12-03-2016, 06:17 AM
Alrighty...I'm going to release this dev blog a bit early to make up for being a day late on the other two. I'm also going to make up for it with a lot more information and details ahead!
Before the list, I want to state that there is a hell of a lot of things going on in the background outside of work you are presented with, far beyond what you're presented with on weak weekly dev blogs at times. This is because sometimes I believe it's just not a good time to bring up certain topics to steer away the focus from the primary development we are working on, or don't have the time to go into detail about them.
This is a huge month though, in fact I feel like while the amount of content getting released soon won't be a record-breaker, this month is a huge stepping stone in preparations for 2017 and what we bring to you. After a hellish year last year with so many migration issues, and development imbalances over the course, I'm excited at the thought of just what is possible for next year.
2016, The Life and Survival of IOU
I feel like it's a good time for me to speak up on the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year.
Throughout migration, the offline gains initial release (where kills no longer mattered), we lost a chunk of players but have still held a strong and dedicated user-base outside of some rather poor (or poor timing) choices on my end. While the growth remained stagnant after those issues for a while now, it appears we are on an upward climb again...and we still have yet to publish publish publish. The minor bits of engagement focuses definitely do make a difference, and there's an incredibly vast amount of room for improvement in that regard.
While it should be obvious IOU needs to keep bringing in new players at least here and there, there should be no misconception that the players who have stuck around since the beginning are the reason this game survived through some seriously rough waters this year.
It's incredible to me that players have stuck around an Idle game for so long, that when people tell me they are quitting it's almost a reaction of surprise because as a gamer, I certainly never stuck around game's for year(s) like this. That being said I completely understand some players quitting because they are tired of waiting, or the game is not going in the direction they anticipated.
I'll never make everyone happy, and I will continue making mistakes...So in any case, I appreciate community for all their dedication, even the thorns (You know who you are).
A lot of you long-term players have put up with an incredible amount of hell throughout IOU's life thus far.
This year could have been worse, but it could have been much better, and I expect with all the improvements over the last few months that it would be pretty hard to move in any direction but forward in 2017.
Community Competition
Participation rewards were sure a big pain in the ass to give out, but admittedly I want people to have a sense of accomplishment. I won't be able to give participation rewards every ComComp, but keep in mind there's always potential for gratitude and reward for your work in helping improve IOU.
Participation rewards were doubled, and all rewards being given have been handed out at this point.
Thank you everyone who participated, and sorry if you spent any time voting or discussing votes. In the end it made sense for me to just handle the wins with my own bias as opposed to community bias, where there was too much room for exploitation.
A new ComComp might make it in a couple weeks, but keep in mind just how busy things are right now.
RPG Event
I can't believe how the entire user-base absolutely LOVED this event and all its interactions! ...Oh wait.
This was a neat experiment, and even better to discover the user-base's feelings towards heavier interactions within the game on full throttle. That being said you can rest assured this will be under constant consideration in the future.
Santa Event
In the meantime, enjoy a braindead-relaxed event coming up! I've made changes to make it even more laid back, and significantly more rewarding than last year.
Black Friday
The Black Friday bit is coming to an end on December 10th. You should assume that it's over by the 9th. I will not be re-enabling any packs (paid or free) after it is taken down. Firm.
New Years
Looking at a small New Years surprise. This entails potentially the first very simple mostly-passive global event in IOU, one that will be our pre-testing to the capabilities of Global Beasts, Guild Rehauls, and other features of a more powerful collaborative game-play. I think it'll be a great way to end and start 2016/2017.
Note: There are no plans for packs (free or paid), or diamond spending. This tiny event is intended to be a fun little experiment.
The development time on this is expected at to be one Day for Ray and Jay, so don't worry about being set back, Eh?
Exact release time unknown. No point in asking for a while.
Bonuses
Recharge and Exp bonuses are being taken down and replaced. You'll see what with after the patch release! I'm avoiding hype and headache by not releasing that information until release.
Challenges, Series & Level 1000+
While there's a never ending amount of ideas behind where challenges will lead in the long-run, I can tell you right now we are looking at re-balancing challenge series to scale more quickly in difficulty.
BUT! Chill out, I'm not finished! Don't go spamming us on Discord, Tickets, Facebook, Forum and Emails yet...
We are likely looking at reducing the difficulty slightly for non-series challenges, and adding two new difficulties. Platinum, which would release at level 500, and Ragestone, at 1000.
Before this however, the UI needs a significant clean-up. Plenty of great ideas from the PIC Competition
New Logo & Loading Screen
New loading screen/logo coming with this next patch. I'm pretty excited for it, just being looks or not, it's a major improvement in my eyes and I'll be a lot more proud to show it off.
Expedition System
Player ships?: Check
Battlestation?: Check
Battlestation background?: Check
After this patch release, I'm going to get everything going with the 2nd half of the expedition release and get things rolling onto test as soon as possible.
Unfortunately we had a few issues and distractions along the way but we should be good to get a move-on again, albeit behind schedule but it's not like progress hasn't been made in several areas.
Optimizations / Challenge Lag
Somewhere along the way challenge lag came back with a vengeance. This being one of the distractions as of late in terms of the expedition system progress, has been interesting to say the least.
First, I spent a lot of time breaking down -everything- in the servers, and debugged for many many hours. I discovered a lot of interactions going on during Connect and Disconnect, which appears to be where all the major spikes occur, including ghosts.
Ghosted players are legitimately an AI version of you running your account, but the kicker is that it shouldn't require much processing for all the offline players. Instead I discovered a lot more going on with database transactions, timers, etc that shouldn't have been, and major improvements have been made in that regard.
----
Second, we have always had an issue with trying to run rooms individually to avoid one room affecting other rooms (or crashing all rooms for that matter). One issue with this was that we ran a unique connectionpool to the database for every single room. This generally lead to a disgusting amount of connections for one dedication machine to handle, especially when several rooms are created or shut down around the same time.
What we have done instead is created a central connection pool communicator that handles transactions for every single room. This was a rather big change with how we handled things before, and we're going to try running with it in this upcoming patch.
If things don't work out on the first push of these changes (which have been on testing a while now), then we have designed a quick way to switch it back until we can clean up whatever issues arise (if any).
There has been so many optimizations/cleanups with the development of this upcoming patch, that I will likely declare a few hour potential downtime upon release.
----
All that being said, we're very hopeful this will improve the lag issues astronomically.
World-wide availability!
Right now all the servers (game servers, webhost, balance loading authentication scripts) are being hosted in the USA.
However, we are in the works of setting things up on a CDN for at least the assets/authentication portions. This means people around the world who play will have a much better access to files and calls for a much quicker download time.
It's a big step in the direction we are aiming for, which will eventually also include servers hosted around the world, and being able to set where your party room, or challenge room is hosted (North America, Europe, Asian, etc). Who needs 500+ ping anyways?
2017
Next month i'll have some announcements on plans ahead for the year, beyond the community surveys.
Rehaul
I now have all the assets for worlds 1-10, all backgrounds and monsters.
For those who are used to the existing monsters, I'm giving a heads up...it's going to be a system shock, but this rehaul was announced a looong time ago, and for the purpose of being able to begin preparing the game/assets for multiple resolutions for cross-device support.
Show and Tell
I was going to show the new ship(s), the battle station, and some of the new assets ahead but i'll leave that up for further dev blogs, or simply just release them!
Cheers,
Ray
Before the list, I want to state that there is a hell of a lot of things going on in the background outside of work you are presented with, far beyond what you're presented with on weak weekly dev blogs at times. This is because sometimes I believe it's just not a good time to bring up certain topics to steer away the focus from the primary development we are working on, or don't have the time to go into detail about them.
This is a huge month though, in fact I feel like while the amount of content getting released soon won't be a record-breaker, this month is a huge stepping stone in preparations for 2017 and what we bring to you. After a hellish year last year with so many migration issues, and development imbalances over the course, I'm excited at the thought of just what is possible for next year.
2016, The Life and Survival of IOU
I feel like it's a good time for me to speak up on the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year.
Throughout migration, the offline gains initial release (where kills no longer mattered), we lost a chunk of players but have still held a strong and dedicated user-base outside of some rather poor (or poor timing) choices on my end. While the growth remained stagnant after those issues for a while now, it appears we are on an upward climb again...and we still have yet to publish publish publish. The minor bits of engagement focuses definitely do make a difference, and there's an incredibly vast amount of room for improvement in that regard.
While it should be obvious IOU needs to keep bringing in new players at least here and there, there should be no misconception that the players who have stuck around since the beginning are the reason this game survived through some seriously rough waters this year.
It's incredible to me that players have stuck around an Idle game for so long, that when people tell me they are quitting it's almost a reaction of surprise because as a gamer, I certainly never stuck around game's for year(s) like this. That being said I completely understand some players quitting because they are tired of waiting, or the game is not going in the direction they anticipated.
I'll never make everyone happy, and I will continue making mistakes...So in any case, I appreciate community for all their dedication, even the thorns (You know who you are).
A lot of you long-term players have put up with an incredible amount of hell throughout IOU's life thus far.
This year could have been worse, but it could have been much better, and I expect with all the improvements over the last few months that it would be pretty hard to move in any direction but forward in 2017.
Community Competition
Participation rewards were sure a big pain in the ass to give out, but admittedly I want people to have a sense of accomplishment. I won't be able to give participation rewards every ComComp, but keep in mind there's always potential for gratitude and reward for your work in helping improve IOU.
Participation rewards were doubled, and all rewards being given have been handed out at this point.
Thank you everyone who participated, and sorry if you spent any time voting or discussing votes. In the end it made sense for me to just handle the wins with my own bias as opposed to community bias, where there was too much room for exploitation.
A new ComComp might make it in a couple weeks, but keep in mind just how busy things are right now.
RPG Event
I can't believe how the entire user-base absolutely LOVED this event and all its interactions! ...Oh wait.
This was a neat experiment, and even better to discover the user-base's feelings towards heavier interactions within the game on full throttle. That being said you can rest assured this will be under constant consideration in the future.
Santa Event
In the meantime, enjoy a braindead-relaxed event coming up! I've made changes to make it even more laid back, and significantly more rewarding than last year.
Black Friday
The Black Friday bit is coming to an end on December 10th. You should assume that it's over by the 9th. I will not be re-enabling any packs (paid or free) after it is taken down. Firm.
New Years
Looking at a small New Years surprise. This entails potentially the first very simple mostly-passive global event in IOU, one that will be our pre-testing to the capabilities of Global Beasts, Guild Rehauls, and other features of a more powerful collaborative game-play. I think it'll be a great way to end and start 2016/2017.
Note: There are no plans for packs (free or paid), or diamond spending. This tiny event is intended to be a fun little experiment.
The development time on this is expected at to be one Day for Ray and Jay, so don't worry about being set back, Eh?
Exact release time unknown. No point in asking for a while.
Bonuses
Recharge and Exp bonuses are being taken down and replaced. You'll see what with after the patch release! I'm avoiding hype and headache by not releasing that information until release.
Challenges, Series & Level 1000+
While there's a never ending amount of ideas behind where challenges will lead in the long-run, I can tell you right now we are looking at re-balancing challenge series to scale more quickly in difficulty.
BUT! Chill out, I'm not finished! Don't go spamming us on Discord, Tickets, Facebook, Forum and Emails yet...
We are likely looking at reducing the difficulty slightly for non-series challenges, and adding two new difficulties. Platinum, which would release at level 500, and Ragestone, at 1000.
Before this however, the UI needs a significant clean-up. Plenty of great ideas from the PIC Competition
New Logo & Loading Screen
New loading screen/logo coming with this next patch. I'm pretty excited for it, just being looks or not, it's a major improvement in my eyes and I'll be a lot more proud to show it off.
Expedition System
Player ships?: Check
Battlestation?: Check
Battlestation background?: Check
After this patch release, I'm going to get everything going with the 2nd half of the expedition release and get things rolling onto test as soon as possible.
Unfortunately we had a few issues and distractions along the way but we should be good to get a move-on again, albeit behind schedule but it's not like progress hasn't been made in several areas.
Optimizations / Challenge Lag
Somewhere along the way challenge lag came back with a vengeance. This being one of the distractions as of late in terms of the expedition system progress, has been interesting to say the least.
First, I spent a lot of time breaking down -everything- in the servers, and debugged for many many hours. I discovered a lot of interactions going on during Connect and Disconnect, which appears to be where all the major spikes occur, including ghosts.
Ghosted players are legitimately an AI version of you running your account, but the kicker is that it shouldn't require much processing for all the offline players. Instead I discovered a lot more going on with database transactions, timers, etc that shouldn't have been, and major improvements have been made in that regard.
----
Second, we have always had an issue with trying to run rooms individually to avoid one room affecting other rooms (or crashing all rooms for that matter). One issue with this was that we ran a unique connectionpool to the database for every single room. This generally lead to a disgusting amount of connections for one dedication machine to handle, especially when several rooms are created or shut down around the same time.
What we have done instead is created a central connection pool communicator that handles transactions for every single room. This was a rather big change with how we handled things before, and we're going to try running with it in this upcoming patch.
If things don't work out on the first push of these changes (which have been on testing a while now), then we have designed a quick way to switch it back until we can clean up whatever issues arise (if any).
There has been so many optimizations/cleanups with the development of this upcoming patch, that I will likely declare a few hour potential downtime upon release.
----
All that being said, we're very hopeful this will improve the lag issues astronomically.
World-wide availability!
Right now all the servers (game servers, webhost, balance loading authentication scripts) are being hosted in the USA.
However, we are in the works of setting things up on a CDN for at least the assets/authentication portions. This means people around the world who play will have a much better access to files and calls for a much quicker download time.
It's a big step in the direction we are aiming for, which will eventually also include servers hosted around the world, and being able to set where your party room, or challenge room is hosted (North America, Europe, Asian, etc). Who needs 500+ ping anyways?
2017
Next month i'll have some announcements on plans ahead for the year, beyond the community surveys.
Rehaul
I now have all the assets for worlds 1-10, all backgrounds and monsters.
For those who are used to the existing monsters, I'm giving a heads up...it's going to be a system shock, but this rehaul was announced a looong time ago, and for the purpose of being able to begin preparing the game/assets for multiple resolutions for cross-device support.
Show and Tell
I was going to show the new ship(s), the battle station, and some of the new assets ahead but i'll leave that up for further dev blogs, or simply just release them!
Cheers,
Ray