The biggest change this sprint to the game was the start of building a new game play flow involved with the menus. The first set of menus were added that directed the game play to be aligned to Regions and Venues/Clubs within each Region for Player customization and holding events. The top level screen now has four options.
The first option, “Play The Game” takes the player into the simulation portion of the game where they are being event promoters and they build up various venues/clubs and hold events on where they will be scored as to how good a job they do preparing, promoting and running a dance event. Based on their scores they will progress to bigger venues/clubs and have more options in terms of props to add to their club, DJ lights to be able to use, etc. This first option has all the new menus and game flow associated with the player pursuing their live concert event promoter career. The Sandbox and Party Mode currently just take you to the menu system that has been in place for myMO for the last few months to be able to edit or host events. The quit button leaves the game.
If the player selected the first option to Play The Game, they are first taken to the Region screen. There are currently 9 regions to select from which are diverse places in which to customize venues/clubs and hold events in. The player selects the Region they want to start their game in. The Region menu has the following nine regions/genres for players to explore and build clubs in.
The player selects the region to visit and is taken to the Venues Menu where they can select from 4 clubs/venues to customize or have events in. The venues are generally a small venue, a medium venue, a large venue and a bonus venue. During game play the player will begin with only having access to the small or easy venue to customize and hold events in and as they gain experience as a club promoter they will gain access to the medium, large and bonus venues to play in. Currently the game does not have this simulation logic in it so the player can access all 4 levels of venues for each region. Of course most of the clubs/venues are still to be built, but at this point at least they have been added to the menu and if the club map/level is not yet available the player is taken to the basic template club. Here is an example of the venues screen for the Outback Region:
Based on what they select the information in the gray window on the right of the screen will change with information, versions of the club they have saved, history and tips unique to the club/venue will be displayed. If they want to begin customizing the club they select the launch venue button on the bottom and they are placed in edit mode. Small fixes were made to improve the edit mode and the player can add props from the store, lights, cameras, NPCs, as well as move DJ lights to customize their Venue/Club for game play. They can then save as many versions as they want to. A behind the scenes infrastructure change was made to store the customized club settings (prop, camera, light, NPC positions) in a SAV game file instead of using AWS databases. This was done to speed up the saves as well as lower the overall database cost incurred by the game and potential issues players might have with network traffic. It is part of the planned migration of most current AWS database tables to local SAV files or internal Data Stores.
Also a number of existing maps were changed so that they could be customized. The player may now customize include Club BlueMojo, Rave Cave, Top of the Town, Oasis Park, Oasis Studio and Oasis Plaza. The plan going forward is for all levels and maps in the game being able to be customized by the player. To facilitate this a new Creator Template was made that will be used to create new maps/levels for the Venues in the game. This new template has the ability for the artists on the Music Oasis team to be able to build the new planned venues with all the DJ lights logic, player customization logic and other needed infrastructure in the template to make very easy to incorporate the new built venues into the game. Previously all this had to be added by the developers after the map was handed off. Now the handoff is relatively painless. As part of testing this new approach to using the template, a new club was added using the template and a build bought off the marketplace for a generic dance club. It took less than a day to get this new club in place. Of course, an artist would probably spend more time building and adding unique features to their venues, but, the mechanics of adding a new venue have been greatly streamlined with the new template. A video showing how this was done is out on youtube:
