way that it's much easier as a dev to browse through the topics and pull out idea's useful for development. We plan on directly giving positive feedback to people who consistently produce good ideas on the I&S forums, as well as giving them the opportunity to give us more direct feedback, and talk to development about design and development issues directly. Expect good things in the future from that section of the forums that has for a long time served as a large disappointment for most.
Design has been design... Some very interesting idea's have come up within development and community recently... alot of people have been thinking with a forward mindset in terms of possibilities for gameplay. While KG has left the team he's brought up some really interesting design discussions both in public on our forums and our IRC, but also in private with some of the current devs. Other community members have also stepped up and dropped their 2cents in on what is a very complicated issue in the end of the day. Ultimately we'd like to try alot of different things at one point or another, and we're going to make use of our playtest team to evaluate the fun and potential of different concepts before we commit to them. A game is more then a collection of features, it is the sum of it's parts, and the way the gears turn together, and designing 2.0 from here on out will be alot of brain work and alot of trying ideas. Hopefully it will be alot of excitement and alot of fun too
Development so far has been going great. We're more than half way there in terms of having the first play test build we want to try. Development for 1.9.3 has been relatively simple for the most part, primarily we were intent on fixing different bugs and making some minor balance changes. There are alot of problems with SF today, but one of the more violent root causes has just been the bugginess of the game in 1.9.2. 1.9.3 will serve as the starting point for future development with the intent of solving gameplay and design problems. We plan on eventually fixing stalemates in SF, we plan on fixing uncreative fort designs playing the primary role in the game. We plan on adding tonnes and tonnes of fun new skills to learn and master eventually, but in order to do that we need to have a relatively bug free basic patch to work off of. That will be our 1.9.3.
I'm very pleased to report that 1.9.3 is currently in a playable state. It has been ported over to the most recent source SDK, which will mean some cool things for our mappers, HDR enabled, and some various other bugs now fixed. As I stated before at least half the features we plan on including for 1.9.3 have been coded up already, which is really exciting. This being announced, it's becoming apparent that we're going to need people to playtest this game pretty frigging soon
. Any day now we're going to be opening up an official playtester applications process, and we plan to get experienced and passionate players from all over this community on board and in action serving the first line of defense between us as devs and bad public releases. I've been a playtester for SF for a LONG time now, and it's exciting for me to tell you that playtesting is a huge part of our future plans. In the future of SF playtesting will be much more important then it has ever been before, and if you get on with us you'll get to do alot of fun things aside from just looking for bugs before an official release.
Overall, we as developers are really excited about the future of this game today. Despite setbacks and drama, things are really starting to look up, and it's looking like we'll have new stuff to play sooner then we hoped for
Progress!
Hybrid Mode
