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Developer Blogs > Tarken > The Workings of the American Magus Afloat


The Workings of the American Magus Afloat - Tue 27 Mar 2012
This past January marked my 3rd year as a wizard here on BatMUD, and my has it been getting busier and busier. I've worked on many things over the years and have a fair share of projects and responsibilities. I took the last two weeks or so off for the most part, as I finally beat Favorit's bugfixing record, claiming the reigning title for closed issues (almost 2500). It made for a rather laborsome Spring Break vacation, but at least it was fun. Now that I've been fully rested from my Bat-vacation, I'm ready to get back in the swing of things.

It took longer than I had hoped for, but I've finally found myself highly involved in and knowledgeable about ships now, which was one of my original intents set forth when immorting as a content and lib coder. Within the ship realms, I have several projects in progress. The first, is an expansion to ships and NPC combat, the boarders. The process to add modules and new combat options is quite lengthy and involves a lot of idiot-proofing and testing, as most changes in ship code cannot be applied until the next reboot. The release of the boarders will come alongside the release of the Island-Continent named 'Las Islas de Tormentas,' (Storm Islands) which will feature the pirate city and headquarters, Gutrota, among several other contributions by developers to the islands. This has been a co-operative project between primarily Dralith and myself, as well as Ens, Grediah, and Damut contributing.

In addition to the boarders addition, I have been making numerous changes and upgrades to the ship NPC combat algorithm. While not yet in-game, my goal has been to make them think like players as close as possible. Also, I've begun drafting and implementing parts (finally) to the new merchant navy reputation system. I'm hoping to soon have a way for people to offload their goods straight from their ship for money and reputation, minus a small fee. Hopefully soon as well I'll have another 6 ship skills/spells ready for implementation, but that's rather low-priority at the moment.

I've also had a few other content projects in the works. An area that I first started right when I wizzed, Asvera Village, might be finished soon. I've recently found the motivation to touch it again. I've also be reconditioning and expanding Blitzer's old Zorbul area from the early 90's. Lastly, I've been coding an area submitted by a mortal which will make a nice little addition. Yet, I seem to have succumb to the rather frequent inability for people to code to their won standards. :) I've also taken the Nergal project under my wing, after a recent push from upstairs to get the high-demand project rolling. Currently it is in design phase still, but I can generalize my plan at the moment as somewhat of a flavorful mix between some existing guild concepts and some necromancy. It will feature the use of powerful diseases and the control/use of undead servants.

As usual, the bugfixing never ends. Some day, I'd like to see them all closed. I don't understand even my own obsession with them, perhaps its the goal-oriented aspect, but there is SO much to learn about the game and how it works from these, as well as a HUGE(tm) repository of ideas which do actually seem to contain some gem ideas. Under my supervision, we now have four mortal bug-updaters, who assist wizards in organizing and investigating bug reports. Nuane, Ewige, and Spid help out with the general management of issues, and Ooga helps out with the ship-specific reports (accounting for as much as 1/4 of bug reports). These helpful fellas help search out and link duplicate/similar/related reports, reproduce certain issues, weed out known fixes, and provide valuable input to some submissions, reducing the valuable time spent by coders to the actual fixes themselves.

Lastly, in a recent venture, I've been trying to get involved a bit more in Bat's marketing and public image. I created a BatMUD Facebook page and have been moderating it as such. By regularly posting discussion topics and information on releases, we increase our appearance and search visibility on the web. It's also a more modern way of keeping in touch with the game and promoting the community aspect of the game most have grown to love and adore. We will also have a Twitter at some point, but we're working on securing the proper username from a name squatter, a rather lengthy and annoying legal process. It's my belief that we need to take a social media presence and cater to the constantly changing internet market. This way, we have a way for Archwizards and Developers to show how active we are, for players to post their in-game accomplishments to their social profiles, and for important informs regarding wizlocks and maintenance periods. Additionally, I've begun to make some regular promotional posts on the MUD Connector to try to increase our playerbase. We're quite close (<1000 away) to having 60,000 players, which is something certainly worth celebrating.

That's enough for now, as I need something to ramble about next week.
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