Utopia Classic Developers’ Update 20th May
Sean and Brian have taken the time to answer some of your additional questions this week. Please comment on the thread Here as usual:
Hi All,
There’s been a bunch of follow up questions since last week, which we’ll go through below.
Luth: “my biggest concern is that once it is put out onto genesis for testing, that you give it a long enough period of time before it’s put out onto wol.”
We hear you. There’s always a kind of pressure to move forward with things, but we have no desire to incur everyone’s wrath with an unnecessarily buggy WoL age.
Comport: “you said the same thing ["no pay-to-win nonsense"] with Utopia “Khanwars” Kingdoms… and yet the “pay-to-win nonsense” is front and center in that game.”
UK is a different game than this game and we (Brian and Sean) had no involvement in it, so we can’t comment. Regarding this game, we’re calling the shots for the foreseeable future, and we believe that premium in-game powers/abilities make a game less fun. A game that isn’t fun won’t attract the numbers of new players we’re aiming for.
3. Bishop: utopiaclassic.com [has no one noticed that it's a Jolt-owned domain?]
Yes, Jolt has bought utopiaclassic.com, mainly just to get there before any of you guys. We’re sure it didn’t cost much, and no one’s married to the name, should a better one be suggested (i.e., one that sounds good, is attainable, is clearly to do with original Utopia, and won’t be confused with sister games like UK).
4. Prelude: What are the next things on your agenda with regards to Utopia Classic? i.e. would the domain shift to utopiaclassic.com straightaway, will you be looking at fixing the guide next, developing other external programs for the iphone/facebook, or work on promoting the game?
That’s a long question. To take it piecemeal:
“would the domain shift to utopiaclassic.com straightaway”
As you know, we’re going to run on Genesis first to test the code and new site out. What “running on Genesis” really means is that we’ll have the new code set up on new servers, and will have the normal Genesis link on the existing site pointing to these new servers. These new servers may or may not end up on the utopiaclassic.com domain - that’s yet to be finalized.
When we’re happy that the code is ready for WoL, we’ll set that up on the new servers too, and point the WoL link on the old servers to the new servers. When we do this, the old servers (on utopia.swirve.com) will basically just be serving static content (the “experience” and “guide” pages, so we’ll make a plan to move those over to the new servers completely, ultimately decommissioning the old site and redirecting utopia.swirve.com at the new domain.
“will you be looking at fixing the guide next”
Regarding the guide, a lot of people have been asking about it recently. It’s out of date, and incomplete in places. It’s a lot of work to write something like that (kudos to the authors), and its even more work to keep it up-to-date over time. Some people have been talking about setting up a community-edited Wiki to replace it, which is a really great idea. We’ve noticed that there are already a bunch of 3rd party sites out there that have tried to do this over the years, or that are currently doing it. One problem with this is that people’s efforts end up divided between many sites.
Because of this, we’re thinking of hosting an “official” utopia Wiki to replace the current guide, which we could prime with articles from the old guide as well as the various other sites that are out there (with their authors’ permissions). We’d love to hear what people think of this.
On a related note we feel its necessary to acknowledge that the guide/wiki serves as reference material, but is not a good substitute for in-game help, or just plain old usability. As the game currently stands, novice players are confronted with a pretty bewildering array of decisions, as well as immediate pressure from kingdom-mates. At launch, the new version won’t really be much better in this regard, but its something that really needs to improve before we consider seriously promoting the game to a new audience. The kind of improvements are:
(a) usability improvements. Layout and design should help the novice player find his/her way through the site easily at the start, without getting in the way of more experienced players.
(b) in-game documentation. This includes things like tooltips, to an in-game guide that overlays the actual site, helping first-time players build their first buildings, begin training and research etc.
“Developing other external programs for the Iphone or Facebook”
This is definitely something we’re going to look at down the line, but we haven’t spent any time thinking through the details yet. For us, its under the category of “Make Utopia Huge Again” (MUHA).
“or work on promoting the game?”
This is also under MUHA. Before we start spending money on promotion though, we’re going to make sure that the game is up to the standard we’d expect of a web game in 2009, so that as many curious visitors as possible convert into full-time players. There’s a lot of work between here and there.
4b. Prelude: do you intend to possibly pick up some top kingdom experience? [to help with game design changes]
If we’re hearing you right, this is another question about whether we’ll consider instituting a “Council of Elders” that could act as a kind of representative system, and who could act as an advisory panel on game design issues. This is definitely an interesting idea, but a complicated one!
We’re not opposed in principle to this, but would only set it up if we were sure that the players that make it into the council were selected fairly (e.g., by election); that there was sufficient transparency; and that the unavoidable politics and in-fighting that always happens when people are elected to things wouldn’t get in the way of us doing our jobs. What do people think?
5. Luth: … do we have an ETA yet on completion and installation onto gen?
Here we have some bad news. We had an unexpected setback last week when we had to reconsider some assumptions we had made about how WoL and Gen servers would co-exist on the new servers, how accounts are handled, archived rankings etc. (basically cross-over issues between the software architecture and how we’re going to deploy it in production).
The upshot is that we had to re-organise a bunch of code, which set us back about a week and a half. Put together with some other minor slippages and we’re about 2.5 weeks behind our last estimates, and looking at private alpha testing starting in early June, with Genesis deployment in mid-June, and WoL at the end of June at the earliest (so the current WoL age will run for another 5-6 weeks at least).
6. Ningun: Will you make use of an affiliate system? So if you get new people to start playing you get a little real money in your pocket.
We haven’t got this far in our thinking yet, but when the time comes it is quite possible that we will consider offering some kind of incentive for people to recommend the game to friends.
Thanks for reading everyone!
Sean and Brian