Life in Beta: New Features so Far

We’re now a month into Beta and the list of new features added since the last “new stuff” round-up post has gotten reeeeeeally long. Oops! We’ll have to post new things as we do ‘em or these posts are going to stretch to infinity. So, in order to get caught up, a long list:

New Maps & Map Search

The first thing you’d notice, if you were the type who hadn’t logged in for many weeks —rather than the type who obsessively refresh the home page to see the game is open, which we’ll just assume you are, since you are reading this— is that the maps changed quite dramatically (old on left, new on right):

The new look is less abstract and gives a better sense of the shape and distinctiveness of each area and makes it easier for us to add distinctive landmarks and geography. And to make it easier for you to find where you are supposed to be going, the maps now have a live find-as-you-type search feature which can find any public street by name and point out its location on the map.

To round out the map features, we also added map links to quest descriptions and other places where we talk about specific locations, and added a new menu option to streets on maps; “Create Link for Chat”, which lets you easily send clickable references of particular locations to friends and groups via IM and chat.

New Locations

And it’s a good thing we did that, because we’ve also added five new areas: Chakra Phool, Jethimadh, The Jethimadh Tower Base, Alakol and Ilmenskie Deeps (the latter two are still being unlocked).

The first three are all extensions of the “Firebog” style which began with Shimla Mirch many months ago. Chakra Phool extends around and deep into a cavernous underground area while Jethimadh streets encircle one of the first large landmarks added to the game, The Great Tower of Jethimadh (only the base of which has been unlocked so far). The Tower Base includes an area-wide puzzle set-up with plenty of secret rooms, hidden spots to find and a capper quest (only available to level 12s and above).

Ilmenskie Deeps is an even deeper set of caves underneath the older Ilmenskie Caverns, found on the small island of Uralia. It is rich with mining rocks and contains windier passageways and “funner” climbs :)

Alakol extends the styles established on Groddle Island on to the “mainland”, the biggest landmass players have yet expanded into. Its misty vistas, ancient fjords and sheer rock faces bring to mind both Irish hills and Norwegian seaside bluffs.

Making it Easier to Do Things from Inside the Game

One by one we’ve been adding things you used to have to do on the web site (or in pop-up windows) directly into the game itself. For example, you can now choose Skills via the magic rock, like so:

And before committing to learning one, you can find out all the details on a particular skill in an info window, generously interlinked with item info windows, and vice versa. (You can also ctrl/cmd-click on items to get a special link that can be used to view info about that item.) Even players have their own info windows now:

Most delightful to the constant gardeners out there, Gardens are finally in the game client and much, much easier to interact with (drag and drop for planting, single click actions for watering, harvesting, etc.) You can see what this looks like below when we get to Community Gardens.

And a Whole Lotta Polish …

We push out changes every day, usually many times per day. Among the bug fixes and performance improvements, we’re constantly looking at the way things work and trying to make them better, whether it’s making existing features easier to use or tweaking game mechanics to better balance things out. For example:

Wardrobe Improvements

The wardrobe got some love, with a new visual representation of the wardrobe itself, to make it clear where the things you already own are stored. New sorting options make it possible to find the cheapest or newest items right away (which is getting important now that we are nearing 500 unique items available).

With all that variety comes an impulse to create a number of outfits to suit different moods. As a result, the most frequently requested feature has been to save and load outfits so the ensembles don’t have to be recreated each time. And that’s what we’ve added: any time you get a combination just right, hit the “save outfit” link and you’ll be able to recall that look with the touch of a button.

Game Balance Tweaks

Ecology in a persistent world is hard to design: the actions of so many independent players making their own choices is a constant source of “ah, right” to the designs we produce. Which means we have to try to build some resiliency and self-correction into the system. Things like:

Animal sadness: piggies, butterflies and chickens now all get “sad” when they feel overcrowded (the exact numbers differ by species and size of the location). The sadness will pass after they get used to new population sizes, until a critical threshold where the animals will start to escape to less-crowded nearby locations.
Poisoners’ guilt: poisoning trees now has built in rate-limiting: each time a player poisons a tree, a twinge of guilt causes some mood loss (which either goes away on its own or is cleared by planting another tree). But successive poisonings while the guilt is still being experienced can cause a serious mood crash.
Wood trees: to help balance the need for planks with the need for cherries, spices, etc., we’ve introduced a new type of tree. Wood trees have an experimental twist: as they grow, the number of planks obtained from each harvest gets much larger; but, each harvest knocks the tree down a size and harvesting the smallest trees causes them to disappear. The optimum approach is then to let the tree grow as much as possible and only harvest the “ripest” state — but that’s hard to do with lots of players around …

Public Amenities

We’ve gradually been adding public, shared versions of some of the things players will eventually be able to build as private locations in the still-to-come Group Halls, like Machine Rooms and Community Gardens. The Machine Rooms house unsightly Fuelmakers and Blockmakers and the enchanted space gives a bonus for use inside the room. The Community Gardens are just larger-than-normal gardening areas where anyone who happens by can plant, tend or harvest. The dynamics that players establish are fascinating to watch (the gardens tend to flourish with people stopping to replant after they harvest while the machine rooms tend to have the machines inside disassembled and carted off).

Improving Interior Spaces

We also added Notice Boards (first debuted inside Machine Rooms and now available inside several Apartment Lobbies as well) which allow players to post notes for others to read and view those left behind. Jokes, propaganda and instructions abound; it will be fun to watch these evolve.

Storage Cabinets got a nice bump by making the insides much larger: they now scroll and generally contain twice as many slots as before. In addition, each cabinet slot can now accept a multi-slot bag (instead of just a single stack of items) which means that the overall number of items stored is increased dramatically.

The Look & Feel

The badges granted by Achievements now each have their own distinct look (making one’s achievement list much more satisfying to behold), while Action Indicators show the state of animals and trees (ready for milking!, needs watering!, etc.) and let you perform those actions with a single click. This makes it much easier to see which nearby piggies you’ve already petted and which chickens still have a bit of grain left for you to squeeze out.

Finally, getting the maximum bonus from an action, winning a race, obtaining the full complement of 100 coins in a day and other feats now trigger Rainbow Overlays to make results a lot clearer.

And More!

There are several more significant new things — like the revamped Auction System in the game and ability to purchase subscriptions & credits — but those deserve posts of their own. And this was far, far too long already :)

Posted: Jun 1st, 2011 by Stewart Butterfield

Footnote: This entry was posted in Announcements, Historical timeline, New Feature Round-Ups