Poet’s Work Log:

Poet has been working on a neat searching feature for the trade system, which also can work for any searching area of the site! The trading system is pretty close to completion from my point of view. Trade history, starting a trade with someone and selecting which items are being traded are functional. The only areas left are security and aesthetics.

He has also been working on security fixes here and there, I honestly kind of gloss over when he explains the security issues to me.. But I’m happy someone knows what they’re doing!

Beginning stages of the housing system are being discussed.

Some really neat ambient  settings for the map have been made.

Haruka’s Work Log:

Meanwhile, I’ve been working like a dog on items and  new hairstyles this past week. I took the suggestions on facebook and I am glad to report that I have 30 new hairstyles sketched up. Most of them can easily be converted into unisex styles, so no need to worry, guys! The final step is hundreds of hours of shading… ….  ..  .    . —- /// orz


I’m occasionally pecking at the huge amount of scenery art I’ve taken on by myself. It’s overwhelming to say the least. I’ve sunk 30 hours into a particular piece and it isn’t even half finished.

My list is never as impressive as Poet’s!

I’ve had housing system art commissioned. It’s been completed and is ready to be put to use as soon as we figure out what we’re doing with the system.

More NPC art is coming shortly. We’ve had it commissioned but have received no updates so far… so we’ll have to wait and see what happens in that case.

So, yeah. We’ve both been spread pretty thin as of late, and I haven’t had much time to work on the new homepage, hopefully that will be done within the next week. We’ll be putting up applications again whenever the new homepage is completed, because we really need more staff.

Ok I thought this deserved a blog post because it’s a pretty major update. It’s an update that I’m sure a lot of people will have issue with and some of you may want my head on a pike after you see the change. Let me explain it!

The progress page has needed some update for quite some time. The reason being Haruka and myself were doing updates literally every single day, and we needed room to grow without reaching 100%. In other words, I think we were a little too quick to shoot the values up past 75%.

So what we did was add a few more progress categories, and then we went through each and every one of them and considered art; coding; design; functionality; etc…

This brought the values down in some cases (way down in some instances), but the overall percentage only went down a TINY 10%. You won’t kill me because of 10% will you? Please?

I think I worked extra hard for you as a result though. The user shops went up from 43%, and I’ve completed quite a bit there. The item listing (for sale) feature is just about complete now. I have it displaying your entire inventory (minus equipped items) when you go to sell which wasn’t completed before. Huge step in getting both the user shops and the marketplace done. They kinda go hand-in-hand, so when one gets completed, the other is soon to follow.

Haruka has been working diligently on a new main page for Malthea.com. We’re going to make it a little easier to find our pages (twitter, facebook, progress, blog, etc). We love love love the art that we have on their now, so we’re going to be looking at our options as to whether we keep it or get new art for our temporary homepage. We’ll see how it goes.

As was hinted in the last paragraph, yes we do have a new facebook page:
http://malthea.com/facebook/

I’m not really one of the facebook junkies out there, so I don’t know what it’s all about or why we might need it, but I heard that it was pretty heavily demanded and Haru went ahead and made it for you guys and gals! Enjoy!

Believe it or not, I haven’t been a lazy sack of spare parts recently.  I’ve been keeping myself pretty busy these past couple of weeks, I’ve made a few outfits for the avatars ~  some were original ideas of my own, and others were from the lovely entries submitted by you guys. I’m feeling pretty lonely because all the other pixel artists are busy and aren’t around on the forums. I was making a neat background for the registration page but I haven’t worked on it in a few days, I do hope it turns out nice. I am hypercritical of anything I personally make, so I don’t know.

I took the plunge and contacted a wonderful background artist to do some work for us, and luckily we should be able to start commissioning by the end of the month. I don’t want to jinx anything, but I’m optimistic this time! Our luck just might be turning around.

That’s all I’ve got, nothing too exciting.  I have a lot of grunt work to do. I still need to piece the towns together and finish cutting/recoloring items. I am so freaking happy Poet discovered that cropping and thumbnail macro, it really cuts the work in half.

Ok, I’ve put this off long enough now I think. I saw that Haruka was making a post but never submitted it so I’ll add what she was saying and I have some updates myself.

Commissions

We have commissioned more art, both for the NPCs and the housing system. We’re working with some crazy time schedules here with the artists, so it’s taking its time but definitely worth the wait!

General Updates

Haruka has been doing a bit of background drawing as well as making bases for the NPCs on the forum. No idea how much we’ll use them but I think it could make the story interesting. Haruka is also planning on re-drawing the map interface but it’s a daunting task.

We have an interesting banner system in the works. It’s all done but we’re deciding whether we need it or not.

Several new coding features have been completed:
- Item thumbnails (for the inventory, shops, etc)
- Locked items (so that you can’t sell or trade something you are wearing)
- Featured news item for the front page is now working
- NPC shops are customized to individual NPCs
- Forum style was updated with new graphics
- And lots of security updates and bug fixes here and there

Contest update

I am pleased to announce the contest has been a roaring success! We have had dozens of wonderful entries. We will sure be having a lot of interesting additions to our shops, that’s for sure! Thanks to all of you!

The contest is still ongoing, so please keep entering your ideas! As incentive, an additional prize will be given along with the rewards stated in the official post ~>  http://www.malthea.com/blog/?p=325

Ok the last few posts have all been about the map system, the NPCs, poses and all of that great stuff. Last night on the other hand, I decided to take a break from that and work on the homepage. Although the homepage isn’t exactly a feature, it’s still very important!

Upon looking at the homepage last night and finishing off some of the features that sit on it, I think I’m slowly deciding that it needs to be different…. somehow. The header needs to change, the navigation needs to change, and the homepage needs to change. I know it’s a little late in the game to go and change something like that but it’s actually not difficult to do.

The only difficult part will be designing the whole thing which mostly falls on Haruka. I have a few ideas about cutting down the looks of things, but we’ll just have to play around with it and see.

Ok, so in other news I guess I have to mention that we are STILL looking for a background artist. If anyone wants to apply or knows someone who might be interested, let them know. It’s definitely a paid position. We have had very very few applications so far.

Also, we’re still holding the item design contest. People sending us in their ideas has pretty much stopped which isn’t a good thing! It never hurts to try so just send us in those sketches. For details, read below.