Back home, TMN offline

Last Saturday morning I arrived back in the Netherlands after a fun (yet busy) trip to Brazil, where myself and 15 others were doing research in the field of IT. The trip involved many visits to research institutes, companies and university departments, as well as some places important to the local culture and history (and beaches are part of that as well, logically).

After some rest, I pulled the plug on TMN in the evening, and replaced the game by a static page providing everyone with some information. Because of a slight jetlag (and being tired in general) nothing much was done on Saturday or Sunday.

Right now I am preparing a test environment, so we (Devious and myself, for now) can test the updated features, so the next round will have a smooth(er) start (than last round).

Some questions that were sent to my inbox have not yet been answered, so I will address those here:
* The percentage of credits that will be returned has not yet been decided;
* Properties will not be dropped before some players are ranked hitman+ and own more than 10mil;
* Property pickup fees will be there at the start of the round, but may be lowered/raised/removed later on, depending on the state of the game economy;

Marc

TMN offline, communication online

It was tempting to write a long long story about the subject, but because of exams and other important work, it was delayed - and can now contain some positive news too!

Offline
TMN went offline after some players decided to break it by using an exploit. Sad, but true. After a couple of days -and many supporting e-mails- we decided that TMN will definitely be back, but it will require some more changes than "small tweaks". This would be the time to make the changes we wanted to make a year ago!

Communication platform
For the meantime, we decided it would be nice to open up a communication platform for players to communicate with us as well as the other players. This system was created partially during my exams, and partially in the following days, but now it is ready! You can access it from the TMN home page at http://www.tmn2010.net

Future
As stated, TMN will definitely be back, but it may take quite some time. I personally think the end of May should be possible, but all that depends on how busy I am at uni, and how fast development goes in general. We will make changes that will stimulate game activity, allow faster game rounds (and ranking), and make playing a more fun experience in general. More information on that can be found on the Game Forum that's currently online.

Marc

Up and running

As you may know, TMN is back up and running. It doesn't look bad at all from my perspective; between 150 and 300 players online usually, forums are quite active as well, and overall TMN seems alive again.

Before we re-launched we already made a lot of changes, and it seems like we're not stopping yet! Unfortunately we didn't have much time to test the new layout, also because we're more focusing on this game round and its features. I think we'll eventually find a nice way to implement the new layout though! I can't share any screenshots yet.

As for me, I'm currently doing 5 courses at another university, and though I have to spend a lot more time on studying and traveling now, it's a nice set of interesting courses so I'm not complaining.

Marc

Back from holiday

Only a few days back I returned home from 8 days of fun in Rimini (Italy). I spent my nights in multiple clubs including Baia Imperiale, Club Life, Shooters Bar, Copa Cabana, Altromondo Studios and Blow-Up. This holiday was a (well-deserved) opportunity to relax.

Back home I replied to all e-mails and PMs (not too many, lucky me!), to continue with development. Today I started off slow* by implementing Youtube videos for player profiles, which works quite nicely now.

Marc

*: Italians do everything slowly, I apparently got used to that!

Testing

Last night and this morning my time (so till about midnight TMN time) we have chosen about 15 testers, and added them to the test environment of TMN. If you were not contacted, you were either not chosen, or you were too late.

So far we have found a few bugs already, and a few things that influence gameplay in a general way.
We will now try and fix all these minor things, and let the testers find even more, before we launch.

We have thought of who to keep and hire for mods, but haven't really concluded anything. This means DragonCurse and Marc will just look on gameforum often to see what players would be a good addition, and look at their pasts as well.

Earlier today DC e-mailed me asking me about credits... I gave him my opinion:
- We could give credits for donations in the last 3 months of tmnX
- We could give credits for 5% (or anything reasonable) of the donations in the last 3 months of TMN
I don't know what we'll do, but we haven't been able to discuss it any further yet. We'll inform you guys.