Month in Review: September

[Kithrater]

Overview:
We opened!

Meta:
All in all, a month that exceeded expectations. We went from a character-generation process to having most of the Dorthonion Wilderness up for play, allowing hunters, foragers, orc-hunters, explorers and bandits stuff to do. Each day brings a little more functionality to the game, and a few more things to keep people interested.

What has especially impressed me has been the enthusiasm of the players, who really have embraced the game and the game world. Within a week, logging in to Hule’s felt truly distinct, with everyone demonstrating a willingness to leap in to the role they had chosen. All the work over the past year was made worth it, when thirteen players spontaneously logged on and decided to go orc hunting. Keep up the great work.

Probably the biggest unresolved task is making the game fully “newbie friendly”: helpfiles and documentation. A big thank you to Japheth and Kite of Shadows of Isildur for very generous permission to use their command helpfiles. Still, work needs to be done on this, and then updating the website. Once these tasks are done, then we can begin to advertise openly, and build the playerbase.

Coding:
Not an awful lot was done, as far as major advances went: most of it was bug-testing my previous work, and see how it coped with a few dozen players running amok inside of it. A few issues are still outstanding, but any game-killers that have been identified at this point have been squashed.

Building:
Work on Dorthonion! This will likely be the focus of our efforts for the next few months: more animals to hunt, more secrets to find, more scripts to enjoy, more flora to forage, and hopefully a few locations to visit.

Thanks to Eitan and Knoxx for submitting lots of objects that are now in the game.

Staffing:
We took on a number of new builders: Araw, Celahir, Pretzel, and Steppenwolf, to begin with. Thank you everyone who applied, and I’d like to note we are still open to applications.

Next Month:
First goal is to finish helpfiles and documentation. Then, I need to continue to flesh out the available roles: create more options for hunters, warriors, outcasts, traders and sages.

Statistics:

Code:

<#****** / ||||||> show s

  Described Rooms:  1658
  Total Rooms:      1672
  Total Mobiles:    102 
  Total Objects:    674 
  Total Crafts:    27 

  Total Characters: 81 
  Player Writings:  13 

  Last Crashed: 3 days 21 hours 44 minutes ago – Sling bug, now fixed.

Of those characters, 53 of them are actual Player Characters.
Five PCs died: two to falls, one to wildlife, one to PK, one to retirement.