Sorry for the lack of a blog yesterday. There wasn’t anything new and exciting to report. Today we had our usual quick meeting plus a meeting with myself, Jeff, Jey, and Kalipso to discuss SS as a whole. Meetings for 1.5 hours today! Woo!
First the dev specific updates!
Jey found the memory corruption issue! Huzzah! This was the source of most of the crashes here recently. We’re crossing our fingers that most of the crash issues have been resolved. (Knock on wood)
Thomas is finishing up our new front page and it’s looking snazzy!
I honestly forgot what Kalipso and Jeff have been doing, mostly bug fixes from what I gather? (it’s late and I forgot to take notes).
I took yesterday largely off to recoup since I haven’t had a day off in 10 days. I also worked some on our F2P vs P2P page to adequately explain what all goodies you can do as a F2P and what perks you get when you move P2P. I wrestled with JavaScript and taught it a lesson, and thankfully Thomas and SI had more experience with JavaScript than I and were able to help me make JavaScript work with our crappy CMS page editors.
Blue Dwarf has been still working on something with the balance sheets. Yes, they’re still evil.
As I said we had a big meeting today to discuss marketing and how to frame the game as a whole. Jeff wrote up a good document showing how the game is really all over the place and it’s hard to try and peg down what exactly Star Sonata is to a new player. Marketing & advertising Star Sonata has been a right challenge since we have no real central vision. Essentially we are all over the place with different features and ideas, but we haven’t really capitalized on one thing and become the best at it.
Thus, after a very quick deliberation, we have decided we want to focus Star Sonata in a skill based action MMO. We want you to be able to hone in your skills and fight real time to defeat your enemies. We discussed a little bit on how we want our end game to look, but those ideas are very raw and in need of much refinement, and especially with the launch of T22, we’re in no rush to make any sort of change or addition to the end game.
Now that I have a good idea of how we want to take the game, I can now effectively advertise around that. We also know that all the marketing & advertising in the world isn’t going to do anything if our entry to the game is… crap. While the Nexus is fun for some, nothing spectacularly grabs you in that first five seconds of play, and it doesn’t really jive with our idea of positioning SS as a skill based action type game. One of our main priorities then is going to be to vastly improve the entry to Star Sonata to show off what the game is and grab your attention so you don’t click that X in the top right corner.
We won’t be doing any radical changes to game structure, or removing features, so don’t worry. Star Sonata will still have all the kickass features and content it has already. What we’ve decided is that we would like to focus new additions being added to the game around this “Skill & Action Based Combat” idea.
This was one of the first meetings we had where everyone in attendance was largely in agreement about what was being said, which is great. We’ll have more blogs coming up describing what we’d like to add moving forward.
