Here's the timeline, or rather at least the specific things I'll be focusing on in the coming weeks so that you guys know what I have planned in addition to what the most desired things are:
Territories Polish
Of course there are bugs here and there to be fixed, but aside from that there are only two major things that will likely change with territories:
- The first is the silverfish attack that Golems do. I'd call it a bug but it's working (in code, anyway) as intended, but it is, however, not great from a design perspective. Loka will in the future continue to see new, custom mobs like these (for a future PvE update, anyway, not for territories per se). When you encounter a new foe, you should both be surprised at what it can do but you should also be able to learn what it does reasonably quickly. The teleporting behavior of Golems with arrows is pretty well understood. The silverfish attack is not. I'll be figuring out some better attack for the golem to replace that.
- The second is the Core fight. It's really a half-finished feature. The core fight is meant to be a little more exciting and random but not in a way that means sudden death. It will be both tuned and new attacks/behaviors will be added to the Core to support a little more thought than just the current one (which I will refrain from describing in case you haven't figured it out). In addition the number of Power Sources still on when you get to the core make no difference in the difficulty of the fight, and they're supposed to. I predict a larger health pool for the core, some new attacks, and probably some phases of fight (similar to the Giant in Overload).
- Finally, of course is polish, tuning, and bug fixes. Ideally, once Territories are polished up, they should be able to run entirely by themselves without any intervention. They're doing pretty well right now, but none of the Capital Policies are in yet and the map isn't deleting nodes when they are lost.
Website Update
Pretty simple; just a big revamp of the website in terms of look, feel, information, and features. Probably less so on the features for now, but having a properly excellent and informative website will go a long way to giving people a good idea of what Loka's about
before they join the server for the first time.
Youtube Videos
This is going to be vital for real marketing. Videos showing how Territories, Towns, Battlegrounds, Talents, etc work will help people learn them but also will get shared around quickly. People respond to videos best and will likely see a video about Loka and check us out long before they'll dig into our website to research the server.
1.8
1.8 is completely on hold right now while the Minecraft community figures out what to do with it. There
is a project in the works called Sponge which looks to replace Bukkit and basically the entire developer community is watching it with great interest. Whenever it does 'come out' or becomes in any way accessible to the public; there will be a point in time where all server developers are going to have to learn how it works and then redevelop their code to support it. Given how this is likely to work, when we do begin to switch to Sponge, what I foresee is that, in order to get Loka running on 1.8, there may be a lot of features that are simply disabled. Loka has many dependencies on other plugins and most of the major ones are committed to updating to Sponge. Sponge, however, is
not bukkit, so it will be a very turbulent time once that all happens.
Anyway, that's the immediate timeline of things on my plate.
