TimTrain
Big Huge Games
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2015
- Messages
- 18
Hello Leaders!
Hopefully all our players in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying a safe and warm winter. Here in Baltimore, we just endured the largest snowfall in the history of the city, which dumped two*and*a*half feet of snow in our backyard, shutting down Maryland for nearly a week. The team kept busy working from home, however, fixing bugs and adding fun new content to DomiNations!
Earlier this month, I got to travel to Nexon’s offices in San Francisco, Korea, and Japan with Producers Josh Kermond and Alicia Berry. DomiNations has become a truly global phenomenon, and we were really happy with the passion and support for the game as we shared our plans for 2016. As a perk, our Nexon partners showed us wonderful hospitality and took us to some great restaurants. One highlight of the trip was meeting with members of the Japanese press to answer some questions about the game. One of those interviews was with Mr. Tsuyoshi Yoshida, who runs a DomiNations community in Japan. Among other topics, we geeked out about our shared love of the old Koei game “Nobunaga’s Ambition,” one of my first exposures to strategy games on 8*bit Nintendo. He had put together this awesome video of an all*ninja attack, which we are sharing with his kind permission:
https://youtu.be/b6WXcoTbe74
Nexon is also running DomiNations TV commercials in Japan, starring two famous Japanese comedians. Check them out below:
https://youtu.be/JAk1EwP_X3Y
https://youtu.be/TgCcowktFTg
https://youtu.be/Y6sPE0Xe7fY
https://youtu.be/yKwILXsiInQ
https://youtu.be/pLHYYAv‐8SY
https://youtu.be/1TTci0TEUFk
We even got to visit one of the areas where they shot the last commercial in the above list – a bar district called Golden Gai in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. We had planned to take a picture of the three of us in the same alley where the commercial was filmed, but then we found a bar called Baltimore and ended up spending most of our time looking through Nina Simone CDs,talking to the other patrons, and getting them to download DomiNations :*).
While we were off gallivanting the world, our engineers were hard at work putting the finishing touches on version 3.5 of the game, which was just released. This version was meant to cover a lot of “technical debt,” our term for bugs and other issues that have been outstanding for a while, particularly as our senior engineers were completely rewriting some systems in anticipation of the *next* release. We know that our players have been very patient as we have worked through some of these core problems. We anticipate doing more releases focused almost exclusively on tech debt until we have improved on all our outstanding issues including severe annoyances like battle crashes and lost World War attacks. We are nearly there!
The most exciting fixes from 3.5 include improvements in Battle Replays, Alliance Chat, and continued upgrades to security. Of these, updating Battle Replays is the most exciting to me personally, as it sets the stage for adding replays to World War attacks, which is one of the most requested community features.
As a player, I’ve also been really excited about the new Events like Mark of the Assassin and Trade Mansa. I was very sad to watch the timer count down on my Ninja Dojo, and will be carefully hoarding my last batch of Elephant Archer Armies to five*star a critical World War base. We’ll be doing many more of these Events in the future, which bring fresh new gameplay to DomiNations, and we welcome any thoughts or ideas you have for future events.
As always, thank you so much for your continued support of DomiNations, particularly as we work to fix some of those deep*seated, difficult issues that have necessitated some systemic ground*up rewrites, coming soon to a future update!
Tim
Hopefully all our players in the Northern Hemisphere are enjoying a safe and warm winter. Here in Baltimore, we just endured the largest snowfall in the history of the city, which dumped two*and*a*half feet of snow in our backyard, shutting down Maryland for nearly a week. The team kept busy working from home, however, fixing bugs and adding fun new content to DomiNations!
Earlier this month, I got to travel to Nexon’s offices in San Francisco, Korea, and Japan with Producers Josh Kermond and Alicia Berry. DomiNations has become a truly global phenomenon, and we were really happy with the passion and support for the game as we shared our plans for 2016. As a perk, our Nexon partners showed us wonderful hospitality and took us to some great restaurants. One highlight of the trip was meeting with members of the Japanese press to answer some questions about the game. One of those interviews was with Mr. Tsuyoshi Yoshida, who runs a DomiNations community in Japan. Among other topics, we geeked out about our shared love of the old Koei game “Nobunaga’s Ambition,” one of my first exposures to strategy games on 8*bit Nintendo. He had put together this awesome video of an all*ninja attack, which we are sharing with his kind permission:
https://youtu.be/b6WXcoTbe74
Nexon is also running DomiNations TV commercials in Japan, starring two famous Japanese comedians. Check them out below:
https://youtu.be/JAk1EwP_X3Y
https://youtu.be/TgCcowktFTg
https://youtu.be/Y6sPE0Xe7fY
https://youtu.be/yKwILXsiInQ
https://youtu.be/pLHYYAv‐8SY
https://youtu.be/1TTci0TEUFk
We even got to visit one of the areas where they shot the last commercial in the above list – a bar district called Golden Gai in the Shinjuku neighborhood of Tokyo. We had planned to take a picture of the three of us in the same alley where the commercial was filmed, but then we found a bar called Baltimore and ended up spending most of our time looking through Nina Simone CDs,talking to the other patrons, and getting them to download DomiNations :*).
While we were off gallivanting the world, our engineers were hard at work putting the finishing touches on version 3.5 of the game, which was just released. This version was meant to cover a lot of “technical debt,” our term for bugs and other issues that have been outstanding for a while, particularly as our senior engineers were completely rewriting some systems in anticipation of the *next* release. We know that our players have been very patient as we have worked through some of these core problems. We anticipate doing more releases focused almost exclusively on tech debt until we have improved on all our outstanding issues including severe annoyances like battle crashes and lost World War attacks. We are nearly there!
The most exciting fixes from 3.5 include improvements in Battle Replays, Alliance Chat, and continued upgrades to security. Of these, updating Battle Replays is the most exciting to me personally, as it sets the stage for adding replays to World War attacks, which is one of the most requested community features.
As a player, I’ve also been really excited about the new Events like Mark of the Assassin and Trade Mansa. I was very sad to watch the timer count down on my Ninja Dojo, and will be carefully hoarding my last batch of Elephant Archer Armies to five*star a critical World War base. We’ll be doing many more of these Events in the future, which bring fresh new gameplay to DomiNations, and we welcome any thoughts or ideas you have for future events.
As always, thank you so much for your continued support of DomiNations, particularly as we work to fix some of those deep*seated, difficult issues that have necessitated some systemic ground*up rewrites, coming soon to a future update!
Tim
