The Challenges
One of the cool things about making a brand new primary guild is that it gives a lot of creative freedom to make new stuff. The bad part about creating a brand new primary guild is that it forces you to do a lot of under-the-hood work to make things work.
For this particular instance, a lot of that challenge is in the creation of the guild halls because we all know that cookie cutter guild halls are just not any fun to make nor are they any fun to visit.
Among the things that have been changed behind the scenes:
- implementation of knockdown
- npc melee ability changes (be afraid when this comes out)
- new feature to keep npcs from eating player gear if unsummoned or cleaned up
- changes in how underwater can be calculated
The State of Things
It seems that, for every cool feature added in the guild halls and fights, it spawned a week of digging into the codebase to figure out why things didn't just work the way I expected. This in turn led to more time on our development box implementing changes and testing them to be sure I didn't blow up the world.
The technical code to implement the nature spirit secondary fight is complete and now it's just a matter of finishing the debugging before I hand it off to the archs for review.
The lore behind the new guildmasters is being fleshed out - there is enough framework to create the areas but now is the time for detail and filigree - the stuff that takes time to get right.
What's Left to Do
It felt like it took forever to get the secondary nature guild hall fight ready and on paper, it looks like it took roughly six months. The majority of that was split between reading through the library APIs, re-implementing features, and in general cleaning stuff up. Many of the ideas from the nature guild master fight also apply to the other fights so a lot of that prep work should now be complete.
The other thing that helps - after six months working so heavily on area design I am much faster at iterating new code and design. It's amazing how rusty area design skills become after a few years working in the deeper mudlib code.
What Can You do to Help
I'm looking for help with a couple areas - if you have skills in any of the following areas then please reach out to me with your experience and skill level.
- Ruby on Rails
- OpenProject or Redmine
- Community Forum moderation
- CSS or Graphic Design (with portfolio)
These aren't really related to channeler, however, they would help take some things off my plate.