Neo Scavenger - Audio Samples & Update

Blue Bottle Games has a few more updates for Neo Scavenger. I found the following two to be the most interesting out of the whole pile of updates this week.

The Great Triage of 2014, and Plot

Apart from the contest announced yesterday, the past two days have mostly been four things:

1. Plot Writing Collaboration
2. Bug/Feature Triage
3. Bug Fixes
4. Fighting Spambots

Harald continues to produce some excellent work on the new encounter, and has started the draft of the final text. The outlines and background info so far seem very cool.

While he's working on that, I've been trying to wrest control of the massive bug and feature wishlist. Paul's PCDMS system has helped get them all into one place for sorting, prioritization, etc. However, I still need to look at each one, to gauge priority, add notes, and decide if it's necessary for the final release or not.

As mentioned earlier, this list is easily 500+ items. And given their average estimated effort, I probably only have time for a fraction of them.

Fortunately, this triage exercise has whittled down the list a bit. Over the past several days (and with help from Kaaven and Scavenger!), I was able to close about 120 of those as either duplicates of other issues, or "will not fix." Some things are just not realistically going to happen, so it's worth getting them off the list now, and marking them "v2" for future reference.

New Audio Samples

A little while ago, Paul Csapo contacted me, offering to host a bug-tracking system for NEO Scavenger. A lot of my triage/prioritization work has been going on in that system, and it's helped to get a good view of remaining issues.

And on top of that, he dabbles in audio design, so he offered to put some sound samples together for use in the game. What you see above is the first batch of audio, hooked up to relevant items.

So far, I'm pretty impressed! It's definitely an improvement over the painfully repetitive harp sound. And if we can get enough of these created and hooked up, I think it'll lend some nice immersion and atmosphere to the game!