As many of you know, we ran a multi-stage puzzle on Halloween. It was authored by handofg0d, and edited/programmed by the Crotch Zombie team. It went over very well for the most part. When we first envisioned how it would play out, we imagined that one eager player would work his or her way through it before the others. What actually happened was people tackled the puzzle in groups, through Skype, chat rooms and IDC. ...
I was feeling a little nostalgic today, and looked through old blog archives I had. I found this curious entry from 2006: Collaboration - September 7th, 2006 A couple of friends and I are working on a small project in our space time, and it’s been a lot of fun so far. One of the first things I did was set up a Writely document and added the other three guys as collaborators. ...
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. ...
Hey everyone, It’s been a while since our last post. That’s mostly because a) we now have a Twitter feed for everything we do and b) we’ve all been up to our asses in work — to serve you better. Nevertheless, I’m sick of my seeing that same stupid Zunecast post of mine! So, here’s an extremely vague and unsatisfying meta-update for those of you curious as to what’s happening with your seventh-favorite browser-based Internet culture RPG and Twilight fang-fiction repository (see what we did there?). ...
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! ...