All posts by LadyCeres

A wild list appears!

Hello everyone!

We have a list for you to register your interest in the Alpha, at last! It is time to entertain a wider audience of Glitchen.

First, you MUST have an account on our website.  Without it, game access cannot be granted, and your request will be deprioritized until we can reach out to you for more information. We will work on making this more efficient, but it just hasn’t been able to be a priority.

Signing up does not guarantee immediate access; but the plan is to add a batch (10-15?) of folks every few days so we can generate some regular activity in the game.  This will allow us to estimate our hardware needs to accommodate a large population of players.

Any questions, concerns, and general enthusiasm can be posted on our forum!

Without further ado, click this link to register your interest!

In pursuit of clarity…

Hello, madamsirs, LadyCeres here.

I’d like to take the opportunity to clear up some concerns I’ve heard since we made our announcement. If any of the points below appear blunt, know that it is so there is as little confusion as possible.

Ur is for Everyone

First and foremost, the game that is currently Children of Ur will remain open while we work together to open up the Eleven world. This was a vital discussion point when we spoke of coming together. It was important to all parties that there is a version of Ur accessible to everyone. There is not, and never has been, an intention to exclude people from Eleven’s Ur, which brings me to the next point.

Eleven’s Alpha has had to limit its community size for really boring, but irritatingly valid, reasons.

If we’ve never explained our reasoning in this manner before, allow me to do so now: when we started up, no one had the experience of large-scale community management. We were dealing with some really janky stuff, in terms of things going wrong in the first few versions of the alpha. Initially we picked people that we knew personally who would be patient with the super-crapness, had a good knowledge of the game, and would be able to get along with others in a very small (albeit virtual) space. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, but the work done by the Alphas as the staff has learned to scale up community management efforts (alongside bug tracking and your expected Glitch-y mayhem) has been invaluable.

We grew the community via personal recommendations, forum contests, Facebook contests, Kaiyon’s Dragon*Con contests, contrived SQL queries to figure out who was visiting the forum but not necessarily posting (hello fellow introverts!)…with each group added, the support load on myself and one other dedicated staff member increased. You’re all tired of the schtick about volunteer projects, real lives, and jobs, so I won’t repeat it. I can’t emphasize enough how true it all is. There are approximately 300 members in our testing community. Recent code changes have meant that the support load has become extremely minimal, which is fantastic news! It means we are able to add more people without fear of a hundred tiny disasters waiting to happen. I dearly hope that puts paid to any notions that we were being intentionally exclusionary or that less than 20 people had access. Neither are true, and the continued insinuations that they were have been pretty hurtful.

The world is a beautifully incomplete thing.

Eleven’s initial goal was to have the world exactly as it was at the shutdown. We were all high on purple when we thought that was a good idea! There are many locations that were not released back in 2013. I have had it personally confirmed from the-team-formerly-known-as-Tiny-Speck that these locations are lost forever…at least in their original form. Aside from pursuing server stability, we were also plodding along with this idea that we had SO MUCH MORE work to do before we could be ready…and thankfully, we realized that was just silly. The world is absolutely playable, along with the skills and maybe 90% of the quests (missing locations, tsk!)…so we’re taking perfection off the table in pursuit of a more open world. Locations will be rebuilt and added in as they are ready. Game hardware will have to be increased to support more people. We’re plotting how best to achieve it all.

The game will still be called Eleven.

I’ve seen people debate about what we should be called. There are some tech reasons to keep the game’s name Eleven. One is the following image, which was achievable with the existing art assets:

We may rebrand ourselves with a different team name. Laura from Children of Ur has played with blending our teal and purple identities into the existing logo, which was courtesy of Kukubee himself. We’re not trying to erase Children of Ur’s name or memory, so we’re going to come up with other ways to honor it.

But six f*@$)%g years?!

We know, we can’t believe it either. The merger has given us new vigor to get the problems figured out, my hand to Tii.

So that’s the gist.

We are human. We are Glitchen. We are doing everything we can to prevent this game from dying completely. The blending of the two teams will only make us stronger. When the doors open, they will be open to all. Thank you for sticking with us. If you’d rather not, well, we’ll still be here with open arms anyway.

Please join us on the forum for any questions you might have.

LadyC

Side project: Resurrecting another piece of the past

A message from one of our alpha testers, Eris Lord Freedom:

As Eleven Alpha has moved along, it’s gotten complete enough that many of us are chasing down achievements and exploring parts of Ur we never had time for in Glitch. For that, we needed info: What door opens with this key I got in the Ancestral Lands? How many cherries for a Rainbow Potion? I’ve been to all the places in Groddle Heights; why haven’t I gotten the Completist badge? (Answer: Martleby Hare.) What’s the recipe for Awesome Stew, and when can I make it? Where can I find a wood tree?

We had Eleven’s port of glitchthegame.com at http://pedia.elevengiants.com, and the Wayback Machine’s pages for the Glitch-Strategy wiki, but those aren’t complete. The Encyclopedia doesn’t include recipes, and the Wayback capture was erratic; Glitch ended before you could deliberately save a page at archive.org, and many of the saved pages are from an earlier version of Glitch.

We needed something better.

Eris Lord Freedom, a devoted Lemming and occasional Cosmapolitan, decided we needed a new wiki. With help from Ladyceres and Varaeth, we now have…

The Glitch Forever Wiki.

This is the alpha version. Many pages are still outdated. A lot of details from the end of Glitch – new recipes especially – are missing. The database used to restore it was from early alpha Glitch; most regions and streets aren’t there yet. (Oddly, most of the images referenced in the Wayback Version are there. Weird database issues. Ladyceres had days of fun trying to import a 5-year-old wiki database into modern web software.)

But it’s here, and it’s ours, and we can fill in the gaps and add pages for all the post-Glitch activities and Glitch revival projects. Join us.

There’s still time!

Just wanted to remind everyone who might want to sign up for the drawing that there’s still time to do so!

Post in this thread on the forum: —> LINKY <—

Need another reason to do this? Once we draw numbers for this round, I will continue to use the list to pull players for the Alpha.

So pretty please, register your interest on the forum. I am locking comments on this blog post so that there’s no misunderstanding. 🙂

I will update the forum with more details as to when the drawing will be. Monday night is looking good, though.

A spot in the Alpha could be yours!

So remember how we said we’d do something for people who couldn’t attend Dragon*Con?

We’re going to do a random drawing. Post in this thread on the forum for your chance to be selected!

Only one entry per person will be counted, and it will be a largeish group. My hope is to do the drawing next Monday September 26th, in the evening (East coast US). Firmer details on the above to come closer to the time.

Hope to see you enter, and good luck!

Update: I just wanted to be clear that you must post on the forum for a chance to enter, since the forum account is tied to your game name. We will also attempt to verify that entrants have played Glitch in the past.

Vote for Eleven!

While we certainly owe you a real progress update (and there HAS been progress!) we are honored that MMOGames has put Eleven up for Editor’s Choice for February! I’m pleased that the editor has taken notice of us, especially since we are not yet in an open testing phase. If you’re so inclined, take a moment to click the link below and vote for us. The voting is at the bottom of the page, and no registration of any kind is necessary.

MMOGames Editor’s Choice – February 2015

If you haven’t signed up for the forum yet, please do so here; signing up now will reserve your name for the game!

Asset Parade, Street Spirit Edition

This is the start of a (possibly short, but maybe longer) series to show off some of the amazing assets in this game. This first post will be in appreciation of our Street Spirits.

Let’s start with our Groddle spirits. You may remember our poor mismatched friend from one of the first posts on this blog:

Signs of life...

This was a result of our attempt to randomize their appearances, which we quickly realized would not be an ideal solution. When it came time to figure out how we were going to get these guys looking more like their old selves, I dug my heels into the assets and figured out what all the pieces were meant to look like so we knew how they went together.  Once I identified each element, I made a big spreadsheet to catalogue their original appearances by street so we could do some scripty magic and get them back to they way they looked at the shutdown. I became fascinated with how the elements went together and just how much variety was possible.

Each spirit is composed of 5 unique elements: the skull and base (the body parts), top and bottom (their adornments) and eyes. There were no actual rules here. All the pieces fit equally on every type of spirit with one or two exceptions. I had thought that there were set “outfits”, but no! Every piece was mixed and matched to make some very unique spirits, but there were some clear regular favorites per region as well. Some wood assets ended up on dirt spirits and vice versa. All of the examples here are just ones that I put together to attempt to demonstrate every available option.

First we have our dirt spirits:

Note: the flower skirt does not "fit" on the third spirit.

Note: the flower skirt does not “fit” on the third spirit.

The dirt spirits had two different skulls, and two different bases to choose from; they were labeled “0” and “1”, but they could be interchanged to give us these four different shapes (the last two in the row are actually the same shape, but their clothes give them different looks). In my investigations, the spirits with the shorter bottom did not have other adornments – this flower skirt was left on the spirit as an example as to why randomizing the assets would have not been an option (if it wasn’t already obvious by the mismatched fellow in the first picture). Each spirit here has a different style of eyes, numbered 1-5.

The wood spirits were a bit simpler, in that they only had one style of head and base:

Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 4.23.54 AM

However, notice their eyes: it’s still the same five styles, but they are spaced differently. So in all, there were TEN different styles of eyes to choose from! The first and second spirit here both have “type 1” eyes, but with different spacing and vertical alignment. The eyes could appear on any style spirit, and are only displayed this way for the purpose of this demonstration.

You can also see the rest of their outfits represented.  With ten different tops, and nine different bottoms, the potential for variation was huge. Just because one was wearing the lotus top, did not mean it was also wearing the lotus bottom (the first wood spirit is wearing both of these). I seem to have missed the dirt seedling top, which looks an awful lot like the wood twig (third wood spirit) but with a dirt base.

I discovered that there were three different types of Firebog spirits, although only the largest one ended up in the game as far as I can tell. Behold the two lesser spotted ones!

Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 3.45.12 AM

And finally we have our Uralia/Ilmenskie spirits:

Screen Shot 2014-09-12 at 3.48.15 AM

I never noticed that their caps had different designs before! Sadly, there weren’t too many of these in the game at all, which is a shame because they are rather pretty! In fact, when I tweeted this image last month, Kukubee informed me that there were actually more than these four, but they never made it into the game.

I hope you enjoyed this deeper look into the Street Spirits!

A few cooperative things!

Short little video for you guys today demonstrating some cooperation, rather than solo gameplay. Varaeth and I wanted to show you a few new two-person things that have begun to work since we’ve been working on the game. We showed you back in March that collaborative mining was working, but quoin sharding was not. Trading, transcendental radiation and even partying also work again. The party space is full of unconfigured spawners and teleport markers.

(Pardon the overall lack of polish in this video…we started to film it, then I had to reset the server for other reasons, which of course meant we both forgot to grab a quoin to get those badges out of the way. The reason it takes Varaeth so long to join me when we dive into the pool is because he was getting his badges and had a little lag on his end…

TL;DR: staging can be harder than you think when you’re still building a gameserver!)

A small peek into Ur

It’s been many months since we’ve been able to show off some basic gameplay, but we’d like to change that. We have a few videos planned for you all, so get ready! What I’d like to demonstrate to you today is how many higher-level things are happening in the background at the moment.

You’ll notice some weirdness which we will of course be attending to. Those poor street spirits will be dressed up properly very soon. If you missed Aroha’s tweet, we put a temporary room in the game for the locations we don’t have yet; this cut out a good number of errors so we can focus on the ones we need to fix. There’s some visual “noise” that’s from the god-client, like all those tooltips and things highlighting as I walked past them. (Or did that happen before? I forget!)

Anyway, without further ado:

A note on the achievements happening back to back: Glitch counted everything. I have been astounded looking through this code to see how much counting occurs. When we set up our player data for testing, by default we made them level 26 with some currants and iMG…the game just has a bit of difficulty parsing that with the fact that we didn’t earn them. Picking up a currant forces it to count, and it goes “yay, you have so much money!” and fires off all the relevant achievements.  Don’t worry, we’ll be starting from scratch when the time comes just like everyone else!

Playing Dress-Up

Here is a preview of our NEW concept for the Wardrobe and Vanity. The layout and functionality is entirely thanks to Joey!

For those that are curious, this interface is written using HTML and Javascript, but it’s calling upon the original Avatar Displayer SWF file found in the wardrobe. We’re all very excited about the Wardrobe and Vanity being more unified than it was previously – you can see how easily you can switch back and forth to customize your character’s entire appearance on the fly without needing to wait for each module to load independently. Enjoy!