Hey everyone, As threatened in our last post, here’s the podcast for your listening pleasure: The Episode 3 Development Podcast We did our best to cut it down to size, but it’s still an earful. We hope you find it an interesting and informative masturbatory aide. Thanks for listening!
So the great news is the gameplay upgrade launched quite smoothly. We also made some major server software upgrades and the site is running much faster for it. For the geeks reading this: we upgraded to Ruby 1.9.1, which is quite a big change from Ruby 1.8.6. It’s over 3x as fast in most of our benchmarks! Following the gameplay tune-up, I have turned my focus to Episode 3. While I haven’t been working on Episode 3 full time until recently, Jalapeno Bootyhole and his talented apprentices have been churning out content for months. There is a lot done, and I will end up spending most of my time integrating it. ...
When Episode 3 of Forumwarz launches, there will be hundreds of new items available for players to obtain, trade and use to their advantage. Since we’ve covered the basics of Episodes 1 and 2 with itembuildr already, we’re going to hijack itembuildr for a while to create Episode 3 content. The content you guys create will exist when Episode 3 launches in addition to the hundreds of items we’ve created internally, so there will be plenty of new shopping opportunities. ...
I’m delighted to announce that after months of development, we’re going to launch the new gameplay enhancements on September 10th. Addtionally, the new gameplay features will also herald a new Domination season!. We due for a new season, and since things are changing so much we figured it would be better to not mess with the existing medals and winners too much. Important Launch Notes The migrations for the new gameplay changes are HUGE. The database has to change in about 20 different ways, some of which could take hours to process. So rather than do our typical “The site should be down for a few hours” thing, we’ve scheduled a full 24 hours of downtime. This will happen directly following the ending of the current domination round, at 9:30PM EST on September 9th. So we can expect the site will be up by 9:30PM on September 10th. ...
Features in the Gameplay Revamp: In early June, we begun development of a new fork of the Forumwarz code base, with the goal of making the core gameplay more varied and interesting. For a long time we’ve been happy with the storyline and textual content of the game, but the gameplay just hadn’t scaled up as quickly. While role-playing games are notorious for repetitive gameplay (there’s a reason it’s called grinding), we had a lot of room for improvement. We started with a long list of enhancements that was built from community suggestions and our own gameplay ideas, and drilled through it until we’d gotten a lot done. ...
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Zunecast (yeah, I’m calling it a Zunecast, wanna fight about it?) and last time I was unable to participate thanks to technical difficulties. Since we have some major features coming up (Episode 3, Forumwarz Apprentice), and I love the sound of my own voice, I figured now’s a good a time as any to answer some of your questions using a medium other than my keyboard. ...
Jalapeno Bootyhole is looking for a summer intern: a brilliant, talented wordsmith whom he can mold into the next great writer of online parody role-playing games — a very in-demand career choice, we might add. Does this sound appealing? Check out the ridiculously long application on our Flamebate boards and then decide if it’s right for you! This could be a fantastic opportunity and a chance to help make Episode 3 even more awesome than we assume it will be. Good luck to all applicants! ...
I’m happy to announce that greasemonkey superstar Invariel is joining Crotch Zombie over the summer to work on a game extension to Forumwarz. Invariel caught our attention by writing a useful script to make Forumwarz raiding easier. He’s also going to be sitting in on our Episode 3 meetings, so I’m sure he’ll get his fingerprints all over that too! More details on what he’s working on will come in the future! ...
We’re pleased as punch (the tasty kind that you drink, not the painful kind you get from mean people) to announce that we’ve added five new mods to create an all-star, balls-out, ass-kicking team of internet arbitration! Say hello to spacekadt, Nicco, dobnits, Aldo_Anything and Sergeant Cid (aka Acid Flux)! They’re going to be making things a little less Goatsey around these parts. Show them some mod-love in this official announcement thread! ...
I’ve been updatting Twitter a lot more lately than the blog, mainly because most updates don’t warrant a full posting. If you have a Twitter account you can follow forumwarz for more frequent updates. Actually, even if you don’t have Twitter you can just subscribe to the RSS feed there and you’ll get all our updates. Here’s some stuff you might have missed: New Hardware The site has been pretty laggy lately. We decided to finally do something about it and ordered 3 brand new servers, all of which are faster than our current server. They’re currently being set up by our hosting company and hopefully we’ll be able to switch over pretty soon. ...