10-17-2016, 12:52 PM
Good Sunday to you...
How about we get through the biggest part....the survey results:
![[Image: vote1.png]](http://iourpg.com/ss/vote1.png)
ps. PM system was 1%, it got cut off in the chart, sorry!
Clear winner here is the Expedition System
Now - to get that underway, i'll be spending the next 2-3 days tackling how we will move forward with it...what will be included in the original plans, and what will not. This system has some tie-ins to not yet implemented features, so only the portions that can apply here can be developed with that in mind for the moment.
What I can say however is that we will be relying on Isael the original artist on IOU (before the art-house) for the art-assets for this. Unlike the delays we have with the art-house this means we can have a far more fast paced development cycle and get things under way very quickly.
We are going to ensure this system continues to move forward. Some major changes and key notes within the team have been and will be in the works...
Community Competition
I'm excited to have been able to bring back a community competition. I've seen some great ideas...some that actually line up with ideas i've pondered about as well.
After the processing of this community competition, i'll try to ensure we have another one lined up shortly after.
Weekly Competitions - Trial Run
I believe Listat is going to do a trial run with smaller competitions with rewards as well. I don't currently have any additional details to share on this yet as it was discussed just earlier today, so you'll just have to wait and see.
Bug Report Reward - Trial Run
In testing I began opening up rewarding users who reported major bugs / exploits for the event prior to release.
This has a bit of a conflict of interest I believe where people may not report things in hopes to hold it against a reward, but along with that leaves a stronger impulse to actually report issues. If I can get better management on this, it will likely become a significant system across the board, and not just for pre-testing.
On the other hand there's also potential if abuse occurs that this will just be shut down.
Last of the Major Events
This monster event is the last new event that we will be putting focus on for development. Repeats or an overall systematic change will occur for events in the next several months.
Perhaps as we close in on features within the roadmap we can look back at new monthly mini-game events again....however I think we've accomplished a ridiculous mount of secondary games within the game itself at this point.
Patch Frequency
It was suggested that we release smaller patches more frequently instead of large ones less frequently. This is fairly difficult because Flash .fla's are not the easiest for version control, the pain of maintenance, and how it can potentially be less efficient...However I'm going to attempt it. We're going to try to double the frequency of patch releases and hopefully see if that also helps with speeding up the resolution of bug-fixes.
Sometimes we fix an issue with a bug, but there's other aspects to an issue that remain and require waiting for the next patch before the continued fix is released. My hope is that we can tackle some of the bigger issues with the game more quickly with such a process plan.
Engagement
IOU while holding one of the biggest communities on Kongregate, has a significant initial engagement issue. Kongregate initiated research on this with very valuable video feedback from targeted audience users, and we got some great feedback from a new user perspective. I know many long-term users don't care about new users, but better engagement = higher CCU = more revenue = bigger team = more development...it matters to me and the game's future.
We don't want to be flunking out on further publishing.
The changes in regards to this individually are not very time consuming compared to a major feature but since there's quite a few things that could be cleaned up, i'll be splitting it up slowly so i'm not really digging into the new feature development.
That's pretty much it! I have some new rehaul assets to share, but beyond that...catch you at the community discussion this week
Final Planet Drafts:
![[Image: bg_myth01.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth01.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth02.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth02.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth03.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth03.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth04.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth04.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth05.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth05.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth06.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth06.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth07.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth07.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth08.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth08.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth09.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth09.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth10.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth10.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth11.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth11.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth12.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth12.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth13.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth13.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth14.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth14.jpg)
![[Image: bg_myth15.jpg]](http://iourpg.com/ss/bg_myth15.jpg)
Cheers,
Ray
How about we get through the biggest part....the survey results:
ps. PM system was 1%, it got cut off in the chart, sorry!
Clear winner here is the Expedition System
Now - to get that underway, i'll be spending the next 2-3 days tackling how we will move forward with it...what will be included in the original plans, and what will not. This system has some tie-ins to not yet implemented features, so only the portions that can apply here can be developed with that in mind for the moment.
What I can say however is that we will be relying on Isael the original artist on IOU (before the art-house) for the art-assets for this. Unlike the delays we have with the art-house this means we can have a far more fast paced development cycle and get things under way very quickly.
We are going to ensure this system continues to move forward. Some major changes and key notes within the team have been and will be in the works...
- I am providing you all the public community TO-DO board again. You can see what we're working on or planning to deal with as a focus! Find it here:
https://trello.com/b/usVhG9Ry/iou-development-board - Isael will be joining in on weekly dev-blog posts! As usual on Sunday you can usually expect a post from myself, but Isael will now also be including his works (whether draft, or completed pieces) on these topics as well to offer a more streamlined and frequent show of progression with the development.
We do not yet know the day of the week, but it's likely a Wednesday or Friday. This may or may not be included this upcoming week on his behalf as he doesn't even have the work lined up for this feature yet, but we'll see. - We are likely going to have a community discussion this Thursday. I'd like to answer any questions the community may have, and also to get some feedback from the community on a couple topics i'll be bringing up personally.
This community discussion however will only have 1 time slot due to not being on a weekend, and this is because I'm looking to fast track development on the community chosen feature instead of delay it against the inconvenience of which day we run a community discussion :-p
If too many people do miss out, we may be able to run another short one on the weekend just for Q&A - I'll be organizing the team in a rather temporary intrusive way of figuring out how every minute of our time is spent, and run analysis on that against aspects of the game (and business internally) that seem to be short of attention. With this we may make some focus changes within the team to ensure we can run ourselves in a more organized manner to get on track in areas we could be lacking.
Community Competition
I'm excited to have been able to bring back a community competition. I've seen some great ideas...some that actually line up with ideas i've pondered about as well.
After the processing of this community competition, i'll try to ensure we have another one lined up shortly after.
Weekly Competitions - Trial Run
I believe Listat is going to do a trial run with smaller competitions with rewards as well. I don't currently have any additional details to share on this yet as it was discussed just earlier today, so you'll just have to wait and see.
Bug Report Reward - Trial Run
In testing I began opening up rewarding users who reported major bugs / exploits for the event prior to release.
This has a bit of a conflict of interest I believe where people may not report things in hopes to hold it against a reward, but along with that leaves a stronger impulse to actually report issues. If I can get better management on this, it will likely become a significant system across the board, and not just for pre-testing.
On the other hand there's also potential if abuse occurs that this will just be shut down.
Last of the Major Events
This monster event is the last new event that we will be putting focus on for development. Repeats or an overall systematic change will occur for events in the next several months.
Perhaps as we close in on features within the roadmap we can look back at new monthly mini-game events again....however I think we've accomplished a ridiculous mount of secondary games within the game itself at this point.
Patch Frequency
It was suggested that we release smaller patches more frequently instead of large ones less frequently. This is fairly difficult because Flash .fla's are not the easiest for version control, the pain of maintenance, and how it can potentially be less efficient...However I'm going to attempt it. We're going to try to double the frequency of patch releases and hopefully see if that also helps with speeding up the resolution of bug-fixes.
Sometimes we fix an issue with a bug, but there's other aspects to an issue that remain and require waiting for the next patch before the continued fix is released. My hope is that we can tackle some of the bigger issues with the game more quickly with such a process plan.
Engagement
IOU while holding one of the biggest communities on Kongregate, has a significant initial engagement issue. Kongregate initiated research on this with very valuable video feedback from targeted audience users, and we got some great feedback from a new user perspective. I know many long-term users don't care about new users, but better engagement = higher CCU = more revenue = bigger team = more development...it matters to me and the game's future.
We don't want to be flunking out on further publishing.
The changes in regards to this individually are not very time consuming compared to a major feature but since there's quite a few things that could be cleaned up, i'll be splitting it up slowly so i'm not really digging into the new feature development.
That's pretty much it! I have some new rehaul assets to share, but beyond that...catch you at the community discussion this week
Final Planet Drafts:
Cheers,
Ray