Washington Has Fallen - January 2023 Update

WHF Updates:

BETA TESTING

We're currently getting ready to enter into the second official round of Beta Testing.  DuneImp has joined the team as the lead beta tester.  They're currently going through some basic training and becoming familiarized with everything.

WEEK 1 & 2

EASTER EGGS

Even though Washington Has Fallen is in the beginning of beta testing round two, with a hopefully soon to be release date, we're still adding interesting news and political events to this amazing parody Minecraft Bedrock Adventure game until we release it publicly.

We'll do this as much as possible by adding in bonus "Easter Eggs", since adding new missions would take to long and we're really excited to be able to do a full public release soon.

"Easter Eggs" in videogame's are a tradition in which secret areas, hidden areas, special prizes are built into the game for the more ambitious player to attempt to locate. Some remain hidden for years.

We'll be thinking of ways to add a few in, there are lots of possibilities.

Top Secret

Since SkyThrusters is currently doing design work on our next project INVERSE and waiting for Beta Testing round 2 to begin, he took an evening to build Joe Biden's Delaware Home into Washington Has Fallen.

Biden's Delaware home in the Minecraft Build had

limited space between two other buildings, so the profile is much smaller, but still has three floors.

This is the real Biden Delaware home, where the

Top Secret documents from when Biden was 

Vice President were discovered in his garage.

Building space was limited since SkyThrusters wanted to add it into a specific community of Washington DC, but we think he did a darn good job.  He said studied photos of the actual Biden home, but couldn't figure out where the garage is actually located, so he went ahead and just put the garage opening in the front as an attached garage.

No photos of the interior of the Biden Delaware home could be located, so he just did basic interior design that he felt fit the Biden's, including a pool in the backyard, a traditional brick BBQ and Jill Biden NPC making some food.

WEEK 3

MORE EASTER EGGS

We placed more Easter Eggs to be discovered throughout Washington DC.  Washington will be the only area with the Easter Eggs to award the curious and ambitious with extra in game benefits. Unlike the Mission Chests within the game that have enough for up to five players, the Easter Eggs only payout to the first player who discovers the content and activates it correctly. 

LOCKING IT DOWN

We also locked down some key elements of the game to prevent those assets from being moved, mainly vehicles that are intended to remain in place. The majority of the other vehicles are intended to be usable for transportation, thanks to LIFE BOAT's built in mod package.  There is one significant area of Washington DC that the vehicles being frozen in their location makes sense for the surrounding mood and environment.  That took most of a day to accomplish.

LIGHTING UPDATES

Also worked were some lighting level improvements.  Some missions of the game take place at night in Washington DC and need enhanced to improve the visibility of highlighted areas that players need to see easier that would otherwise be to dark.  That took an all night/morning work session to complete.  There will probably be other lighting updates required that will be discovered during the next beta test session, which will hopefully happen soon.

This is an example of one of the areas that was too dark

and needed a lighting level update.

NAVIGATIONAL GUIDES

During our first beta tests back in 2020, lead beta tester BlestHeart18402 recommended adding in NPC's to act as navigational guides.  At that time there were no guides or directions to help locate missions or sites of interest. A significant amount of time was wasted running up and down the massive main world area trying to locate buildings and places using minimal signs.

The past two years, a large amount of time has gone into exploring and implementing different ways to assist players from one mission location to the next, including NPC's.  Here at the end of development it made sense to add in a lot of additional "guides" to help players figure out where they are in relationship to sights and places directly around them.  That has taken a week or more to implement.

INFORMATIONAL MESSAGING AND NPC

The original world that the Washington Has Fallen Minecraft Template overlays, used a network of NPC's and raw text messages at sights of interest. We always knew from the start that one of the last things to do in WHF would be to replace those messages.  We replaced the NPC's in 2021 after an update from Minecraft broke the original NPC's that LifeBoat used for their Washington DC world.  Their NPC's existed before Minecraft Bedrock had NPC's available.  When Minecraft Bedrock was updated to include it's own native NPC system, we had to go and repair and replace all of the original NPC's that had broke.  That was actually a good thing, because ultimately it gave us full control of NPC placement and customization.  This week we are updating those internal raw text messages with content that matches the theme of the adventure. At the same time, the NPC's that work together with internal messages are getting a brand new 2022 look.

Our original NPC replacements were honestly ugly, fortunately the last update from Minecraft in 2022 also introduced a lot of new NPC skins, so we found a much nicer looking skin for those NPC's.

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Thank you to the RGAP Creative community on Twitter

 Thank you Twitter Friends

2022 was a strange year, but also an amazing year for the Washington Has Fallen Minecraft Bedrock Adventure Game

Though we didn't have any takers from the public to help us beta test during 2022, we did have a very tiny, but active community of friends on the RGAP Creative twitter.

We appreciate your input, especially in our polls to help use to decide which characters you wanted to encounter within the final version of Washington Has Fallen.

We gave you a lot of suggestions, but you decided, and you wanted Elon Musk, Hunter Biden and Kyle Rittenhouse and a few others, and we think you made a great decision.  We had a lot of fun creating new missions utilizing this new Non-Player Characters into the game, in fact the only reason we're even still working on the game during the last week of 2022, is because some of the new missions we built are so stupidly crazy and fun.

In the last few missions of the game, you'll now encounter Kyle Rittenhouse armed with medical assistance and tools you'll need to help survive in the massive war that takes place in the Dark Lair.

Then you'll encounter Elon Musk with his Twitter Files.  Elon will send you into a very, very, very, very bad place where you'll encounter one of the craziest mission battles we came up for the game.  You'll have to locate Biden Hunter in this bad, bad, bad, more bad place and help him, so he will give you access to the information on his laptop.

Survive those encounters and maybe, just maybe, you'll live to tell about it.

So it is with great appreciation that we say thank you Twitter Friends, for your input.  The game would be completely different if you had picked different characters in our polls.  We don't even know how different, because we designed the final missions completely based on your choices and then had to figure out how they tied into the entire plot-line.

Thanks a bunch!

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Washington Has Fallen End of Summer 2022 Update

 Still slowly working out those beta bugs.

Progress on Washington Has Fallen continues, albeit slowly. Minecraft has received a lot of updates since we began coding the Washington Has Fallen adventure, and some of them have changed the way parts of the game was originally coded.

We originally used a strategy throughout the world that forced key NPC characters to self propel themselves over distances while triggering events along the way to set up some of the missions players would encounter next.

It was a unique idea in which an action by a player would TP the unknown and hidden NPC Character to a special area onto a pressure plate which in turn would trigger a series of command block commands, along with moving the NPC to its next area until the player arrived.

Originally it worked, because in the first introduction of NPC's into the Bedrock version of Minecraft, they had weight and could trigger a pressure plate when they landed on them.  But in newer updates of Minecraft, the player has to be present where the NPC is being teleported from, so it became no longer to self-teleport the NPC that had been teleported beyond the block limits of the player.  The command blocks would return an error, "Unable to place block outside of world".

That has created a ton of extra work as we were design the missions of the game impacted by the changes.

One way it's good, because originally we were teleporting and triggering blocks every so many block chunks within the players range. Since that it no longer working either, were now just teleporting the NPC's wherever they are going, and recoding the local activity locally.

Another good thing about it, is some in-between missions required a lot of running around and searching for buildings in Washington DC which is massive.  That created a lull in the adventure experience. So we've been forced to create new areas that originally didn't exist and some mini-missions that didn't originally exists.

The downside however, is its creating a whole lot of new unexpected work, a whole lot of new coding, and going through the original coding to figure out what we originally did and how it originally worked so we can write new code and make some aspects simpler.

For example.  In the original final beta version, the player trigger an action that sent the NPC jumping by itself and triggering different set-ups about four times on it's way to the White House.  That way, by the time the player would reach the White House, everything would be ready to go and the NPC would be in place.

But, with the changes Minecraft has made, we've had to instead make seven new mini-missions in between the location the player ends the previous mission before reaching the White House Mission which is a major mission in the game.

For example, the player originally never needed to visit the Hospital in Washington DC.  Now the player has three new missions before reaching the Hospital.  The Hospital never had a "Chapel".  But we needed an area that made sense within the overall game to propel the game forward, so we had to build this Hospital Chapel.

We thought the Chapel would be enough, but when testing it out, it connected to the original NPC jumping points which no longer work.  So several of the areas we built recently ended up being unused.  Instead as we beta tested this part of the progression of the game this morning, we realized the Hospital Chapel is actually going to end up being an important part of moving the game forward.

Of course I can write about it all I want, but it won't make much sense until you eventually have a chance to play, and by that time, we'll have already worked out the new coding.

That being said, it's exciting to finally be almost to the White House.  The White House Mission is one of the major missions and contains enormous amounts of coding and activity.  It's one those parts in the game for those of us doing the coding that lets us know we've reached a good place.

Though we'll certainly have to do more creative work arounds once we get past the White House Mission, its a good place.  Hopefully, the White House mission will require little if any new revisions.  It's been beta tested more than any other mission, only uses NPC's to trigger local events and is self contained.

We'll be about half way done with the current beta test repairs and fixing bugs when the White House mission is done.

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