Fractured Universe - After the contest

The contest winners of the MMORPG contest won't be announced until sometime after Feb 14th and the game developers are... well... continuing with development.

At this point, winning would be a huge plus, but not our current goal; splitting the $1000 grand prize 4 ways (5 developers, but I'm forgoing my share of the winnings...) would be nice, but I'd also love to have the win, even just for the prestige of it.

Game updates

Since the final contest client, we've had 5 new patches (and possibly another one coming out tonight!) It's awesome that we're being allowed to patch the game and have it apply towards the contest... shows that the time and effort put into the patch / update system was well worth the time, effort and money.

Including the next patch, we've got several awesome updates.

Quests

The first quests (Ventin / Leska) were made mostly using scripts because of the "chaining" requirements, but with the updated quest system, chaining quests can be done through the back-end MMO editor... no scripting involved.

The quest system is growing leaps and bounds... quest chaining (one NPC that gives out multiple quests), and quests based one player type, stats, current XP, current money, etc are all easily achieved through the back-end quest editor. A few more minor features and this system should rival even the the best. We've combined all of the best features from World of Warcraft and City of Villains, plus added our own unique quest types to create the most versatile / flexible questing system around.

The end result is that once this system is completed (within days, not weeks) then we'll be able to resume adding new quests and provide over 100 different quest types. No more mundane "Kill 10 spiders"... ok, so we support that too, but the quest system is much more than that. Hopefully it's enough to keep a small player base... well... what's the word... "less than bored" is what I'm searching for ;-) "fully entertained" comes to mind :P

AI

We've started fine-tuning the AI / monsters, etc and now the same-level monsters are actually quite challenging... be careful! The wolves bite hard!

The monsters are a bit smarter and tougher... although we're still not finished placing AI nav nodes, the AI monsters are able to navigate around most obstacles, return to their spawn points after dispatching players, etc...

Next step... enhanced the agro system and place more nav nodes. Eventually I hope to be able to add quest / monster specific nav nodes too.

Oh, and look forward to new monster types in the near future as well!

NPC's

Although we've not added any NPC's, the one's we have are getting smarter by the day. Dialogs now change based on dynamic values such as money, XP, items, etc.

Inventory

The inventory system has been completely re-written to include NPC / Quest enhancements.

Wow, one small sentence for all of that work... :S I spent over a week re-vamping the inventory system and I'm finally happy with it...

New / Updated zones

Our author is busy creating back-stories for three new worlds (some as large as 10 zones!) including the new Keldata cyber-punk zone. We hope to have as many as 4 new zones completed by the end of March (for a total of 6 zones) in time for IMGDC... bring your laptops if you're going as we hope to start a mini-lan party :P

We've also updated the lighting (still a work-in-progress) to give the first zone a slightly different look to it... pretty nice looking. Well worth the effort.

Thanks to J. Ervin and Arteria Gaming, we've got some awesome tone-setting music that changes based on the zone / area you're in. From the theme-song when you're first in the game, light-hearted music while in-town and the creepy monster-growling music when you enter the catacombs... impressive.

Finish line and other deadlines

For now, our target finish date is Jan 1, 2008.

Alpha testing started a few weeks ago and we're opening it up to include more than just devs / friends. We're getting a lot of great feedback, and now that all of the assets are encrypted, it's not such a big deal if we give the client out.

Open Beta, although I hope we can do it sometime this summer, more realistically it'll probably begin sometime September 2007. When we start the open beta, we'll have the first 35 player levels defined, at least 4 worlds completely populated and all of the main game features finished.

Screenshots? Not this time... but if you want to see the game in action, sign up on our forums www.FracturedUniverse.com and ask for an alpha serial number in the alpha/beta signup thread. Make sure you sign up with a valid e-mail address, otherwise you might not get validated.