The West Dev Blog

I leaked some screenshots …. I hope you enjoy

Some new  mountains, a small town, a lot of wood and rivers are shown here. Note town graphics are not final at all and this border will not stay :p

Some desert with a lot of details on the ground. A new job icon placed right in the middle. Our problem at the moment: Job-Icons at the actual state are not clear enough. If someone has good ideas feel free to post 🙂

And another screenshot with some roads towns, job icons, rivers and trees.

We are very happy about our progress and we are looking forward that we can announce  a date for any kind of public beta in the near future.

But there happened also a lot more changes in the development. We converted some more screen to new design Sheriff, Bank, a lot of fort buildings. We are nearly done with converting any windows to new design. i will hand out screenshots for the new windows later, because i don’t have the new screen on my development machine at the moment.

The development for new Interface has taken place and makes a good progress, hopefully i can present some pictures next week and tell you something more whats this all about.

Last but not least for this week we did a lot of optimization for php backend and also our chat server and still will go on a while. Our technical goal for 2.0 is it to get more performance out of the game this belongs to chat, server backend request and also the new interface and javascript code. It is our goal to get West 2.0 more smooth to play and everything should work with shorter response time.

As promised yesterday here is the addition to the new job system from our Game-Designer Ashock

Danger

The injury system will also be changed a bit in the new The West version. Only the probability to get an injury will be influenced by the job-points and no longer the damage. The damage will be a set amount of percentage rate based on the player’s maximum health. Thus a player with a huge health pool will have the same chance to seriously injure himself as does a ‘normal’ player.

This change should increase the ‘thrill’ in working as you never know if this work might kill you. There should no longer be messages like ‘someone shot you. You lose 1 health point.’, but rather ‘someone shot you. You lose 1500 health points.’.

Dropchance

The dropchance system for items will not be changed drastically. The drop values will be calculated the same as before but there will be a bonus on drops for shorter worktimes.

For products on the other hand the system will be changed a bit. The displayed dropchance for a product in each job counts for every task. For each task it is no longer possible to find more products but only one. If there is a 50% dropchance for a 15 second task, the players will get a product statistically every 30 seconds. For a 50% dropchance in a 2 hours task, the player will get a product statistically every 4 hours. This will of course have a major impact on the crafting system, which will be completely revised.

This new system should lessen the confusion about the drops of products and should give the player an easier understandable model for price calculation.

Experience and Money

As with the new job system the worktime can no longer be influenced every job will have a fixed experience value. The money value will still be influenced for every job by the workpoint bonus of the player. There will be a bonus on experience and money for shorter worktimes.

Further the needed experience to level-up has been increased by 3 times, but also the offered experience by jobs, quests, achievements, etc. were increased by the same amount. The necessity of this was plainly the fact that jobs at a worktime of 15 seconds produced experience values of less than 1.

Quests

The questsystem will get a slight change, as the quest requirement ‘worktime’ no longer fits the new job system. This requirement will be change to a requirement ‘task.done’, which requires a certain amount of finished jobs

Motivation and Energy

Every job will reduce the work motivation by 5% independent of the worktime for this specific job. For every day the motivation will be increased by 25% at midnight. Jobs with a motivation of 0 will no longer yield experience, money or item drops. Product drops are still possible.

Observed over a longer time period, jobs with a lesser worktime will need more energy than jobs with a longer worktime.

Both systems are to counter the offered bonuses for jobs with a lesser worktime, to prevent players from abusing the new system.

I read already a lot of misunderstandings and questions i hope this words will make some things more clear. But i think there will be still questions unanswered. I will try to collect all this misunderstandings and questions and try to answer them in this post, so beware of daily updates 🙂

Hi there,

i am happy to tell you that we already started with the development of Version 2.0 and we make good progress. I want to keep you informed about some states of the development in this post. So i try to make weekly updates, but first i have to secure that i am allowed to give out this informations 🙂

Before you will get a look into the development progress. Here is a list of all related topics for Version 2.0

New Map

The biggest change in Version 2.0 will be the change of the whole map. We will introduce new graphics and we will scale the new map to fullscreen.

Interface Redesign

The whole Interface of The-West will be changed, but don’t be scared our goals are: Get the interface more clear and more harmonious with the new windows. In the same task we will bring all windows into the new window style with Version 2.0.

Get a better start

With Version 2.0 one of our goals is: Bring new players to the game. In fact of that goal we will introduce some changes to the beginning of the game:

•  New Tutorial
• First jobs will take less time
• Movement speed will be buffed until you reached a specific level
• You are not able to use difficult features e.g. market , until a specific level

Jobsystem

There will be some changes in jobsystem. Make things easier to understand like gain expierence, gain money, find items and make stuff more clear for the player. Every job will have a fixed duration in version 2.0 so you don’t have to choose any duration for jobs anymore. We also recalculate formulas for new durations and  modified the hurt formula with version 2.0. So if you hurt yourself by robbing trains it can be possible to lose much live or even die.

Here some words to the upcoming changes from our Game-Designer Ashock

Jobs
In The West 2.0 the jobs will be fundamentally reworked in both visual representation and functionality. There will be less job icons on the map as up to five jobs will be grouped under one major job-group.  This job-group will be placed on the map as an interactive icon and opens upon clicking a radial-menu showing the five sub-jobs of this group. All current jobs will be represented by 28 job-groups with varying occurrences. In each county there are four common and two rare job-group occurrences, which accumulate to a total of 90 job-groups per county. Not all job-groups consist of five jobs, which leaves us the space to introduce new jobs in the future.

This change to the existing job-system was mainly done to improve the visual representation of the map and better blend the jobs into the map environment. Another aspect of the change was a better usability for the player as he will be able to find different jobs much easier due to an improved job screen, which will no longer only be usable for premium players.
Worktime
The worktime system of the current version will be totally changed in The West 2.0. Each job will offer a unique worktime and the player will no longer be able to select different worktimes for each job. Also the shortest worktime will be drastically reduced to 15 seconds. This means that some jobs require a worktime of 15 seconds, while for example others require 1 minute, 30 minutes or 2 hours. For each range of job-difficulty there will be different worktimes available, while the majority of the jobs switch from fast to slow jobs for higher jobpoint requirements. For example ‘scare birds from field’ needs 15 seconds and ‘free slaves’ needs 2 hours of worktime. To reward active playing we introduce a bonus for jobs with lesser worktime.

The reason for this change is that we want to offer a more active play style, which doesn’t force the player to passiveness especially in the beginning. This change is based on some analysis we made that most players quit the game in the beginning after they are forced into a longer waiting time. Nevertheless we still offer jobs for every range with a longer worktime to still support player who prefer a less active play session.

 

Preview Section – please keep in mind i just want to keep you informed everything i will post below are screenshots and / or  concepts from our development machines, so this are very very early versions. Most of them are not tested, finished or final.

2012-06-13: Some preview from the last week of development

Questbook, Saloon and Employer

We started to get the questbook into the new design

First we have the saloon with just a few changes its a little bit bigger and we use the new tab style, on the second tab your questbook with all quests which are not solved yet and on the third tab there are all solved quests. The saloon graphics has a bit too much light at the moment and the color are to bright. This will be changed in some days.

If you click on an employer you will get a window like that the employer will show you on the left site which quests are available and ready to accept. If you click on one of those quests on the left site you will get the detailed informations on the right site including things like description, rewards, requirements.

The new duel screen in tactical overview

Npc duel screen

Several other Windows were changed to new design but with no or less modifications:

Fingerboard, Buildingpages of fort, ranking, town overview, sheriff other town, ghosttowns, town invitations, found fort, you have no town window

Technical Development:

We have already completed some parts of the backend implementation of the new map this includes kind of caching systems, distribute systems and data structures. There is still a lot work in progress of course. From the graphical view there are round about 15 people at the moment which generate the map with our given editor. As soon as they finish their work we can bring it all together. I know this will be the most interesting part. Please stay tuned i don’t know when i can show you some preview of the new map.

Next big tasks for our development team: new job window, get new map backend working with new interface and on fullscreen with any resolution, modify backend for the new job system (fixed duration, new formulas), clean up a lot of old code in backend and frontend

I hope to hear from you and stay tuned for the next update from my site next week

P.S. In the next days i will post some more details about the job formula changes with another quote of our Game-Designer