Episode2

A few days ago, I checked in the last piece of code to Episode 2 that made it playable from beginning to end. It took a lot longer to stich together the storyline than Episode 1 did, I think because we tried to add variety to missions wherever possible. In Episode 1, the majority of the missions are “Pwn this forum.” While the gameplay still revolves around pwning forums in Episode 2, we tried to vary it up as much as possible. This meant a lot of extra programming, but I think the end product is worth it. ...

Note: If you just want to know the cost of Episode 2 and not our justification behind it, scroll to the bold part at the bottom. Nothing seems to divide our users more than the issue of cost. Last week I put up a poll asking how much you would pay for Episode 2, and as of right now it’s split almost 50/50 between those who say $0 and those who picked a cost. ...

Not everything in Episode 2 is related to new content. We’re using the development time to streamline some other things, such as the battle interface. Check out a new screenshot! The biggest difference is that we’ve re-claimed the top part of the screen. While in battle, normally the only links from the top menu you’d want are to Leave Battle or to Report a Bug. Instead of wasting inches of screen real estate on the logo and tabs, we’ve come up with a one-line version takes up a lot less room! The text “Emi” in the screenshot is the name of the test character I’m using. ...

It’s been a while since I wrote about Episode 2 stuff on the blog, even though I am spending the majority of my time these days working on it. One thing other RPGs have established is that grinding to level up your character feels a lot less like grinding when there is an objective just on the horizon. Right now, thanks to the community forums, there are more than enough forums to visit and pwn in Episode 1. However, besides levelling up your character or earning Flezz, there is little reason to visit them. ...

While writing Episode 2 Jalapeno purposely left a lot of it out of order. So when it came down to the stage of integrating it all together, I was left with a bunch of missions and forums that I could introduce to the player in any order I wanted. In Episode 1, we dabbled a bit with non-linearity, but we only had about 10 forums so we didn’t flesh it out very much. There are a couple of parts in the storyline where you can do things in the order you choose, but most of the time it’s a straight line. ...

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately on the introductory sequence to Episode 2. One thing that got a lot of positive attention with Forumwarz Episode 1 was the beginning, where Excre-Bot and Shallow Esophagus ease you into the universe and gameplay. We spent a lot of time designing that sequence and I think the effort paid off, as our number one complaint when we launched the episode was that players were left wanting more after their first hour or two of gameplay was up and their daily visits were gone. ...

Episode 2 of Forumwarz gives us a great opportunity to introduce changes to the gameplay balance. Since it’s a large content update we can piggyback on it with a bunch of adjustments to the balance between classes. We have been collecting feedback on the balance between classes forever, and we have a bunch of great ideas for where to start tweaking. The only problem is, tweaking even small stats on our classes means a lot of additional testing is required. When developing Episode 1, the best tool I had for this was my “Clone character” and “Reset character” tools. ...

I don’t think it’s a spoiler anymore that in Episode 2 we’re launching a new class, The Hacker. In Episode 1, the attacks you can execute are all about posting. For example, as a camwhore you’d post a picture of your cleavage to try and derail a thread. The hacker class gives us the artistic license to screw around with more than posts. The hacker can pwn the forum itself, and I’m currently having a lot of fun coding up the various attacks. ...

The Forumwarz creative team is hard at work bringing you the Nexxt Episizzode of your favorite web-based parody role-playing game. Today’s agenda is tweaking the Camwhore class and giving her some new visual attacks. Hot chicks making out and an upcoming episode of Forumwarz?! Now that’s what I call fapworthy! Now if you’ll excuse us, we have lots of work to do. And by “work,” of course, we mean, “searching for more royalty-free pictures of softcore porn.” ...

While we’ve been working on Episode 2 for a long time, the pace of development is about to change. Jalapeno Bootyhole is now able to focus on the writing full time, and now that INCIT is live we have no other major features in the pipeline. Starting this week, we are going to really start pounding out Episode 2! I promised when I started this blog that I’d give updates as to its status and I plan to fulfill this promise in a spoiler-free way! ...