So work is continuing on Spy Battle 2165 (www.spybattle.com). With Richelle‘s work on art and Mark‘s work on content is leading towards some new story elements for the game expected in February. We’ve added some periodic weather effects to the game to help liven things up and the redesigned “new player walkthrough” is being tested and the text reviewed. The design we’ve adopted for the tutorial is similar to what was done for the Star Pirates full graphics but with a little more interactivity. It is centered around special directives to help point new players to various things they can do in the game. We should also be able to apply this system to Star Pirates to update the walkthrough there as well.
Game development is always a balancing act, particularly for live, established titles. We always want to work inside the game, but at times the external elements need some attention. The work invested in maintenance is also hard to quantify for the users since, when done right, it’s entirely transparent. While I’ve been working on the look and introductory experience in Spy Battle, Admin256 has been working on game infrastructure for all our titles. The servers that house all the Starcrash games are older boxes and we’re overdue for an upgrade. That is something that should occur in February or March and should not affect the game; at least that’s the plan. If everything goes right, we’ll soon have a new landing page with a new introduction to a new UI on a more powerful server. All of this of course is part of “Christian’s Plan for World Domination!”… oh, sorry, wrong document. “Christian’s Plan to uplift Starcrash!”.
All of these changes are building up towards a renewed effort to market the game and attract a new group of users. We strongly believe that the content and community the game provides are still a relevant experience for many players who haven’t found us yet. However, we’re not quite ready! There are still some glitches in the new UI, and the redesign of the Special Directives is still in progress. We’ve already made some initial changes. Directives now have time limits and new directives don’t appear right away. There are also a few more graphic elements that need updating, but we are making progress.
The rest of the team is also making progress on our new mobile project named ‘Wasteland Heroes – Boss Wars.’ We are close to having some screens and artwork to share so expect more about that in the next blog.
Thanks again for playing our games!