We had a busy week! From updates, to new community managers, to having our first iteration of the Code of Conduct on our forums - it's been a lively week!
This week we welcomed two new Community Managers -Shadow Elusive and HiroA. You can read their greetings to the City of Titans community here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/meet-our-new-community-managers
Egads! Our Report Post button has apparently done gone ran away with the last forum software update, so in the interim you can private message toShadow Elusive, HiroA, Minotaur, or myself (VDG) if you feel a post needs to be reported for violating any of the forum rules. Read that post here: http://cityoftitans.com/forum/reporting-posts
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/collab-central
Have I not shared this before? What's wrong with me? Check out ChristopherRobin's collaborative art thread - some truly awesome work in there.
From: Radiac For: Business & Marketing When should I expect the receive the T-shirt I bought with my Kickstarter money? Also, will the non-physical stuff (e.g. Iconic, Mogul, etc) be dealt with before the game is released or after? Thanks.
Terwyn, Marketing Manager: Given the sheer size of donations we received during the Kickstarter, it should be no surprise that it has taken us a long time to track down our benefactors to confirm specific details. Since some people have surprisingly contributed well over a thousand dollars, and haven't read their e-mails instructing them where to sign up for their goodies, we've had to extend the deadline and reach out to these individuals personally. So, eventually, we started collating the results, and found that some people had left shipping addresses in Titan City. A nice thought, but unfortunately unhelpful for items existing outside of the game world. As well, more than one person had left the default size of t-shirt in the system, and we're quite sure that half of our base do not wear a women's Extra Small. Needless to say, that started off an entirely new sequence of back and forth communications, forcing us to have to collate the list again.
Good news, however, despite all of that, the orders are going out more or less as we speak, and they'll start shipping as soon as they can. Everyone should be getting the shirts more or less at once, presuming that local postal systems are equally efficient. As for the digital goods, they will be plotted out and dealt with accordingly well before the final build of Titan City.
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/comic-recommndation-thread
Always worth re-recommending, the comic recommendation thread, by Skaargoroth http://cityoftitans.com/forum/goats-color-book
Awesome art and coloring by Lord Goat Ask-A-Dev Got a question? Ask it here: http://tinyurl.com/askadev From: Darth Fez For: Composition / Lore How does Titan City manages to (presumably) remain largely peaceful despite so many heroes and villains, and those who fall between those extremes, pursuing their goals? Will be a question of suspension of disbelief?
Robin, Composition Lead: This depends a lot on your definition of 'peaceful'. In part, people have learned to work around the super-battles. The heroes do a good job of handling the villains, and the TCPD and the TCFD are both excellent at keeping civilians out of harm's way."
It's also worth noting that super-criminals -- at least, those who aren't out to deliberately kill as many people as possible -- tend to try and avoid getting people killed because if they're to the point where they'e fighting a super, they know they might be caught, and if they might be caught, they don't want to make their sentence worse."
Another thing is that citizens of Titan City understand this to be a part of life. They don't mind putting up with it in exchange for living in what they consider the greatest city in the world. The can-do attitude common among the locals means that instead of worrying about it, they come up with solutions, and honestly the supers help; heroes will often do their own cleanup, and there's a number of city workers with their own powers."
Supervillains often end up helping as well. Not voluntarily, of course, unless they're seeking good PR. But for convicted criminals with suitable abilities, cleaning up superbattle sites is often part of their sentence as hard labor, and it is also accepted as community service.
From Around the Web
*Shakes head* I never thought it was this possible to fail that hard.
We are also currently working on (manually) going through the Kickstarter Backer list and correctly flagging their forum handles as such. We had looked at a module that could do this for us but it apparently had a Zod complex and was banished to the Phantom Zone - so we are doing it by hand.
Like the Florida ballot counting.
So, if you supported us on our Kickstarter Campaign and pledged enough to receive the Kickstarter forum title/badge and you used a different email address to register for the forums - first off; damn you. Secondly, send me an email at vdg@missingworldsmedia.com with your name, your City of Titans forum handle, and the email address you used for our Kickstarter campaign.
From: jcheraz For: Gameplay Will the new game engine allow for, and will you use, more active combat roles (like dodging, blocking, etc.)?
Warcabbit, Project Lead: The new game engine will allow for more active combat roles. However, we've seen that blocking has come off poorly in certain competing games, so before we implement anything like that, we'll have to be darn sure it's fun and functional.
Right now, we're not aiming to use it - we're starting off with some fairly traditional gameplay, though we're encouraging a bit more mobility in combat, and we've got some really good ideas on how to make pushing buttons to trigger powers a bit more fun and interactive.
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/discuss-real-tech-update
The real update.
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/dev-digest-april-week-1
Who posted what and where on the Dev team.
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/feeling-truly-heroic-its-little-things
A good discussion from Empyrean, but what is it that makes you feel heroic in a game?
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/any-interest-party AmbiDreamer would like to throw a party in game and it's never too early to plan!
http://cityoftitans.com/forum/what-mmos-are-you-playing-while-you-wait Consultant would like to know what MMO's you're playing while you wait. Ask-A-Dev From: Nucleon For: Gameplay Do you plan to make a nemesis system with customizable minions, lieutenants and the main supervillian?
Warcabbit, Project Lead: As for the nemesis system, we wouldn't mind doing that, but we also have another idea that ties into the idea of playing with your friends. I don't want to spoil it because it might not work, and it might not be fun, but if it is, it'll be the best thing ever. A _real_ nemesis to play with.
If it doesn't work, though, the customized nemesis is something we can do, but we want to do it a little better than other iterations.
From: Tskales For: Tech With regards to the unreal 4 engine you're now gonna use, will it be possible to have capes and long hair without major clipping issues? DeathSheepFromHell, Assistant Art Director: The UE4 engine supports physics-based collision modeling of clothing through a suite of code known as APEX (made by NVIDIA, but runs on any graphics card.)
Which means that once everything is properly set up with the pipeline and the client, a cape will drape over the character wearing it. Or get blown about by wind. Or be blocked if you spin around and it runs into a wall, shift around if an animated tail bumps into it, or pull you into a jet engine if you fly too close. Okay, maybe not the last one, but not because we *couldn't*.
Long hair is a somewhat more complex question, mostly because the "state of the art" in dealing with it is a rapidly moving target. Do we intend to have long hair? Absolutely. Will it clip? No, for the same basic reason that clothing won't -- physics modeling. *When* will we have it? That one is much more up in the air, because the timeline is determined in part by what technique / approach we go with, and for some of the options, in part by when Epic is able to integrate all the new shiny into the stable engine builds (as opposed to a bleeding-edge tech demo).
Probably not until after it shows up for clothing, for two reasons: first, clothing that handles what we aim to do is already in the stable engine (and has been for a while). Second, it presents a lot of the same *types* of problems that hair does, but they are almost universally simpler with clothing. So it makes a better place to start tackling them.
From Around the Web
Vader-Pooh? The voice of Winnie the Pooh reads some of the Darth Vader's lines from Star Wars. Please make sure to have a towel underneath you before watching. You might leak with laughter.
From: Dinma For: Business & Marketing Would you deploy an additional stand-alone adventure/danger room builder; a pen and paper (tabletop) CoT game; personalized avatar action cards, T-shirts, mugs etc. to raise funds or have Comic book stories--with player characters to reward loyalty?
Terwyn, Marketing: We're certainly exploring the various options, but it is too early to make any promises right now. Developing a pen and paper game, for example, would draw time and effort away from our other priorities for development. Creating personalized avatar materials would also require a degree of effort that we cannot quite invest just yet, as well. All of these things have been noted as things that we would eventually like to do, if possible, but first we have to get to the point where they *are* possible.
As for loyalty rewards, I think you'll love some of the things we've come up with already.
From Around the Web
I need this. You need this. We need Goat Simulator
