Posts Tagged ‘episode3’
Haven’t bought Episodes 2 and 3 yet? Now’s the time!
For a limited time, we’re offering Episodes 2 and 3 together in a package for 150 Brownie Points!
That’s a savings of 50 Brownie Points versus buying them individually, and means you can now pick up both Episodes for under $15. The feedback for Episode 3 has been phenomenal so far, so be sure to take advantage of this sale while it lasts!
Log in, and check out your Support Us tab for more information.
Episode 3 is Live!
Thanks to the grand efforts of our Beta team, Episode 3 launched today with very few issues. I’m watching the server right now and many people are playing through the new content!
As I’ve said before, this episode is really important. Releasing it means that we’ve followed through on initial plan. If you check out the updated credits page, you’ll see that we were only able to do this with the help of many other talented individuals! I thanked them yesterday, but I’m going to do it again.
What’s new in Episode 3
- The conclusion of the storyline that begun in Episode 1
- All new attacks, forums, characters, cinematics and mini games: in fact, there’s more content than Episode 1 and 2 combined
- Enhancements to our user interface: there’s dozens of tweaks included in this release
- More moral choices, and different content depending on your alignment
- Multiple endings, depending on your choices.
- Several major storyline branches that you can complete independently of each other.
Forumwarz Orange(tm)
We’ve also launched a trial of Forumwarz Orange(tm), which is an enhanced interface geared towards power users of the site. All users who have reached the end of Episode 1 will receive a Tubmail inviting them in and explaining what’s available. The interface is free right now, but we plan to charge for it in the future once we figure out a fair price and gather user feedback on the new tools.
The Shit Hit The Fan: A disgusting bonus game
If you’re not busy playing Episode 3, you might want to head over to Kongregate to try out The Shit Hit The Fan. It’s a filthy mini game that occurs right near the beginning of Episode 3, but we’ve decided to release to the public for fun. Don’t worry about spoilers: the game reveals almost nothing of the Forumwarz storyline.
Thanks so much to all our users for being so supportive! The game is better because of all of you!
-ET
Tomorrow’s the big day!
As you all know, tomorrow we’re opening the flood gates and launching Episode 3 of Forumwarz to the world.
I’m super proud of this Episode. It is by far our biggest update to date, and it concludes the story arc that we started out on years ago.
I want to take this last moment of silence before the storm to thank all the non-CZ people who contributed to this episode. I’m talking about all the writers who dreamt up the characters and missions, the artists who created new images, the people who recorded their voices for tubsonics and the testers who relentlessly helped to polish the whole thing.
It was a monumental effort and I think everyone who plays through the new content will appreciate it.
Launch Details
I’m going to take down the site at 9AM EST. As the regulars know, it often takes hours and hours to get things ready, so expect the game to launch sometime in the afternoon. While the site is down we’ll set up a cool chat room to chill in and watch people doing nothing on their web cams.
-ET
Episode 3 November Update
It’s been a while since we released the Episode 3 podcast and our users have resorted to threats of ransom for updates!
As you can imagine, a lot of progress has been made towards finishing Episode 3. I am looking at my Episode 3 flowchart right now and far more is crossed off than isn’t, and every day I cross off some more. Right now the majority of the development is in my hands, as all the conversations/items/forums have been built for some time.
A couple of weeks ago during our meeting, I told Jalapeno and BingeBot 2015 that if I worked my ass off, I could have a beta out quickly. But we all decided it was in everyone’s best interests to take our time with it and not rush it out. We want Episode 3 to be as awesome as possible, and if that means launching a little later so be it.
I’m still not sure how long Episode 3 will take to play through (we’ll need beta testing for that), but content wise it’s pretty enormous. I think in most metrics, Episode 3 is bigger. I found out this morning that there are more sTalk conversations in Episode 3 than in Episodes 1 and 2 combined!
So please be patient with us. The worst of the wait is over, and it’s just a matter of time before we’re ready to open our beta testing and announce a release date.
-ET and the crew
The Episode 3 Development Podcast
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.
We have a much better idea of what shape Episode 3 is taking and can now answer a lot more of the questions we’ve been putting off since Episode 2 launched. It seems like a great time to do another Podcast, so we’d like to invite anyone interested to post their questions in this thread on Flamebate
Finally, a public service announcement: We have been updating the blog far less frequently since we started using Twitter. A lot of our announcements are better suited to short sentences than long posts. If you are looking for Forumwarz news you should watch us there, too. You can find a link on the right hand side of this blog.
Invariel joins Crotch Zombie
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!
Episode 3 Stuff
It has been about 6 months since we launched Forumwarz Episode 2!
The initial plot for Forumwarz was written quite some time ago. Based on a few meetings where the team discussed what we’d like to have in the story, Jalapeno Bootyhole wrote up an outline. (At the time we were planning on releasing the entire game in one go, where half way through you’d be forced to pay to finish the storyline.)
As we got into the development and writing we figured out that it would be a lot more work than we thought to finish the whole story before we ran out of money. We decided to split the game into Episodes. Three made the most sense, so we found logical end points and adapted the story accordingly. Reviewing the document now reminds me how far we’ve come:
First mission:
You get a popup message, that refers to whatever search term you came up with.
Bottom corner: Dr. Mysterion/Johnny Anonymous/HornySanta24/AnonImus/Shallow Esophagus has added you to his IM list!
Some presence (Sentrilion? Googhole?) adds itself to your IM list. I know you were searching for pictures of monkey snatch, but: Can I talk to you for a minute? Yes/No, doesn’t matter. Singles you out for never having done anything in your life. Says you can change the world forever, just have to listen to instructions. “Why me?” etc. Not important. Asks you to destroy this forum. He’ll make it worth your while, and if not, you can block him.
Hah, part of me wishes we went with Dr. Mysterion now!
Throughout the design stage, I referred to the overall storyline as the mythology. In other words, the story that glues together the entire universe. We also introduced a lot of side missions, which are basically interesting characters with a gripe that want you to help them out for money.
Episode 3
Episode 3 is the last piece of the mythology, as far as we’ve written it. People keep asking me what we have planned for the game after that. Well, just because this particular storyline ends doesn’t mean we can’t create others. We aren’t about to abandon the franchise just because what we initially wrote runs out!
We are committed to working on Forumwarz as long as it is viable to do so. I’m not sure what form that will take, because we’ll likely want to take some time to imagine our options, but it might be a new storyline split up into episodes, or single one-off episodes that have shorter but self-contained storylines.
In a little while, Jalapeno Bootyhole will enter the heavy lifting aspect of the writing process. We’ll work together to create a detailed outline of the events in the game, the actor dialogue, the forums, the gameplay, etc. It will take some time, but once the ball is rolling you’ll hear a lot more about it and what’s contained.
But first, the combat revamp!
While Jalapeno is fleshing out the writing, I plan to spend some time beefing up the existing gameplay. In Episode 1, you spend so much time learning about the different aspects of the game that time flies quick and before you know it you’re finished. In episode 2, the storyline is much longer, so the limitations with the existing combat engine are more evident. It ends up playing too much like World of Warcraft, where you hit the same combination of keys on the keyboard over and over.
I have some good ideas on how to improve combat and make it more intelligent, and I want to spend some time implementing them into the existing game. I’ll need a bunch of volunteers from every class to help test the new mechanics, and there will likely be some speedbumps along the way, but in the end I think it will be worth it.
Look for more on that in the coming weeks.
The three most common question:
These are what I get asked most frequently about Episode 3.
When is it coming out?
We aren’t giving a release date because we’d rather launch it when it’s stable than push it out too soon. Based on our previous history, a release towards the end of 2009 is likely. Episodes 1 and 2 were both released in October.
How much will it cost?
We’re not sure yet. It’ll depend how long it is and how epic it feels. We are certainly not out to gouge people so it’ll stay affordable like Episode 2 was. Last time the pre-order was successful, so we’ll probably offer that again when we have a release date in sight.
Can I beta test it?
Last time the beta tester feedback proved to be invaluable. However, we made some mistakes about letting everyone into the beta at once. Once most people had finished it, they had little reason to start again and test it fresh. This time I plan to have multiple beta sessions, staggered from each other.
We’ll probably be hand picking most testers based on their feedback of the game (we even like harsh criticism) and based on their ability and willingness to spend time playing an unfinished game. However, we might end up doing a random selection of people. If we create a sign up list for random selection, you’ll hear about it on this blog!
A bunch of new stuff!
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.
There will be some downtime as we switch over. This is a pretty major change so it might take the larger part of a day to switch over, but it should be worth it for the performance we’ll gain.
Tubmail Updates
I’ve pushed out some early upgrades to Tubmail, which should help if you have many messages in your inbox. It’s now paginated, and you get much more screen real estate to view the list of messages.
ItemBuildr Results
We’ve published a few ItemBuildr items already. You should check out the ItemBuildr section of the site and the store to see the awesome stuff our users have come up with.
What’s next?
Over the next little while I’ll be putting out many little enhancements to existing parts of the site such as Tubmail and Flamebate. If you’ve been part of the community for a while I’m sure you’ll be glad to have some of the new tools we plan to build.
We’re starting to work out a schedule for Episode 3 development, too. It’s a long way away, but we’re getting ready to get the ball rolling on that one too.
Official Forumwarz Blog 