It's been a bit of time since our last media and news update. We've been working out some new fan oriented stuff to help allow you to get a better insight into our team workings. Over the upcoming month we have some new features planned to incorporate into our website so keep an eye out for that! For now we would like to introduce everyone to our server's twitter site at Twitter.com ! We've had it going for a little while now, and there are still some adjustments that need to be made. What it allows is for anyone who is interested to see an exported log of our development server. You can see who, what, when, and usually why someone did something as well as keep your own tracking on our frequency of work if you wish. Why would you care about that you say?? Why wouldn't you! Now lets move on to player feedback(that's you guys) and our responses.
New and in progress this month we'll briefly discuss our new traveler's map and expanding Journal. We had some feedback on people getting lost in some areas after release. Many remedies were suggested, many we didn't like. We enjoy leaving the player the responsibility to figure his way along however we did understand a need for at least some assistance when a player needs it. We tossed out any ideas of glowing arrows or a position tracking map. What we kept is this lovely hand drawn style map. It doesn't move, it doesn't track and it doesn't give you super radar powers. It does allow you to find your general location based on landmarks. Simple, yet handy to those who need it while not overly revealing to those who don't.
Moving along you can see we also have an inventory page now in the Journal. In addition to a map we heard a lot about players not knowing what exactly was in their inventory. They kept picking stuff up but where did it go and what did they have we were told?!?! Simply put the inventory page of your journal will now display quest and puzzle related items you have acquired or are still missing throughout your journey.
In a final addition to the Journal system we have a brand new secrets tracker. It shows the amount of secrets you've found out of the whole number of the level. As we've watched a lot of videos on Youtube of players playing the release build we noticed an astonishing fact. Everyone was missing almost all of the secret rooms!! Not quite sure if players just don't care or if players aren't used to the old "this block is a little different then the rest" type of secret but we wanted to do something. The secrets tracker, we hope, should at least make aware to gamers that they are in there and they are going unfounded.
Closing out our news post we'd like to welcome Solarsplace who joined us as a new programmer. He's been working hard on all our AI needs and has brought previously waiting monsters to life and they are already being implemented in our new maps awaiting testing. Welcome aboard!
Until next month. Keep making videos and sending in feedback and bugs. We'll keep working, fixing, and progressing. We consider all feedback that comes in so the more we have the more we can hopefully improve the experience for next release.
IRC Network: irc.gamesurge.net
IRC Channel: #edgeofchaos
Twitter(dev): Twitter.com
Email: hexen.team@gmail.com
about the secrets... I havent played this yet, but as you said "this block is a little different then the rest", This is right, people must find secrets thinking like that. Problem is, many people dont care about secrets, at least, dont care about searching for them (and they dont get some special items/weapons because of that). But secrets ARE suposed to be hard to find, but notice, hard is different from impossible. If you think those secret areas are too hard to find, change it, but im guessing its not that hard, just dont make them too easy.