I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government. ~ Thomas Jefferson
I know it's been a long time since I've used this site for my postings, and it's time I fix that, and sorry for this coming so late. It's been an absolutely insane month and I've just now had the time to sit down and type all this. I got this space to be able to provide you with regular content, and I've been providing that regular content...just not in this space.
So I've been a little backwards in my own efforts and not doing it in a fashion that's really able to present itself properly. It's time I re-visit that effort.
From now on, I'll be putting the posts that I'm *personally* doing outside of Lightmare time here, rather than cluttering up the forums with post after post after post of my own stuff.
Without further adieu, let's hop into the topics for the June Edition of Infinity Development. We'll be talking about the following:
- Rebellion
- Foundation
- "Launcher" redesign
- CPE Goals
- LightMinds
- Infinity Wars Team Series
Rebellion
Rebellious attitude?
Oppression has been released, The Overseers are exerting their
will upon the Factions of Infinity Wars. Will you join them, or
will you rise up to join the Rebellion?
The primary reason I'm talking about Rebellion so early here is I wanted to mention a really neat shift in design flow for the process of creating sets. Due to the amount of artists we have and the time it takes to make an Animated Card in Infinity Wars, we had to have a very set timeflow in the past. It generally lead to art being done for a card, then design happening for it, and sometimes that lead to situations the designers shouldn't have been in.
Starting with Rebellion we've set ourselves up such that we're designing the cards first, then getting the art for them done. This is something we've wanted to do for a while, but timeframes kept that to a non-possibility. So we're going to test this process out with Rebellion and see how it works.
Foundation
So as everyone by now should know, we have the Foundation Set coming to help new players, and improve the draft experience. What will happen once Foundation comes out (as a reminder) is that in the Rift Run Draft Pool it will replace all Core, Rise, Infestation, and Ascension cards. Making a much more focused and enjoyable drafting experience.
We currently do not have an outlook on precisely when Foundation will be released, the original statement was a few weeks following the release of Oppression, and that's not looking like it will happen right now. When more information becomes available on this point we'll let you know.
Launcher Re-Design
We all know about these features that we'd love to happen in Infinity Wars right? Auction House, Spectating, Multiplayer, among others. The features themselves might be great, but a question came up and we had to retroactively look at our client and go....where in the puffy would we put it?
We came to the realization that new features would be great, and we could likely create them, but the Infinity Wars Client itself is an old amalgamation of frankenstein'd systems. It simply wouldn't be able to work very well with creating new systems and features and piling them on top of this already jumbled mess of UI bits and pieces.
Here's an example of what we're talking about
A large majority of people around the world will know what this is.
You may ask, why am I showing it to you? Let me explain. Within this screen, "actions" and other "windows" can happen *within* this launcher. You may not realize it, but this isn't the primary program of League of Legends. This is a launcher, that allows other things to happen inside it, and it can then launch the full game.
This allows for a large amount of options to be placed within this launcher, a much more effective process of navigation, *and* allows us to handle game connections in a completely different manner than what we currently do.
This is something we're discussing internally. Making the Infinity Wars client something that doesn't look like a Frankenstein of screens and menus, and inherently limits our own capabilities of features and effective presentation of the game. Both on the CPU load, and being able to actually make it work/look good as a cohesive unit.
Like I said, this is only in the discussion phase, so when more information pops up we'll talk about it.
CPE Goals While I won't be able to dive straight into details on where the CPE Discussion is at, I can provide you with what we'd like to accomplish. Firstly, let me give you a little quote from lead designer Ian Underwood. I asked him where our focus was right at this time, and when we think we'd be prepared to move to the CPE efforts. This response was likely one of my favorite things he could have said. Although it means more time in development, it also means safer development. | What we're doing right now is making the NPE perfect and fixing bugs first and foremost, I am making sure that what we've done lately is something we are all satisfied with before moving onto new things like the CPE and new Systems/Features; rather than leaving things half done and moving onto the next carrot all the time. |
The mission of the Core Player Experience (CPE) sprint is quite simple. Make the game easier to enjoy, and more enjoyable in general, for all levels of play. The "Grind", the collecting, the accessibility; it all factors into the same concept of helping people have fun. This is about feeling like you can log in and have an incentive, some motivation, enhancing competition; all of those in our minds tie into a more engaging product, and that's our goal.
Although the mission is simple, what that implicates is not. It's going to take time, and it's going to be a lot of work, but thanks to this amazing community of gamers we know that those efforts need to look like. Even if you posted an angry rant, or a simple thank you, or made a quick comment about something in global chat, you gave us feedback that was valuable. Thank you.
LightMinds
In LightMinds, that's precisely what I'll offer. Sometimes it might be an artist, sometimes it'll be a designer or technician. This month, it'll be one of our new QA Techs, Du-z. You'll remember we picked up two new QA Techs to help polish up the game and expand our bug fixing process, so I thought it'd be nice to let him give you lovely people some insight into what goes on for him behind the scenes.
Q&A:
Q: What is your role with Lightmare Studios?
A: Whipping boy. Seriously though, I'm a Quality Assurance Technician.
Q: Around how many issues in the month of June would you say you were able to "Resolve"?
A: Honestly I don't know an exact number, but JIRA got a lot of traffic from our office, let's put it that way. June was really heavily focused on further polishing of the new systems and features introduced in 1.4, balancing/tweaking Oppression, it's all happened so fast and it's been insane. We were able to get patches out much faster than usual thanks to the new processes in place, and we're hoping this trend continues while we can continue optimizing the game along with our own internal processes simultaneously.
Q: What is your current area of focus for Infinity Wars?
A: Making Oppression smooth like butter.
Q: What does an average day look like in the day of your aussie work-life?
A: Well, it looks a little something like the following flow chart.
- GIVE ME COFFEE!
- Morning Meetings
- Slapping code somewhere, whether it's bug fixing or working on testing feature development. This generally takes the majority of my time regardless of which side it's on.
- Lunch, and avoiding spiders.
- MORE KEYBOARD PUNCHING!
- 30 minutes or so of Infinity Wars, I usually do Rift Runs, because who can be bothered to make their own deck? That takes effort, I just wanna play man.
- Mount my trusty Kangaroo and hop home.
Q: What was the silliest/most interesting thing you worked on in terms of bugs in the month of June?
A: Bugfixing the CoV card Redirect was pretty tricky. We tried redirecting a redirect, and casting a death ray to see what the end result was. Also, finding out Redirect can target the top card in the grave, and if the enemy plays an Awaken or something, it would be Redirected. That was rather amusing.
Q: What's your favorite food stuffs?
A: Lasagna, wait no, BACON!
I just wanted to say thanks to all the players out there, Teremus gives us a lot of feedback from what you guys say and talk about, and I just wanted to throw it out there that without you guys none of this would be possible. So thanks for being sexy and awesome. See you on the battlefield!...or whatever Teremus usually says. Kappa
Infinity Wars Team Series
Essentially all I'm going to say here is what I'll be doing this upcoming week with this topic. I'm going to be making a post on our forums, and sending out a newsletter, encouraging people to make their own teams, and getting community artists to have some fun with logos. The Team Series is going to be once a month, and quite the opposite of the Pauper League.
Where the Pauper League is designed for everyone of all shapes and sizes to enjoy and have some fun with, the Team Series is going to be the pinnacle of competition. There's no minced words here, if you aren't ready for brutal competition, don't join a team.
Did you miss the Team Series Exhibition Matches? Well, that's easy to fix.
Thanks everyone!
See you on the battlefield!