Something we’ve been thinking about for quite awhile and just haven’t had the right art nor the time to implement is maps. Maps are a great navigational tool in addition to providing a sense of place that can enhance a game through immersion and context. A good map just makes any place feel more like a world when you get an idea of where you are and what might lie over the next horizon. One aspect that made any fantasy novel richer for me was a map where I could reference the places I traveled in the book - whether the silly shores of Lake Ogre-Chobee or the darker reaches of Middle-earth. That in mind, we now have the right art and hope to have the time to put Phyrra on the map - so to speak.

As we scramble to make Duels the coolest game on the Interweb, we’ve also been scrambling to make our players and fans (and don’t kid yourselves, us too) the coolest kids on the planet. In pursuit of that goal, we’ve been working with pretty much the premier clothing company for…well…people who wear clothing. Check these guys out if you haven’t already: J!NX. StarryEyed has been gracious enough to take time off from helping wayward forum posters (among other things) to design our own Duels gear that you can show off to your girlfriend, husband, co-workers, associates and even people you don’t know.

So your first question is obviously where do I acquire one of these wondrous tees? That’s why this is a p-r-e-v-i-e-w. They aren’t available just yet but you can bet we’ll tell you as soon as they are.

To give you a sneak preview of what is coming in the Miyatana set, here are a few items:

There are a lot of items in the set. 

 You can also read more:  http://www.duels.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=168492

Growing is hard. In the beginning, you sort of run straight ahead as fast as you can pausing to make minor adjustments and learning a lot along the way. It’s a lot of fun making up everything and you’re starting with a clean slate so you don’t have to worry about bumping into too many walls. When you’re working on cool stuff like us, you get a lot of positive energy when you’re showing off the product to your friends, early beta testers or whoever (people tend to get excited talking about games even if they aren’t players). There’s no legacy code, there aren’t any customers to worry about, there are very few people to keep track of and very little “management” overhead. However with a little luck and a great product things can start to get complicated very quickly and you’ve no choice to but to start growing (which is really hard just in case I didn’t mention that). It’s hard because no matter what you’ve done (no matter how big), people have bigger expectations. It’s hard because it’s hard to find good people (and as everyone who’s an A player knows - A players hire A players). It’s hard because compromising is difficult and you can’t progress without compromise. And it’s hard because you have to start planning instead of doing all the time and if you work for a start-up, doing is one of the things you enjoy most.

Planning is an item that’s taken a bit of a back seat for us but we’re actively trying to get better at it (and that basically means I’m trying to put together what we’re working on over the next few months). It’s not so much a foreign concept as it is just one that’s been in the back of the closet long enough that it’s a little dusty and seeing it reminds me that I didn’t actually take it to Goodwill and drop it off. Time to get it out, make sure it still fits, perhaps toss it in the washing machine and put it on.

The executive summary of this post is that I’m working on putting together a plan that involves monthly updates (we’ll still do the weekly patches when we need to). The goal being to communicate the up and coming exciting stuff that’s going on with Duels and even collect some feedback so we can alter our course if it’s way off. Here’s an idea of what’s coming in the next couple of months. There are some growing pains as we get bigger but we are definitely getting better.

The next theme set, along the lines of Yumeria, is in the works.  It will be called Miyatana and is an ancient oriental them.  We will release more information and some preview items in the coming weeks, but in the meantime here is a wallpaper:

The armor shown in the wallpaper will appear in the set.  The black armor set in the foreground is the assassin set.

A few of you have noticed a new face in the forums. Some of the more perceptive even thought we had a hacker on the site…..how can anyone show up, go from 1 to 40 in 60 seconds, smack me for a couple thousand health in one blow and look that good. She’s a force to be reckoned with and fortunately she’s on our side. StarryEyed has arrived to help Blerg and Bhaal and, more importantly, all the players in the forums. Please be aware that she’s rumored to be involved with Shindaan Guardian Del and he’s the jealous type.

We scrambled to launch duels.com last August, then fought mightily to keep our heads above water for the first 4 weeks or so. After some modicum of order had been restored to the 1 bedroom apartment we were working out of (servers located off-site) and our newborn Internet baby was able to make it through the night, we managed to put a sliver of process together: weekly updates. We’re all experienced tech people and (typically) know how things SHOULD be done but in the heat of battle, you sometimes do things the way they CAN be done.

Our sliver of process quickly burned up in the heat of launching feature after fix after feature. Well, we’re giving it another go. We’ll try to work with weekly updates and produce documented patch notes while we’re at it. Watch us pull a rabbit out of our hat. With any luck at all, we’ll do better than Bullwinkle.

The first patch notes are here: Patch 01.24.08.

For your entertainment, here are some Noble Set II items:

 Noble Set II also has a slightly higher percentage of epics, legendaries, and artifacts. 

I know all of you duelists out there are patiently awaiting Duels 2.0. We’ve been quite ambitious with this one and right now we’re wrapping up on Tournaments and Ladders. We spent so much time focusing on the gameplay for these that we didn’t even imagine how many architecture changes would be necessary. I wanted to share some of the difficulties I’ve been facing during these late nights of work.

In Duels 1.0 a challenge is very simple. There’s a challenger and a defender and some settings for the loadouts, openers, and scrolls of the two players in the fight. The challenge doesn’t actually exist until the challenger issues it to the defender. The defender then responds with an accept or reject before the challenger cancels the challenge. Keep in mind that rejecting and canceling have no adverse effects.

In Duels 2.0 a challenge is much more complicated. In addition to Duels 1.0 settings and the new action sets which must be replenished before a fight, there’s the complication of Tournament and Ladder fights.

With a Tournament, a challenge must be issued to both players at the same time and their individual responses to the challenge must be tracked. You no longer have a reject or cancel response, but either duelist can explicitly forfeit by taking that action or implicitly forfeit by taking no action before the current round of the tournament ends.

Ladder challenges are even stranger. When you request a Ladder fight you are matched with another player. You accept the challenge and it gets sent off to the defender, or you forfeit and lose Ladder points that your would be defender now gains.

New data models are necessary to track these multiple responses and old data models have to be modified to allow challenges to exist even while missing most of the information that’s normally been required for the challenge to be a challenge. Then once you’ve got the data modeled correctly you have to update the functions throughout the system that interact with those models.

These 300+ challenge touch points throughout the system are then quite unstable and have to be examined thoroughly before they can even be trusted on beta servers where beta testers are still working through actions and balance changes. Once that’s taken care of there’s still the matter of building out the Tournament and Ladder features that required those architecture changes.

And that’s what I’m doing now, once again at 3am. I feel like Santa… err… Senter Klas putting the finishing touches on the toys before Christmas. For now I’ll leave you with a simple screenshot from one of the Ladder pages.

EDIT: I’ve also added a screenshot of our Tournament viewer in a 64 player Tournament that we simulated.

So I’ve been working with this php language for almost a year now in what I will call hardcore fashion. I came fresh from the wonderful world of C# and my fancy Visual Studio IDE. It was sort of like being cast out of the garden of eden in a lot of ways but I’ve programmed on unix before, I’m comfortable with vi and used to do a smidgen of perl back in the day.

Last Friday I decided I would (once again) try to get a debugger to step through php code. I tried almost a year ago but admittedly got frustrated with it and just went with tried and true logging. I probably should have tried harder but you’re trying to be productive, get stuff done, show some progress….you know how it goes. We had a couple new developers start recently and one was successful with debugging using Komodo from Activestate and the other was up with Eclipse. That gave me the impetus to try again.

First, I tried Eclipse. After about 8 hrs of frustration and the clunkiest interface I’ve used in a while, I decided to give Komodo a shot. Granted, I did get debugging working but couldn’t seem to get it to step into the cake code (the application framework). Less than an hour later, I hit my first breakpoint in cake and that was my omg moment. Thank you Activestate. I now have a real IDE that I can debug with. Should have done that a long time ago. Lesson learned (again). That lesson where you’re doing something, you know you could be doing it a better way (like coding with a debugger) but you can basically make things work well enough for now and for now just keeps getting longer. Props to the new guys at any rate.

What does Mac have to do with all this? I’ve been doing development on a Dell D600 for the last year but had a brand new MacBook Pro all set up and waiting for me to use it. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve transitioned to the Mac during the process of setting up the new software and gotta say that aside from the interface learning curve, it’s great. Ahoy, productivity increases ahead!