| NOTD Update - Jan 2011 (Month 5) |
| Completion Stage: 35%
Principal content development is coming to an end and we're wrapping up loose ends in January. We've developed a huge world (3 storylines, 12 classes with 36 main talent combinations) and need to start bringing it to life in a more intuitive and beautiful way. After this period, most 'content' will be minor optional side-missions and random events that will help make the NOTD world richer. Polishing work has begun. You've seen some of these changes in ability aesthetics, new cinematics (Erebos intro, Charlie's kidney drama) and mission refinement. This month we will continue polishing these areas. We're drawing inspiration from Half-Life 2, Modern Warfare 2, Fallout 2 and several other award winning games to bring the best ideas together in NOTD. For instance, our new Stat system is based on Fallout's S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stat system. From Half-Life 2/Dragon Age, we aim to learn from their story telling techniques to create a universe you can be part of. Modern Warfare 2 will be a source of inspiration for some combat systems such as the Forward Observers's Gunship Support. Terrain will be re-designed gradually over the next 3 months. We will begin with the periphery areas of the map like Mining Colony, Starport before moving into Apollo itself. A draft layout of our redesigned terrain is in the image below. What do we want NOTD to be? Taking a step back, we want NOTD take custom map making to a higher level. This means significantly more work and dedication needed to get us there. Apart from creating an immersive experience, we hope to build a legacy. 5 years from now when you speak of SC2 custom maps, hopefully we'd hear NOTD alongside other quality maps like SotiS. As a non-scientific benchmark, our Facebook fan base has grown 2.5x in the past month from 200+ to almost 500 fans today. SotiS has almost 1000 fans and is played 3-5x more than NOTD in most servers today. Key Work Completed
Priorities for January
Vision For the Final Game
Help Needed from Community
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| NOTD Map Rollback - January 5 (2011) |
| Hi all, I'm rolling back the NOTD map to a version 5 days old. This is to fix a sync bug in SC2 that is making the map unplayable for around 10% of the player population. I suspect this come from an unfixable custom soundtrack bug that other map makers are facing.
Dozens of hours of work will be lost and we'll have to re-work most of the progress made recently unfortunately. We will not be making any updates on the map for the next 5 days until the situation is stabilized. This is extremely frustrating and I'm taking a few days off NOTD as well. Help Needed Report if you still face any unusual lag activity (please note: we can't fix issues that come from normal laggers) |
| Patch 1.2 Fixes - January 11 (2011) |
| Hi all, you'll notice some weird things happening to NOTD (and other custom maps) when you update to StarCraft II Patch 1.2. We'll be fixing these over the next few days. Patch 1.2 has been released in SEA server, and will be out in NA/EU in the next 1-2 days.
Some Weird Things (there are others)
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| Away for 4 days - 24 to 27 Jan |
| I'll be on a business trip to Vietnam. Earendil will be updating the map offline during this time. The next update will be patched on Thursday night.
We have 3 priorities this week:
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| Battle.Net Popularity Bug January 21 (2011) |
| Hi all, there's current a bug where top games like Sotis, NOTD are not updating hours played correctly. To fix this, I may have to upload the map on a new name in each server.
Tentative new map names (old one will be deleted)
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| Community Donations to NOTD January 30 (2011) |
| Hi all, as I have received a request for donations, please use this link to donate to the NOTD team: http://www.notdstarcraft.com/donate.htm
Guidelines
What We'll Do With Your Donations
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