This week I was asked to answer the weekly dev questions, so here we go.
Me!!
First, let’s start with a question asked by The Crazy Game Master. They ask,
“IIRC, you were gone from SS for a very long time. Where’d you go? What did you do? Why’d you come back? (Not saying that we’re not all REALLY happy you are back).”
I was first asked to work on content for Star Sonata by Atlum (everyone remembers Atlum and Code Herder, right?) in late 2005. Over the next few years I did content projects on the side of my crappy regular job and churned out a bunch of stuff; parts of the Nexus, Tortuga, Aug Tweaking, Enigmatic Sector, etc. I ended up leaving in 2008. This was because I headed off to university. During my time at uni I pretty much didn’t do anything for Star Sonata and I stopped playing (mainly due to coursework and a distasteful, shameful addiction to WoW). I really got roped back in right before C2 was going to launch in 2011. Jeff asked that I come back and refurbish the Nexus. I was still pretty low key then though. The following year, 2012, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. I had a hard time finding an entry level programming job in the area I wanted to live and Jeff offered a position as a Content Developer / Programmer. So, I’m here full time now.
The next questions are from Arias. They ask the following things,
“1. Hours of SS played weekly?
2. Recent content influenced?
3. As you have a role in major content, how’s the Adum-themed zone going?
4. Any plans to redo the Ur’Qa UZ?”
So, first, how much do I actually play Star Sonata? I probably put in 10 hours a week onto my main, Calypso. Most of this is checking up on bases so I can set colony prices or toss excess metal from my mining base. The rest is spent leveling up my Sniper alt, Evil Calypso. Yes, that’s me.
Second, recent content influenced. The entire Subspace Assault ‘expansion’ was pretty much my project. The alien invasion mechanic is something that has been planned for a long time and a little work had been done on the programming, but for the most part, everything from lore, language, missions, instances, invasions, etc, was something that I started and finished over the better part of a year. Most recently, I’ve been working on server programming related to the forthcoming class rebalance. Jey is busy with a lot more important things (some of which, even with a uni education, only vaguely makes sense to me), so a lot of this content programming falls to me.
Third, the adum-themed zone is going swimmingly. It will consist of a set of instances, a single player instance where one player completes the trials of adum to get a key that unlocks a multiplayer boss. Most of the work on this is finished, I will be doing some balance testing sometime in the near future and I hope to have it live next universe.
Fourth, the UrQa Uber Zone. Everything related to the planning of this area, etc, was safe in analog storage (a notebook), and I’ve moved it all into a pretty elaborate series of gDocs. I’d like to work on this again sometime soon, but there are some other projects that take priority, chief among them, working on the new-player experience some more. We also want to flesh out the existing tech levels a bit more before we start barreling towards T23 (which is what this project would probably turn into).
The last question for today comes from Captain Fatbeard, They ask,
“ask him why he decided on the african names for T22…”
Are you sure you’re thinking of T22? Those names are not African. Perhaps you’re thinking of the Mzungu missions in Enigmatic Sector which are written in pidgin-Swahili? If you are thinking of T22, you mean my pseudo-mangling of a dead language originating in the Indus Valley? It’s because the aliens don’t know Standard Galactic English.
That’s all the time I have for the dev questions this week, hopefully you enjoyed a look into why I’m here, what I’ve done and what I plan on doing. Feel free to post comments, etc, in the forums.
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