Good night, sweet prince

Some of you might have already heard that TYLER's young and talented music composer, Reuben, has passed away after a tragic dragon boat race mishap.

The first time I met Reuben at our old office I remember thinking to myself: "Damn, this guy is a composer?! He should be a model or professional athlete". Guess what? He was all of the above.

Talented music composer, Mr. World Singapore 2007, member of the national dragon boat team, 3D artist, works with disabled kids, excellent DOTA player and all round a really nice guy. Honestly, he's achieved more in his 23 years than most of us will ever in a lifetime and doesn't brag about any of it.

Reuben scored and performed music for Mobile Weapon 1, MW:TC, Ramen Ramen! and Battle Stations. He volunteered to create music for Battle Stations even though we didn't commission any. He was very passionate about the game just as he was passionate about every other part of his life. I was also going to get him to kick start the audio section of our new MW portal.

He didn't get to see his work for Battle Stations put into the final product (that's due out in late December before Christmas) but we'll still release the full version with his work because it's what he wanted. I remember he kept bugging me on msn to find a feasible solution to incorporate the music into the Facebook game.

IMO the music he made for Battle Stations was his best work yet so I'm going to go the extra mile to make sure Battle Stations becomes my best work too so it'll do justice to his great music.

We'll dedicate the full version of the game to him and donate some royalties to the Reuben Kee memorial fund for under privileged kids.

For those of you who haven't heard his good stuff you can check out his website www.reubenkee.com which we'll help to keep live, hopefully forever.

Reuben! we were supposed to have a mega-DOTA session after my exams this week! We shall play DOTA again someday!



"Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!"

Class Progression in Battle Stations

Here's a quick preview of some stuff that's going to be in the completed version of Battle Stations:

Class Progression:
Players will be able to advance to better job classes from the basic 5 jobs. For example: players on the commander track will start as the Soldier; advance to Officer; then to Commander.

Advanced classes get more stat points and special abilities they can use in combat. Here's the artwork for the female soldier and officer.



Class abilities:
There will be different abilities for different classes. Here are some examples (no prizes for guessing which are the respective classes they belong to):

Preemptive Strike – you fire first during defense
Black Barrage – all weapons fire for 1 more round
Augment – repair in combat + boost to SPD, HP, ATK
Gold Cannon – deal damage proportional to your gold
Maneuver – adjust speed to stay at maximum range

The special abilities cannot be used every battle because they will require strategy points (SP) to activate. More details after my exams end...

Better? Yeah right.

Today, our Battle Stations forum got spammed by a player of some web game. Their game has more than 1 million registered players (launched Dec 2006), ours has 24,000 players (launched Oct 2007).

Let's compare traffic numbers:



We have lower traffic but it's almost on par. And we have 41.6 times less players. At our current rate of growth, guess where we'll be given the same amount of time?

This is the same web game that's been responsible for spamming a lot of other Facebook games like Warbook and Pirates.

MW.net's Alexa ranking breaks through the 10,000 level

Like the title says. I was pretty excited when I saw it: 8,150! I hope we can raise our traffic to make 4-digit ranking for the 3 month average and shoot for 3-digit ranking!

Changeable character outfits for Battle Stations

Very soon (when we're out of BETA), you'll be able to buy different outfits from a new clothing shop for your character. Check out this new pirate outfit!





All classes will be able to equip the new outfits, so even an engineer can wear the new pirate costume if they want. The hats are also now separate as well so you can mix and match hats with different outfits.

A big thank you to our contributing artist, Jonathan, for designing the new outfit as well as helping to make the changing system possible by breaking down the avatars into parts.