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Dev Diary 32 :: 2017 - August
#1
Hey Folks,

Been a fair while since the last dev blog post. I figured this survey would be a good time to go over things.

First: What have you been working on?

For starters...aside from the major testing phases with the new ascension rehaul and cleanups after the release, it has been a long haul with backend changes/improvements.

We ended up migrating away from using dedicated Windows based machines over to Linux (Ubuntu). Because IOU has a large player-base that constantly remains online, and with the insane amount of packets being sent back and forth, and the amount of rooms required to keep this up, it has been a very costly self-hosting run over the last year. 

Linux costs half as much to start, and we went with long-term prepaid contracts to reduce the prices even more to ensure IOU sticks around for years to come.

We've also run into the plague with the challenge issues that we finally cleaned up. Not that there won't be a rare case of connection issues with players because of routing, ISP, lag, etc, but I think challenges from here on should remain more stable than they have ever been since the beginning, as we rewrote and cleaned up significant sections to improve stability outside of the underlying issue that was causing people to drop prior to the challenges beginning.

I think with our next image release coming up we won't have to touch any back-end development for a nice while, which will leave a significant amount more time to develop features. We could certainly use better tools on the support side but we have what we need in the mean-time.

What's Next? Spill the beans on the survey already!
There's a clear indicator that the large amount of players over on discord don't actually make up a large portion of other players; the kind that play perhaps more casually and don't bother with tickets or community.

This is obvious when we look back at the survey where players requested a fishing expansion...and now with this survey.

Please continue to read after seeing the results as I know in hindsight there will be disappointment with the winning item:

[Image: surveyresults.png]

Initially, Trophy Rehaul and EP Rehaul had their counts growing well, with Instant Mine/Chop not far behind but today it appears it won the race, and just by a bit over Trophy Re-haul.

I have good news though for those not exactly happy about Instant Mine/Chop being of priority.

When I saw that it was unlikely that Instant Mining/Chop would be surpassed today, I started working on a quick implementation of Instant Mining & Chopping:

[Image: MineAll.gif]

and...

[Image: CutAll.gif]


Now, with this being ready for testing pronto and likely live by early next week. I think I can say this item is done/closed and move onto the Trophy Rehaul. Will be opening discussions in testing next week with some proposal(s).

Okay, and what about Beasts?
I got pretty far with the beasts screens, and possibly could have just put it into testing without finishing them all, but even the time it took me to get the few screens going I felt like things were moving too slow and hindering my ability to spend time on things we could see sooner.

I'm going to pick it back up very soon. I apologize for just dropping progress on this but with the back-end issues and the delays on the ascension re-haul, I simply needed to change my focus for a while, before I lost it all together.

Anything Else?
There's actually a fair bit of cleaned up art for challenges by Isael that I could add at any point in time, but it just hasn't been such a priority yet.

Other things coming up:

Bingo
I know...you're probably tired of hearing this one. However from recent tests I am confident we can release this finally. Right now I'm waiting on negotiation with Kongregate on a promo event with the release of bingo, where we'll likely be running it every day for 7 days, then 1-2 days per week thereafter as the promotional release.

If you're wondering what bingo will entail...well, it's more free stuff.

Pack Window Cleanup
I've undergone this task as something that needed to be cleaned up and expanded upon. The new pack window will include diamond packs and the alternate packs all in their own categories, along with expanding on available packs....including Level-Up reward packs section which will be made available in the future, when I feel comfortable with the existing systems and can include the newer currencies/items that they'll persist with.

That's all for now. If you want to be a bigger part of the development, make sure to take part in the testing when it's present!

Thanks,
Ray
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