Wait… Has it really already been a year since we first invited our tiny group of testers in? Huh… Who knew? Time sure does fly, doesn’t it?
Well, we’ve certainly come a long way in that time. There have been some major stability updates, most of the main game features are working, or very close to working, we’ve got a few web app screens close to ready, and our user base is getting close to 100 players… Wait a minute… I just said close to, didn’t I? And 100 isn’t even prime, so why the heck would I even say such a number!?! Let’s say 101, and let’s see what we can do to get up to that number ASAP!
Later today, I’ll open up a thread in the forums where I want as many awesome and crazy creative posts that you can imagine! Good at drawing? Make us a funny doodle. Bad at drawing? Scribble something anyways! Like to write? We enjoy all kinds of poetry and stories. Whatever you do, just give it a piece of your heart, and you’ll be in the mix to get added to the alpha test group.
I’ll leave the thread open for about a week, and then a small group will comb through the submissions to find their favorites (and we may even pick a couple names at random). The winners will be informed shortly after decisions are made. If you don’t make the cut this time, don’t worry, we’re thinking up new ways to start adding people on a more regular basis as well, so stay tuned!
Happy creating!
-Kaiyon
P.S.: Let’s all take a brief moment of silence for Glitch in honor of the third anniversary of its shut down. While what we are doing here wouldn’t be possible without it’s untimely end and the amazing generosity of those who made it, it’s left a gaping whole in the hearts and minds of so many people that we can only hope to fill again someday.
Going to Dragon Con in Atlanta, Georgia this year? So am I! Well, a small part of it…
Want access to the Alpha AND going to Dragon Con? Hmm… maybe we can work something out.
Here’s the deal:
I’ll be at Dragon Con Friday, from around lunch to dinner time, and then I’ll be watching the parade on Saturday. During those times, if you happen to find me wandering around in my Eleven t-shirt, I’ll be giving the first 5 (or so) people access to the Alpha!
Already in the Alpha? Still come and find me, I might be able to hook you up with something too (after the con).
I’ll update this post with a picture of the t-shirt before the con, and I’ll try to post some updates to twitter during the event (@ElevenKaiyon and @ElevenGiantsMMO).
So, it’s been a long while since my last big post… Sorry about that. Time to rectify away, though!
Since my last State of the Project post (way back in August of last year!?!) we’ve accomplished a whole lot! Time for a list (in pseudo-chronological order)!
Vanity/Wardrobe
We rolled out our combined version of a Vanity/Wardrobe system. While we haven’t hooked it up to the account system yet, we’ve got a solution for integrating it with the game in internal testing/review right now. In the meantime, you can save/load your creations via a bit of text. If you haven’t checked it out, you can find it here.
Housing
While housing (along with the associated streets and friend signposts) is set up and working, there’s some architectural and infrastructure stuff keeping it (and other instanced areas) from working in anything other than a test environment at the moment. I’ve been chomping at the bit to get this rolled out, but we’ll just have to wait a bit while we work out some of the other kinks.
Pathfinding
Our NPCs can move! While we still have a few bugs to work out here and there, most of the NPCs are fully functional, though we don’t have foxes working yet.
Namerizing
Eleven Wardrobe Namerizer
We requested some help from our amazing community to provide new names/descriptions to the items in the wardrobe, since that data has been lost to us. While we might have been able to simply dig around to find the lost info somewhere, we thought it might be a good opportunity to put our own (and some of your) personal touch on things. It’s closed down at the moment, but keep your eyes out for other ways you can contribute in the future (we may even open this, or something similar, back up)!
Throwaway Server – Thrown Away!
That old Throwaway Server we were always talking about? It’s no longer being actively used for development. Instead, we’ve pushed the real thing up on GitHub along with a couple of other repositories. Full disclosure though, there are still a couple of repositories we’re holding private for the moment that are necessary to run the game (if you want access to contribute, just send us a message from the info over on the Contact Us page.
Alpha Release
We finally managed to get things to a point where we could welcome people into both the forums (public) and the game (private). We’re continually adding more people to our testing group as activity levels and system stability allow, and we’re making loads of progress in getting things ready for bigger audiences. An unfortunate disclaimer though, we’ve still got a long road ahead of us along with some major changes that need to be made to our core system in order to get things ready for that next level which I’ll address a bit more later.
This also gave rise to our forums (you are signed up… right?), which has had a great turnout of former Glitchen and new players excited to get in on the action.
MMOGames Editors Choice Award for February 2015
We won! Thanks to our amazing community, we won MMOGames first ever Editors Choice Award voting, and had an interview (with yours truly) run because of it. Check it out here.
Current Happenings
Architectural Issues
You may have seen our most recent blog post regarding some of the issues we’re working on, but I’ll summarize either way. Basically, some of the features we’re taking advantage of in order to get our system working well in a distributed environment also make it perform insanely slowly. While this kind of performance doesn’t hinder a very small user base much, if we were to increase the load on the servers, things wouldn’t go very well right now.
Some experimentation has been done in order to try and improve things without rewriting our entire infrastructure to avoid use of the problem features, which has had at least a little success, but we’re still working towards better solutions and closely monitoring the respective progress by the node.js/io.js teams (did I mention we’ve been experimenting with both, and are excited about the merging of the two projects back together?).
QA2
The QA2 process has started, which means our team is combing through every single level in the game and trying to make sure every barnacle is pointing the right direction, every vendor has a nice and consistent look, and a million other tiny details that these perfectionists are keeping a close eye on. We’ve already rolled out one of the Groddle regions, and are slowly working through the rest. I’ll get one of the team members to write something up for the blog soon.
Wrap-up
We’ve been making a good bit of progress on bug fixes while we’ve been trying to sort out the big issues. We’ve also got a setup for an integrated vanity/wardrobe that we should be able to roll out relatively soon to the alpha testers and are trying to add more testers whenever possible; we’re currently up to 53 users, though there’s typically only a handful on simultaneously.
That’s all for now, folks! While progress may have slowed down a bit due to outside obligations and our fun architectural issue, be certain that we are very much committed to seeing this through, so we’ll get it working one way or another.
Thanks to all of your votes, we won, and should get some nice coverage from them due to it.
If you’re curious to see how well our amazing community did in the voting, take a look here: http://www.mmogames.com/topmmos/mmogames-editors-choice-february-2015/
-edit- The interview I did with the editor is available now here: http://www.mmogames.com/gamearticles/glitch-revival-project-interview-project-lead-eleven/
Well, as I’m sure you all know (you do, right?) we’ve let a small group of 13 people into the game to start playing around and testing. This has been a great success, with many improvements being made to help improve the stability and experience while some other work is ongoing in order to bring over some more features. Thanks in no small part to these improvements, we’re bringing in another small (but bigger!) group to help with the process.
How’s 18 sound, making a total of 31 alpha testers? We’ve already picked those new people and let them know. If you weren’t part of the group this time, just hang tight while we tighten things up more.
And now for some feedback from our testers (They provided a lot of material for this part, but in the interest of not facing TLDR issues, I picked out a few comments. They can yell at me later.):
“I feel at home and the nostalgia is overwhelming!”
“Incredible!! I didn’t expect it to be identical to Glitch which it is.”
“(S)ome days there are no new bugs(yay) and other days there are quite a few, and often they cause reloads but it’s all part of the process.”
“It’s good to be there, to almost feel the heart of the Giants. Just like if I went through a portal that brought me in Ur a few glitch-years after the events that put an end on Ur. Back in a broken but fixable world, because we have the technology, we can repair it. A bit of a post-apocalyptic atmosphere, if you have the imagination.”
“Things that arent working yet, npc, and emblems, and such. I can’t do basic quests without simple ingredients like butterfly milk and grain.” (Regarding what’s annoying)
“Default Glitchen æsthetics. Bare, bald, grey, and not being naked. Generic! Although we could be wireframed. Generic might be good then, the pants are superfluous.” (Regarding what’s annoying)
It’s been exactly 2 years to the day since we thought we all lost the world of Ur forever. It most certainly was a sad day for me, and I’m sure I can say the same for the rest of the team (those that played at least). Little did we know at the time that just under a year later, we’d be given the opportunity to bring it back…and that exactly a year later, we would be able to walk around in Ur, even though it was only on a single street. It’s been a year of hard, but fun work, and while we’ve got a long ways to go, significant progress has been made.
Welcome Home
As those that have been keeping up with the blog may know, we started work on our ‘true’ server, the one that’s going to be for keeps, a while back. Since we’ve had a chance to figure out how most of the main game functions work, the true test there was going to be getting the overall system architecture set up in such a way that we’d have the stability and organization we need in order to bring the world back together as we left it 2 years ago, and allow a full load of players. Well, while only a very minimal set of gameplay functions have been implemented in the ‘proper’ way on this new version of the server, we feel we’re ready to open up, albeit to a very small group to start.
It may sound like a tiny number, but we’ll be welcoming 13 people in to start. How are we going to choose those 13 people? This first group will be a mix of people we’ve identified as good testers and 5 people brought in based on their levels of interaction with our group via social media (Facebook, Twitter and here on the blog). Different rules will likely apply to future groups coming in, such as contests and/or first-come-first-serve registration, but those 5 people will be identified and notified shortly. For now, one of the most important things to remember for testers is: Alpha is really not about playing the game at all, but often rather tedious testing and enduring crashes and bugs and… stuff…
How are we going to let people in to the game? Well, that’s where the web app piece comes in to play. Our shiny new forums are launching today as well! Everyone will be welcome to register and chat on the forums for now, and those chosen to participate in the Alpha will be given access to the game through the same login along with a special Alpha only forum. The forum url will be announced in approximately an hour via Facebook and Twitter. (Update: look here! http://humbaba.elevengiants.com )
While we’re glad to start bringing people in, please remember that this is a work in progress, and we’re likely to experience some growing pains as we move forward, and since this is a volunteer project, please bear with us while we work these things out. As always, your best source for updates, whether they be related to issues we’re having, rules for bringing in the next batch of alpha testers, or announcements for new functionality being rolled out will be right here on the blog, on Facebook and on Twitter. Further information for how you can help out as an Alpha tester once you’re in will be found in the Alpha forums.
Again, welcome home,
-Kaiyon
P.S.: Please look forward to follow up posts from some of the key team members that have helped make this happen.
P.P.S.: Special thanks go out to Aroha, Joey, JustinD, LadyCeres, Scheijan, Turnip and Varaeth for their contributions to this last push towards Alpha, and of course to the rest of the team for all of their hard work on the rest of the project.
Well, okay, I may have missed the exact date, but in my defense, my family was fighting a severe case of the plague (that may be a slight exaggeration, but it sure felt like it).
Just a few days over a year ago (November 21, 2013), our little team started to form. At that point, there was no “Eleven” and there was no project, just a group of people picking around in the assets released by Tiny Speck to try and make sense of what was there, and just as importantly, what wasn’t. While this discussion started up on a private Facebook group (amongst other places), it quickly transitioned over to this amazing product called Slack when Ali (LittlePoundCake) joined the discussion and opened the doors for a few of us to help manage a group of people similarly interested in figuring this whole thing out. From there, we quickly decided we wanted our main goal to be filling in the missing pieces and bringing the amazing world of Ur back to life.
It’s been an incredible experience so far, and while I know we’ve put a ton of work into it, we’ve a long road ahead to fully reach that goal, and then we’ve got the future to consider! I could reminisce for several paragraphs, but I’ll leave that out right now (you can always look back at the blog archives).
I know it’s been pretty quiet on our social media front over the past month or so, but please don’t take that as a sign off stagnation. In fact, it’s just the opposite; we’re working very hard to bring some big things to you all, our loyal followers and displaced residents of Ur. While I’d love to spill the beans now, please bear with us just a bit longer; announcements will be made soon (don’t you love that term?)…
I know the resource routes were a bit of a polarizing game feature. Most people either loved or hated it. Well, here’s a quick video showing a short one in action!
A couple quick notes:
We only have the one street template to work with at the moment which I tried to piece together from a full street snap of one of the old ones. We’re working with TS to see if we can get access to the original templates.
Butler motion is still a little buggy. Most of them are standing still next to the house, but one of them (the one on my street) is stuck in front of my tower.
