One of the biggest complaints from the 4 alpha testers playing Faith right now is that there isn’t enough ways for them to interact. While I first argued that there was, it is actually a fair bit behind Asylum. At this point in development Asylum didn’t have much interaction either - parties, attacks, and scandals were all added during Beta. While there aren’t many players to interact with at this phase, I think I’ll go ahead and add some player interaction features, so they can become a bit more integral part of the game than they were in Asylum.
Of course there remains the problem of cheating. The more players can interact, the more weird and wonderful ways they’ll try to create multiple accounts and screw each other over. Luckily I have some good ideas of how to combat that.
An important milestone was reached today - I moved my todo list from my computer into the Bug System. My 50 most-wanted features and bugfixes for Faith are now laid out, and the testers can now start logging bugs. Some of the top-priority items include Holy Wars, Artifact Auctions, and to start a help system (which will be more extensive and more integrated into the game than Asylum’s.)
Anyway, I’m off for my summer vacation (three nights camping) and will be back on Thursday.