Devlog January Round-Up; Internal Situation for 2017

I had a idea of setting up a small database and possibly get some help to make that a mod.

Plus it gives me something to do..

 

If so could you try and add stats like current killstreak, highest killstreak, player you killed most, etc?

 

That was indeed the intent for the player cards thing but the development of some sort of API behind it never went anywhere so they remained turned off. I've got a feeling having the avatar ingame along with even just registration time could help with a sense of identity.

WRT Cosmetics being a dead-end or bad allocation of resources - I'm not sure. The work from me would be just sitting down and coming up with some cool heads in the same theme. The work from MM would be hooking up steam APIs to some sort of "permission" system in-game for using those heads. There'd be no maintenance cost as far as I can see, at least nothing beyond what the game already takes.

It'd imo be a good way to address the calls from folks asking for some way to continue support, and to reward them for their continued support. It's the shortest-term, best reward case.

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WRT an open github mirror - this would be do-able, though we'd have to mess about with more subrepos to have a mirror for base/ (the only part we'd be interested in open-sourcing). I'll stick it on the list as something to consider, but I'm not sure how much use it'd get. We're using git internally as of a few months ago though, so it theoretically wouldn't cause that much hassle.

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WRT THD's financial future - It's kind of hard to draw any meaningful patterns over the course of THD's games beyond bad marketing.

Reason for that is that the only constant between most of the games is MM, the dev teams are totally different for each game and MM himself did very little on the gamedev of butcher (he just produced it), so even there the pattern breaks down a bit. Because the teams are so different game-to-game, the only money that "carries over" between projects is MM's as well. TR is the (unfortunate) anomaly there, where we both chipped in the costs and work of developing it (and lost out).

I'm not sure what MM will decide to do long-term, all I can say is we'll maintain KAG as long as there's a community, just as the Soldat team has with Soldat.

As a sidenote though, as I mentioned in the OP:

I'm working on something solo separately, as well as doing contract work, and you should definitely follow me on twitter to learn more ;)

 

Honestly, I miss mercurial, but apparently this was less hassle on the hosting side. Workflow is pretty similar but particularly when using gui tools (visual diffs are handy and MM is a terminal-phobe) we keep ending up with things like detached heads in subrepos for unknown reasons.

They have indeed committed a lot to the scripts, but it's mostly come from a pretty small slice of the community and in a pretty ad-hoc way. I feel like the thing you guys would get the most out of a github mirror for the scripts is being able to look up an older revision - but that history would only go back to whenever we start the github mirror.

Either way, I'll think about it. I can see some benefits, as long as the pushes to it are automated by our backend (so I don't have to maintain multiple remotes)

 

Oh I totally agree with those benefits for developers - particularly ones with a big pile of changes to submit (ideally as separate pull requests) - just most members of the community are not developers, and won't get much out of that.

Being able to see changes being made across the source (which files changed, how often) might also be beneficial to lay players as well.

Also, I can definitely sympathise with the tedium of manual change tracking after dealing with the modded server stuff today, across multiple machines.

 

From my half-aware-of-the-situation point of view, in the short term it would mean Fuzzle fixing things or updating the "betterment" work he did back in the day, which perhaps in this moment is simply something good for KAG.

 

re: "let me know what you think of me doing round-up posts like this"--
I'd say it's had a pretty good response. I've certainly enjoyed reading through a thread where the general attitude and quality of posts was on the upbeat, and I have to think that a large part iv that is due to the OP giving us/making us feel like we're on the inside track. It's so much easier to act like you're a valued member of the community when you're made to feel that way.

Just my two cents worth, seeing as no one else had said anything.

 

This is why most of us have stuck with KAG. It's a small, tight community with devs who interact with us and give us a say in the future of the game.

Keep up the good work Geti and the others at THD

 

will try to at least get one out monthly then.

 

Yay thanks for some proper feedback!

Thanks, thats why I did it. I'd like to get a bigger cohort of interesting maps for all the modes, but TDM is the one that suffers most from stale maps.

Wooden doors actually get marked invincible when loaded from the map. I could maybe just use "U bends" to keep the water out? I was thinking of making the blocker platform things into timed traps but it's a lot of hassle tbh. I'll see what I can do, thanks for testing it with "abusive player" mindset ;)

Er, is this from them blowing bits up with bombs? Or something else going wrong? Just running in before it's closed or something?

I feel like the author's intentions was always to have the option to jump up high on the middle and I didn't want to just turn it into a totally different map. I'm not a fan of it either way and would consider removing it from rotation if we had more maps (so it wasn't decreasing diversity).