Posts Tagged ‘itembuildr’
itembuildr: The Episode 3 Hijack
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.
This is how it’ll work:
- The stats of items will be hidden. We will assign them later.
- All winners will get a special Episode 3 item contributor E-Peen(tm)
- The winners will also get an IOU for the item once Episode 3 launches. These IOUs can be traded via Kyoubai in the meantime, so it’s a great way to earn extra Flezz.
You can start building Episode 3 items right now! Have fun!
itembuildr Updates
We’ve listened to your feedback on itembuildr and pushed out a few updates:
- The item-generating code is a lot better. There should be fewer random repeats of the same item class. You should never get the same item class twice in a row. Secondly, there are fixes to prevent pricing from going way out of whack (like with the Dragon Ball items.). Thirdly, we can create special items for all classes now (like Hackers!). Unfortunately, I had to make adjustments to a few of the existing items to keep their prices in line with our economy.
- There are two new E-Peen(tm) for itembuildr — one is for having your idea chosen. The second is for having your image chosen.
- A bunch of items built with itembuildr have been moved into the regular stores. Each item will display credits for its creation. They have subsequently been removed from the ItemBuildr consumer’s co-op.
I’m hoping these fixes will go a long way to making itembuildr a lot more useful and fun for everyone. As always feedback is appreciated.
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.
itembuildr is live!
Today I’m delighted to announce the launch of itembuildr, our latest system for players to create content in the Forumwarz world. Whereas forumbuildr allowed players to create forums, itembuildr allows you to create items that your player can actually equip!
Here’s how it works:
Step 1. The itembuildr gnomes come up with an item type and stats.
This is done automatically, and is mostly random. The item will either be an equippable item or a junk item. It can be anything from a .moar file (in fact, our first build is a video .moar file) to a tattoo or even a special item. Pretty much anything that can be equipped can be designed by our players.
The stats for the item are generated by marrying two existing items together from a particular class, plus a little random mutation thrown into the mix. So you don’t have to worry about designing some kind of super item that’s better than anything in the game. Everything should be within the limits of what we consider acceptable.
Step 2. People submit names and descriptions
Any character on Forumwarz can submit a name and description for the item. They are told what type of item it should be and what it’s stats will be, and they can submit exactly one idea. The submission period lasts 24 hours.
Step 3. People vote on the names and descriptions
On the second day, people will anonymously vote up and down other people’s ideas. Again this lasts 24 hours. After the voting period ends, the winner is picked as the official name and description of the item.
Step 4. People submit images for the item
Now that the item name and description is known, people can submit images for it. Each character can submit one image for consideration.
Step 5. People vote on the images
Again, a new voting period occurs and people can vote on the best images. After 24 hours, the best image is picked and..
Step 6. The item is published!
The item will end up in an itembuildr store at first for a limited time, along with recently published items. People can purchase the item and begin trading it on Kyoubai (or just stockpile it for their collections.) The best items will also be moved (at the discretions of admins) into the actual game stores, so anyone playing the Forumwarz storyline can purchase them.
Working in Parallel
Now that we’ve explained the pretty straightforward flow of the itembuildr process, you’ve probably figured out that it takes 4 days for an item to go from concept to the store. That would mean about 90 new items a year, which isn’t nearly enough for our rabid users.
Instead we’ve designed the process so that we’re designing two items in parallel!
The way this works is that we’ve broken it into a two day cycle of submitting and voting. During the submitting day, you can submit ideas for items, but you can also submit images for the previous winner. Then on the voting day, you vote for both. So it still takes an item 4 days to be created, but there are always two on the go. Cool huh?
How to access it
You can start using itembuildr right away by logging in and clicking on the multiplayer tab. Today we are only submitting item ideas since it’s the first time it’s being run.
Feedback
As always, we welcome feedback on the process, the interface and the integration into Forumwarz as a whole. Let us know what you think and how we can make itembuildr a great piece of the Forumwarz universe!
What’s Coming!
fig 1.1
So Kyoubai has been quite the success! Since it launched just over two weeks ago, we’ve hosted over 40,000 auctions with 150,000 bids. At any given time, there seems to be over 1,000 auctions to peruse for stuff like rare .moar files.
Thanks to all our users who offered input and helped us tweak the system so that it’s easier to use and less prone to exploits.
Up Next: ItemBuildr
Last night during our weekly brainstorming meeting, we discussed our next project: ItemBuildr.
ItemBuildr is to items as ForumBuildr is to forums. Every week there will be a competition where items are created by our users for the community.
The beauty of ItemBuildr is that it will mean a steady trickle of new equipment, junk and collectible items into the game economy. And unlike other popular MMOs, each item in our game will have a hilarious blurb of text inside it.
ItemBuildr is kind of the yang to Kyoubai’s ying, in that it guarantees that there’s always fresh new items to be traded back and forth.
Kyoubai: The Forumwarz Auction House
We’re getting pretty close to launching our first major feature since Episode 2 was introduced back in October. It’s called Kyoubai, and it’s an auction house that allows player to auction their items to each other for Flezz.
The name Kyoubai was chosen by the horrible denizens of Flamebate in a series of polls. It is one of several Japanese translations for auction, but it also sounds a lot like Ok, you buy!.
The mascot of Kyoubai will be BidSquid (a cartoon squid with a cowboy hat and a gavel). He’ll be the one who corresponds with you when you are outbid or when you win an auction. He’s going to be designed by the talented artists at Dooomcat. They’re the ones who designed the awesome homepage for Forumwarz, as well as the player class portraits you get when choosing your class.
How the auction house will work:
- You can select virtually any unequipped item from your inventory and put it up for auction.
- You set the starting price, as well as a length of time to run your auction (12, 24 or 72 hours).
- Optionally, you can set a buyout price or a reserve price.
- The auction house will charge you a listing fee based on the parameters of your auction. Generally speaking: the longer the auction, the higher the fee.
- Other players can then bid on items. There is a minimum bid amount based on the current bid on an item. However, you can choose a maximum bid that is much higher than the minimum. In this case, your maximum price remains hidden, but you will automatically outbid any bids that are less than your maximum.
- At the end of the auction, the highest bidder wins the item. If the item does not sell, it is returned via tubmail.
New Items to Trade
- We plan to introduce new and rare items via the auction house. So keep an eye on it from time to time to see if there’s something you’ve never seen before. You’ll never know what you might find.
- We are going to be introducing more rare .MOAR files soon. For those with lots of excess flezz but no patience to grind for Pink Floyd type of files, the auction house will be a great tool!
- We are planning to introduce ItemBuildr in the future, as a way to get a constant feed of new and awesome items into the economy.
When’s it coming out? What’s next on the Forumwarz agenda?
Most of the coding is done. We are mainly waiting on the artwork. If things go well, it will launch by the end of the week. If not, next week for sure!
Afterwards, we’re going to focus on enhancing Forumwarz Domination. There are plenty of discussions going on in the Domination Forum, and we plan to go a long way to address the major issues as well as to make Domination much more fun and open to all players.
ItemBuildr
One idea that came up at a recent meeting was to build an ItemBuildr site similar to ForumBuildr. I wanted to run it by you guys:
The idea is a contest where people build items for the game. The winning items are automatically put into the economy and can be purchased.
The reasoning for this is that ForumBuildr remains popular after all this time. Also, when we ran the Junk contest it was also insanely popular. People just love the idea of their items becoming part of the game universe.
Here’s how I was thinking it could work:
Rounds would last a couple of days. The site would predetermine the stats, category and price, say something like:
Category: Glasses
Price: 1,000 Flezz
Stats: +3 charisma
Then people have to submit the rest. That would be: the name, the description and the image.
Right now I was thinking that all three of those could be submitted by one person. We would have to make sure the image is creative commons or something, so there might be an additional field where you provide a link to the source image you used.
Then, people would vote on the various items. The winning item automatically gets put into the game, and the winner gets one.
What do you think?
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