Idle Online Universe RPG - Dev Blog

Unity and Beyond

Sun, 23 Sep 2018 22:56:05 +0000

Hey folks,

Been a little while since I posted a development blog, since I've mostly just discussed things in chat/testing, but I felt it was time to give a more appropriate timeline and intention for where I anticipate the game going moving forward for 2018.

Unity
We are tying a lot of features right now with the new larger integer system to sustain insanely large numbers within the client. This was already done for flash but set us back a fair bit on Unity. That being said it definitely didn't change my intention of having testers on the upcoming public test build.

We anticipate multiple weekly test builds with all three of us (Myself, Jay & Kay) working on the Unity side of things. Your participation and feedback will definitely help us get things moving along in a direction to get a base live build ready.

There will be several smaller systems that are not part of the testing yet that we'll be delegating among the team while focusing on the bigger areas.

We are about a week behind the test builds (Intended for october 1st) as Kay is likely undergoing eye surgery but things are still progressing well enough.

Base Live Build
I expect this to happen by November, where we move the webGL build from testing servers, over to live....where we'll have a transitional process between flash & unity.

Goodbye Flash
A generous death-date of the flash version that will likely never be touched again is the new year.
I HAVE BEEN ASKED: Nothing will happen to your character data. It is stored on the servers, not on the client!

Stand-Alone
We are anticipating a standalone version. This will be a very rough build initially, and we'll likely include that well before the new year to get feedback and testing on it.
The goal will be to tie into notification systems within desktop-OSes between Mac and Windows, to allow you to be offline but have the option to receive notifications on things like "Club Claim is Ready!" to truly design a new stand-alone experience for an idle game.

We will be tackling download-management Portals such as steam once we are 100% comfortable with the stability of it. I'll definitely be asking the help of the community for helping get it Greenlit as we are no longer partnered with Gamestop for this part of the publishing. I am confident we'd make it through; I'm not 100% confident how steam community would take this kind of game but that is always the risk.

Mobile
We will also be tackling android testing very very shortly after the webgl testing. This will be a drawn out process as mobile publishing is nothing like web, and a little more complicated than stand-alone due to Google/Apple updating processing that we'll have to adjust our workflow to.

Flash Finalization
The sooner this happens, the sooner Unity becomes the full focus and speeds up the feature list.

Here are the items I will be tackling immediately:

Ability to respec ships
Woodcutting expansion. We have 70 trees ready...from 40.
Balancing ships & expeditions. They got a little out of control beyond our expectations without softcaps.
Mining Depth Increase & Diamond accrual changes on repeats
Mining NRG cost changes
Online Claim stacking improvements
Match 3 retro energy claim improvements
Y Upgrade & shield balancing (currently a maybe)
Small QoL stuff

I will be making small adjustments still with flash during the transition, but we will not be focusing on it, and major improvements/changes will start to occur within the Unity version since full support and maintaining two drastically different clients is hell.

Event System Changes
One thing that will probably occur unless a miracle occurs and the Unity version is 1000% live-ready before Halloween, is experimentation on a challenge-based event system.

We will be running a temporary halloween-themed challenge that will have growing difficulty and rewards. I'll be having this within test at some point and we'll work through the feedback on how we can use this setup for future events by offering unique rewards similar to the original events well before the mini-games.

The existing candy/halloween event would likely run parallel, since these will be experiments on working over things for the future.

Notes
We have several systems that are basically planned and ready to go, but we'll be integrating them within Unity, since there will be 3 of us able to do so.

Flash was always a pain because I was the only one who could work on it, and I'm by far no UI designer. That being said, with 3 of us able to work on the front-end, and two on the server-side, we will able to give a better flow of progress and updates.

I'll fill you folks in on a lot more as we get further into Unity.

Dev Diary 34

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 01:24:15 +0000

Hey Folks...time for a dev blog I think!

I will no longer add the month at the end of the dev diaries as they simply won't be monthly.

As many of you know January was pretty crappy for me and we got set back nearly 4 weeks on development, but we're back in biz! And a lot more than nothing has been in the works in the background

So what's coming?

Gold Logs
Well aware of the growth of this new currency being a bit unbalanced, especially for those who didn't have the upgrades before. Changes for this are coming and are now active (although not official yet) in testing.

Pet Arena Expansion
Yes! Finally?

Lets take a look at some of your new opponents:

No word on just how high Pet Arena will go to, nor the changes that will be included for the rewards yet though. I'll get things running in test at some point then we'll make the necessary changes for then

Pet Expansion?
Yes. We had a competition on this for community skins. We already have what we need for tiers 16-20+ skins, however, you'll be able to select your own pet skins instead of being bound to pet tier skins!

But how you might ask? With a Petadontist of course...you'll have a new window where you can select from tons of skins....find ways to unlock skins, or buy skins.

New Shop
One of the most outdated systems in the game, is the 'shop'. I have had so many requests for being able to trade currency for . I always said no, because such systems would mess up the economy further, however, in a limited sense this isn't a problem!

So, how about a new shop that gives one-time deals, daily deals, etc?
[Monday one-time Deal] Trade 50 Infinity Matter for 250 diamonds
[Tuesday one-time Deal] Trade 10 Wood NRG for 1 Bingo Ticket

These aren't official deals, nor specifically how it will definitely work, but we'll be looking at generating offers globally to players to make the new shop a nice treat.

Unity Client
Holy I'm behind a lot now because of this crappy month. Trying to catch up on everything else but I'll be diving into this development heavily again soon for more updates.

Orbs
New orbs will be coming again soonish, along with a likely 2nd layer for being able to use straggler crystals for improving the bonuses on all your orbs.

Guilds
We have a new building coming early this year...but we also have guilds...not going to name any names...but guilds that are reaching lv 200. So some work needs to be done to improve the longevity of guild investments and participations.

Santa Event & New Years
Deductions have begun and will increase pretty quickly on the New Years Event...

Match 3 will be replacing both events very very soon.

IOU Official Website
Level has done some great work on a new official landing page for iourpg.com....it'll be official very soon:

VIP Upgrade
We'll be looking at adding 1 new VIP upgrade over the next couple months. Undecided exactly which bonus as of yet.

Bingo
We know of a couple issues going on with Bingo...we'll be working out minor improvements over the next few weeks. Bear with us on this, it's a pretty low priority system for us right now.

Mining
We are entertaining the idea to a major revamp to mining. Nothing official, nothing to really note at the moment but it's amping to the point that it needs some reworking for the future.

Other fixes/improvements
I know there's a lot I'm not mentioning...I'm brain-fried from jumping back into everything recently so apologies on that. We'll be working through a lot of the issues that have been reported and suggestions from Q&A that made it into the trello board though.

Things are active again in testing as well so don't shy from helping fry the issues before release

Cheers.

Dev Diary 33 - November

Sat, 18 Nov 2017 15:29:04 +0000

Hey folks...

I haven't done a dev blog in ages as we've just been pushing out updates and announcing on discord, however I know many of you prefer a more official posting on what is going on so here it is!

Surveys
I won't be doing these for a little while I don't think. I'll be working with testers and the community to handle priorities as they come until the new year, while also undergoing efforts towards things I personally feel can be accomplished in short enough time to keep these updates streamlined into the new year.

This is not to say they won't be back or used in another manner.

Forums
Forums aren't as popular these days, but I think we'll be anchoring some uses towards them again. I will be working with Lynn to get things moving here more often, including some kind of smaller Community Events going once again.

Events
Some time next year I don't believe we'll be running the mini-game events anymore. I know some of you have your favorites (match 3, clean energy, etc), however these events are a little less practical to keep going.
When/if we migrate the client away from flash (More info below), I'd like to have a more consistent event system that allows us to integrate new content injections as opposed to different/repeat minigames.

Also, next event coming up is global warming. It will be included with the new Orbs patch in a ~week.

Migration?
Or rather, a port....I've been looking at an integration of IOU within Unity to be able to host the game on WebGL, Windows/mac/linux, iOS, Android and so forth. Localization, visual FX, patchnotes, and other more fluid features that will make IOU a little more young again, and bring newer audiences to it.

The reason? Flash is being killed off by Adobe by 2020, but jackass corporations like Google, Mozilla and Microsoft are giving some pretty hefty efforts already to kill it today without any regard for the fans of it, or the small businesses/hobbyists whose world revolves around it.

I'm getting more and more reports of people having issues with flash (especially on Chrome....looking at you Google)...so it's time to look at where the game will head in the future in terms of client support.

If you're interested in seeing the progression of this client over the next few months (expected time for it to be ready would be late spring, early summer), you should join us within the test channel at:

https://discord.gg/0swWvJsHG6CCBLdY

And you can access the client (connected to the test server, not live) at:

http://iourpg.com/unity

As a final note regarding the unity port, don't worry...this is not like the server migration where there's months without updates because of the required efforts. I'm only touching base on the development of this before I hit the hay every night. It's slower than it could be but it isn't really affecting the growth of development on IOU.

ORBS??? Also what is with the whispers of ascension changes I am hearing?
Yadda yadda, new orbs are coming. 5 of them in fact very soon, and another 5 down the road. The testing/development does not begin until next week so there is Not a lot of official information to give yet!

There will however definitely be a Ship Arena orb out of the five. This orb will likely come as part of an assassination on an issue that plagues Ascension upgrades. Many are focusing their builds towards Ship Arena, then vice versa...waiting months and repeating. This has been a known problem with the system without a solid non-exploitative resolution. Well..we have a solution I'm working towards. It should be as positive as any solution could be at this point.

We are looking at one of the following two changes at the same time as the Ship Arena Orb release:

Removing Ship Arena Ascension upgrades all together. Refunding the points put into them.
Reducing the Ship Arena Ascension upgrade caps to a feasible number where you don't need to invest heavily to maintain.

In all cases, you should be able to make use of the new orb to get back to higher states within the ship arena. I know some people are on the edge case of a build towards ship arena, thus, losing out on DPS/gains. This is why we'll ensure to refund you immediately instead of replacing the upgrade with something else, regardless of which option we go with, so you can rebuild towards your more preferable setup.

There was so many suggestions about "Charge people to reset ascension like trophies" or "give faster cooldowns on point resets", but people are missing a significant point here in that the system is practically exploitative if you can switch the builds quickly, regardless of spending or not. The intent with the system was to ensure a more decisive role in your choice of upgrade distribution, however it is clear this doesn't work well with the IOU community.

After this change we'll look at any other upgrades that might have similar issues, potentially resolve those and then we can make the upgrades work similar to trophy downgrades, as there won't be any exploits within the system. I cannot, however do it before then.

Crystals
Not 100% on costs yet. I know you have been smart and saving these up even since before the crystal sac option was removed.......right?

I'm sure i'll be including crystal rewards in the upcoming Global Warming event, but also will be including some new packs with the upcoming new Pack Window.

New Packs?
Yes. People have been bugging me for something new to invest in, along with currency sinks, and they are coming.

Subscription Pack
This is a far more affordable pack that gives more resources over time. Not a pack that is needed by any standard but certain a nice treat for the price:
$10/100kred

For 30 days, Every day you receive:
-100 Diamonds
-10 Food
-1 Dynamite

Weekly Pack
A procedural generated pack that gives a fair amount of diamonds, and a mix of two other currencies. The pack will be the same for everyone and automatically change at midnight on Sundays.

Daily Pack
A procedural generated pack that gives a fair amount of diamonds, and a mix of two other currencies. The pack will be the same for everyone and automatically change at midnight every day.

AP Packs
We have some one-timer AP packs coming. Purchasing the existing will unlock the higher tier of the pack. I know there isn't a huge use for AP these days outside of the pet arena, and I wouldn't reducing the Pet Arena AP requirements in place of something more appropriate and less maintenance-consistent, but that's for another day. This pack is here anyways.

Crystal Packs
Thanks to the testers we were able to come up a generous amount of Crystals for these packs. The option is there if you need more crystals for other unlocks, outside of mining/events.

VIP Upgrades
If you haven't heard already...we're changing this system up a bit.

Level cap on VIP upgrades is now 50, from 100, however:
:: +25 to level cap after your FIRST ascension
:: +25 to level cap after your SECOND ascension
:: +50 to level cap after your FINAL ascension

This means the new cap will be 150.

Also, we've added a new Multicatch VIP upgrade that you can invest in to improve your chances to catch additional fish.

Challenges are getting old
Indeed. So is waiting for the Beast system.

Unfortunately there's some bigger plans ahead with these two systems that require some other work to be finalized before these can be expanded on. One of the reasons I am going towards no surveys for major items for a while is this very reason. We're discussing internally some options moving forward to sincerely expand on how this content works, and other things players can work towards in the long-term to ensure these systems are less of a pain, and more of an exciting challenge towards rewards/progression.

Beasts unfortunately does not have the tie-in yet it deserves, but we are looking towards that this upcoming new year for sure.

If no beasts soon, what about Global Event?
New years is coming...and we know that one is prepared. I see no reason it won't be there with some changes/improvements.

Black Friday?
Negative. There will not be a marketing push set up for this. The new packs / pack window are coming close to it, so I don't see much reason to push marketing so heavily at this time beyond that.

Servers are acting weird?
Been getting some heads up on lag spikes and other issues. We will be working towards optimizations and digging into the cause more intensely after the orb patch.

Clients are acting weird?
Chrome...usually. Something is going on with browsers & flash lately. I mentioned this above. I have no solutions at the moment. Keep an eye on the browser console to see if there's any indications for now.

PvP
We have the bandaid on, but we're still working to improve our first aid kit on this issue.

We're looking at setting up a different ladder system for PvP, where instead of having to switch control drones and ensure you're within the top places for your tier to avoid being exploited down the list, that you'll simply need to fight people (similar to now) around your size. Defeating people of higher challenge will give you additional points towards your ladder.

You'll be given enemies based on your current ladder tier, and as you defeat them and increase your ladder (reward tier) the enemies will get more difficult. I think this can ensure players will be placed into appropriate tiers this way, leaving no limit on the reward tiers based on effort/progresion.
On top of this, we will likely have the top lists for PvP cleared every week for fresh starts.

This isn't finalized or official yet, it's just something we are looking into. We will have things going on test likely in december and I'm sure the testing community will give appropriate feedback to ensure it's a much better system in the end.

Bingo
lul. It's ready though. We have some criticism about the progression of Bingo Levels for this so we'll be looking at a final touchup on that before releasing. Bingo WILL happen.

Pets
We have several new pet proposals. We'll be deciding which ones we go with before we move ahead with a +5 pet tier cap.

We also have planned a 21+ tier cap, as food progression rises and the future will obviously allow you to surpass such tiers.

Alas, for the release of this we WILL be setting up Pet Icon selection. Don't like your tier icon? Change it.

Personal Notes
After the trophy rehaul, as much as the positive feedback I got from it was, it required reworking some hefty things that burnt me out a little bit. Since then, I want a little break on major major items. The survey selecting my workload can be fine but I'd like to work on smaller things that make the game far better in swifter releases, at least until the new year.

There's a lot of improvements coming by the new year. Stay tuned.

-Ray

Dev Diary 32 :: 2017 - August

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 01:52:57 +0000

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:

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:

and...

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

Dev Diary 31 :: 2017 - June

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:12:36 +0000

Summer Time......I look forward to summer every year but things get so hectic that I never get to enjoy it.

I don't have a ton of things to announce so I'm going to keep things short and toss out a rough road-map, similar to May - as these seem to have a pleasant take from the community all the same.

These dates are estimations - bigger items could certainly end up being moved. This is a disgustingly busy time of year for me with my kid's birthdays all bunched up, DJing, summer maintenance and so forth. I'll be doing as best as I can to keep to the dates.

June 13th:
-Aquatic Research Building Release

June 20th:
-Wishing Well building release

June 27th:
-New Global Event release (Based on 'Beasts' as an experimental release prior to actual Guild Beasts implementation for a taste of the system)

July 7th:

-New Event (Clean Energy Shuts down for the next - might be early but I anticipate needing some time to squeeze in the global event)

July 15th:
-Ascension Upgrade Rehaul

Outside of that, there's actually still quite a bit going on and coming up that are not included in date releases. These will be released whenever, or will have a date scheduled later on.

Small-Item Surveys
Instead of offering a big-item survey for the next while, I will be releasing more frequented small-item surveys.
I won't be starting until around mid-july on the next big-item, which will be more of a major preparation for all the new major features ahead (Gear/Crafting).

Bug Cleanups
There's some bugs with older systems that shouldn't be part of a survey item, such as the PvP ranking issues, or some of the guild discrepancies. Will definitely be squeezing bug fixes in.

Two New Guild Buildings

New Purchase Window (With new one-time packs, categories, etc)

That's it for now. Things feel like they are moving at a solid pace lately, thanks to the re-running of events.

There's going to be more coming up than is mentioned here, but I don't know which of the list will apply, so play the rest by ear for now.

Thanks!

Dev Diary 30 :: 2017 - May

Tue, 16 May 2017 00:31:36 +0000

Hey folks,

Not a significant blog here, just a timeline...

~~May 16th:~~
~~-Guild Rehaul Release~~
~~-Cleanups/Fixes to follow over the course of a week or so~~

~~May 18 or 19th:~~
~~-Assuming stability with the new patch, we'll be migrating the database over to a more robust server setup~~
~~-Looking at the resolution to PvP ranking mismatches. We have a new query setup to look at and resolve these issues, but we needed the new server build to make it happen.~~

~~May 26th:~~
~~-Next Event Release (Unsure which event just yet...too busy with other aspects to even think about it at the time of this writing)~~

~~May 31st:~~
~~-Guild Hall & guild quest/level-up release. Testing/discussion within the testing channels for this should begin around the 22nd~~
~~-New Big-Feature Survey release~~

~~June 6th:~~
~~-Library Building Release~~
~~-Short Term Survey release~~

June 13th:
-Aquatic Research Building Release

June 20th:
-Wishing Well building release (Moved from June 6th)

June 27th:

-New Global Event release (Based on 'Beasts' as an experimental release prior to actual Guild Beasts implementation for a taste of the system)

Plenty of other changes/additions can occur between these days, however this is the new timeline commitment we're anticipating

I figured I'd give an actual timeline for things upcoming so you can have an idea when to expect things. To be safe on my end, I'm not writing anything beyond this timeline yet as it's impossible to tell what other priorities may be needed during and after.

Thanks

Dev Diary 29 :: 2017 :: April

Mon, 01 May 2017 02:35:31 +0000

Here it is, moments shy of May.

It obviously feels like nothing has been going on from most player's perspectives update-wise, but we're finally nearing the big patch.

Guild Rehaul
This is pretty much the sole talking point for this blog as it is what has been in major development outside of boring (to you) back-end work.

The guild system probably could have been released a short bit ago already but we've undergone a few big changes to how the system works compared to how it was initially presented to testers due to some concerns that had been raised regarding the inability to co-operate more functionally as a guild.

The toss-up at that point was dictatorship vs complete freedom of stone investment, and while there's arguments on either end, I went with a solution that seemed the most logical.

Words are 1/1000th of a picture though so lets get some visuals going here.

Main Guild Window

The window that takes the cake...

Infinite room for building expansion
Quick & Easy Guild Dialogue control from the bottom primary bar
Arrows/Arrow Keys/ A & D hotkeys to scroll through the guild town
Designed to be able to potentially customize your guild lands and visuals down the road
Given the amount going on in the new window, a lot of optimization considering the visuals
Quality settings invoke performance improvements/changes depending on your setting
Primary/Parent details all in one environment

So what's 'new' about this portion? Just looks like a shmancy way to show off the old buildings..

New buildings (some implemented, some not): Sawmill, Library, Beast's Den, Wishing Well, Aquatic Research Center
Need more pictures to show you!...below..

Guild Building Popup Window

Invest ANY amount you want. 5 Stone? 5 Bajillion (if you have it)?
Earn Guild XP on each and every stone invested, instead of 1 per 1000.
Bonuses are added together based on Guild Global Bonus, Your personal upgraded bonus, wishing well (coming soon) bonus, and the guild's level (Quests - 2nd part of guild rehaul release). These bonuses are then MULTIPLIED with your existing rates, unlike previously where some were additive. This means you'll definitely feel the new rates as they increase.
No cap...and before you worry about there being some crazy exponential increase...this system has some of the softest caps in IOU to date for higher levels. There should always be something to work towards in the short-medium term, regardless of guild progression/size.
Personal bonuses act similar to guild XP bonuses from the old system...they carry with you...as do your building investments!

Who's a noob? I'm the noob. Sort your guild-mates investments in each building from largest to smallest or vice versa. Who needs some encouragement? Ray does, and maybe this ZRZ guy.

Personal upgrades that improve the building's bonus. Spend your guild XP and upgrade any building level to your own choosing.

Your usual MOTD settings
Enable/Disable buildings for your members to invest in. This does NOT prevent them from investing into personal upgrade bonuses though, that is their choice.
New open-join filtration settings: Level, Invested [total], Support Level, Lineage Level

Summary screen detailing ...the summary of the guild. Bonuses [guild/personal], motd, and will also display the guild's current quest when that portion is released.
This window is subject to change drastically before release

Member screen with more appropriate details
Full sort-functionality from high to low or low to high for Rank, Name, Level, Last Online, and Net Worth (total stone invested)

Simple member interaction!
You can inspect guild members with ease
You can join guild mates whether they are online or offline, assuming you match the criteria and they have the join enabled
Simple Promote/Demote/Kick control, similar to before

And that's all worth sharing at the moment.

Bonuses are in real-time...even if you somehow get disconnected from the guild room your bonuses will not be affected and will be in sync!

Anything Else? More pictures?

Incoming improved 'Tribal Smash' challenge theme by Isael.

Improved Rats challenge cleanup by Isael

Alas, one of the many dragons and settings for the future Beast system.

All assets are pretty much done and ready to go for when the community decides to vote on the Beast System, for this Dragon-Themed beast series
over 60 different types of dragons. Incremental backgrounds with new animated FX as well.

Tired of Pictures?
-Enter key will open the chat in most areas of the game
-Fix on damage tracking for trophies (sorry for the delay on that fix)
-Various other fixes likely not important enough to mention until the patch release
-Major back-end work. This has taken up a fair portion of our development time, but for the reason of low maintenance and improve functionality for the future. We currently are unable to log 'too' much information to avoid server lag / bog-down...with the upcoming back-end changes we should be able to shrink & grow at any size and remain sufficient, we can open API to developers, log every tiny transaction for improved support and redundancy on screw-ups on our end, and so forth.

Anyways...catch you in May (what is that? less than an hour and a half in my time?)

Ray

Dev Diary 28 :: 2017 :: March

Sat, 18 Mar 2017 17:27:45 +0000

Hey Folks.

Obviously I haven't kept up with the dev blogs on the forum, but what I'll be looking to do is minimize the blogs to one big one each month and probably leave it at that unless I have additional details I'd like to share ahead.

Starting with the less exciting stuff....

Back-End
We have been working on a lot of back-end changes for the game in preparations for the long term...after the two completely separate outages (The major North East American Amazon Outrage, and the more localized outage of the authentication for IOU on the backend service we use for the database), we've been working on improving back-end reliability, more powerful servers, reducing server costs, and cleaning up some long-term bugs/issues that we've been plagued with for quite a while.

Personal
Been a bit busier than usual lately...spring break, damaging weather, and we've run into some silly portal issues that have been incredibly detrimental to the pace of my goals, but things haven't really slowed down too much.

Aside from this, I've taken a slightly more backseat position within discord and ticket-handling so I can keep busy at maintaining the development until chaotic luck tapers down.

Development

Upgrade Map
I feel like this survey item has been fulfilled. There's a lot of cleanup with the upgrade map itself we want to get to, but that just isn't a priority right now.

I would personally like to optimize the node window, and then carry that cleanup/simplification on the entire map at some point instead of having some sporadically distributed map like we originally came up with, as it only confuses and stresses players out.

Fishing
I'd call this nearly fulfilled except we haven't added the minor improvement feature to fishing yet. Once I have time to jump on this and fulfill it, we'll get a new survey out. Maybe 2-3 weeks before I can toss focus on this.

Challenges
I have been seeing a growth of mentions on lack of new challenges. Right now Isael is doing some side work on old challenge art rehauls...however we actually already have at least a couple challenges prepared for release. The issue is that the challenge system as-is, is bland and needs an expansion upon new features this year.

Once we can expand upon challenges in a more significant way, I still feel challenges will become the biggest piece of the game.

Pets
We are working out some final tier pets, but also looking at expanding the pet visual selection. Selecting what your pet looks like is something people have bugged about since beta, and that will come eventually. It's an incredibly low priority, so the work on this is very very low key at the moment - call it preparations.

Party Instabilities
These obviously aren't perfect yet, but I feel like we did clean up a lot of the issues and stability has improved a lot over the last patch(es). Once party management comes in, I think we can improve consistency and control a lot more.

Mailbox
Okay, so you might be thinking "what the heck do we need that for?".

While I anticipate players being able to send mail messages to each-other, we also could use this system cleanly for sending rewards for several systems, instead of spamming people at midnight. If we are to add more event-systems then this is needed.

It's for the most part ready on the back-end but requires all the UI / client-side functionality. Figured I'd mention it is all.

Chat
This is feeling so half-done it's not funny. There's annoying bugs like the scrollbar, and then there's the issue of not having a friends/ignore list.

It's in mind, just not exactly in the works yet.

Guilds
The one we're all waiting for at this point.

We probably spent far too much time on the guild buildings portion, but I feel like it'll be the centerpiece to guilds anyhow.

We've made room for plenty of expansion for new buildings. I've also added a minor parallax scrolling effect with several of the different layers for a little pizzazz.

Now it's time for all the functionality...

Some things in the works:

New Building status & investment UI (Cleaner)
Cleaner Member Listing & details
Investment log and full member investment tracking on a per-building-basis
Guild Building Bonus rehaul
Personal Guild upgrades rehaul

Things I would like to tackle in this major rehaul:

Guild search filtering improvements
Guild slot restriction settings (Open guild only to players who have )
Member inactivity reports
A new building on release
Preparation for Guild Beasts system

That's all for now. Keep posted on Discord's #announcement channel, as sometimes things are posted there that are not included in the forum or elsewhere.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 27 :: 2017 :: February

Sat, 04 Feb 2017 07:57:32 +0000

Skipped out on last Sunday's dev blog to establish some things for this monthly dev blog, which i'll be releasing ahead.

Straight to the point...

Legendary System
Is now out...however it will continue to be expanded upon and possibly rebalanced over time as new features and needs come forth. It may feel underwhelming for the moment, but bear with the updates and changes to it as we progress this year.

Chest Claims
This was technically IOU's very first 'event' (it's not a significant event but it's tied into the events system). It has been underwhelming for a long time, however as you can see the rewards have improved a good amount, and this had a nice little rehaul. This will be rebalanced over time further with different rewards, different values, etc.

Also, retroactive time has been added for claims. Let me explain how it works for those who don't yet understand it:

Claim 1 = 5 mins
Claim 2 = 20 mins
Claim 3 = 45 mins
Claim 4 = 60 mins

If two hours have passed before you have managed to claim any of the chests, this means that you have 120 minutes worth of chest claims stacked, so you'll be able to claim up to chest 3:

120 minutes - (5 + 20 + 45) = 50 mins credited to the 4th claim, leaving you with a time left for your next claim of 60 - 50 mins = 10 mins.

However, the 10th chest claim will completely reset your claim time and refresh it.

Perhaps someone will be able to write up a better guide on the wiki to explain it in more detail.

Daily Claims
I'll be looking at improving this significantly early this year. I was going to look at this sooner but I feel like it can be done in a really nice manner, perhaps even being part of the survey.

Fishing outside of the fishing window
This is actually ready for testing this weekend. Finally auto fish without requiring the fishing window open!

Offline Card Gains
I had Jay work on this system a little while ago, and it appeared to work well, however it will still require more significant testing. I also need to consider just how this will affect the game, and whether it will be detrimental to the userbase, and to parties if players have no obligation to be signed in so much.

Xsolla
It appears they actively allow you to select which currency you are being charged. I'll probably be looking at enabling xsolla as the sole payment provider for iourpg.com users in the 1st quarter now.

I don't believe they cleaned up their own conversions but selecting USD as the charged currency should at least allow you to choose who handles the conversion.

ArmorGames release
Delayed another week due to some logistical problems

PvP
Delayed and delayed, I'm sure people are getting annoyed by the delay of this (which results in the delay of the next survey and primary feature focus). However I think the test database now finally has enough data to start testing this out more.

Also please keep in mind that even though this hasn't been a sole focus, that hasn't stopped us from making a lot of new updates/changes. The updates have been flowing quite well.
I am aiming to get this out asap though with testing so we can move onto the next major feature.

Survey
I'll be looking at ensuring the next survey is a bit more sophisticated than the last with hover details on what each option entails (How long it is estimated to take, and some details as to what it entails).

Level-Up Rewards
We still have a solid base system for this set up. However I think i'll just keep focus off of this and leave it as a survey item since it will require a clean UI setup.

Fishing Expansion
20 new gear and ~12 new fish assets have been prepared. We'll squeeze in the expansion for a longer-term fishing system, and to potentially allow new bonuses to fish value (which means more SO).

Soul Orb Balancing
I'll be looking at improving the per-level of SO bonuses so it doesn't feel as slow as it does late-game.

Event-Point Balancing
I'll be doing a stronger review of how to handle these based on the discussion in discord in the next couple months.

Match 3
I think most players will finish this well before the event ends, as unfortunately the ArmorGames release delays are going to cause delays on the next event release....sorry, but I really don't want to end this event just a few days or a week into a new major publishing.

More Global Events
It's not a significant focus, but it's being kept in mind for additional global events to spice things up with the community this year. The experiment with the new years event was a great study for me and I will be looking to improve upon that with the next one

Re-organization
I'll be setting up a meeting with the team and working out some new ways to handle patches, testing, logs, and re-determine responsibilities between the team for a more efficient year.

Community Discussion
I think after the survey results, it will be time for another public community discussion, tackling multiple topics ahead for this year.

Personal Notes & Opinions
I feel like the last couple months have been exceptional in the pace of development, as I suggested it would be with a lot of things having come together. I'm really, really aiming for a significant year for this game; no major server migrations, no significant delays on patches, and improvements all around.

I am going to say though that I have been reflecting a LOT since the new year regarding my unhealthy lifestyle surrounding the management of this game. IOU is obviously a passion, but it's also a game. I have been considering that I could possibly burn out without a healthier work-pace on this project, where time is spent more efficiently without hindering the current pace, but also allowing me a bit more spare time for other hobbies and perhaps a tad bit more than 1 week of vacation over several years. I don't feel burnt out (frequently tired, but very motivated), however it's bound to happen if I don't change a few things up.

This is where the 'Re-Organization' will be aimed at, and my responsibilities expanded to the team more, and handling the processes of the game a little differently.

And that's a wrap.

See you in chat,
Ray

2017 - JANUARY - New Years Dev Blog

Sat, 31 Dec 2016 20:50:22 +0000

Happy New Years

(Yes, I did just 'assume' your new years identity as being happy since you're probably consuming alcohol)

This last couple weeks was such a clustershmuck for me personally, hence the lack of the dev-blog, and lack of more fixes in the last update as I just did not have time between being sick, holidays, dealing with more server stability issues, etc.

But as we are entering the new year I wanted to release today's patch, including the major graphic rehaul (will state reasons below) and this community event to test out our broadcasting system, along with collaboration features.

What's in store for 2017?

I think 2017 is the year to finalize things and get them done right. I suspect IOU will get its abundance of updates and roadmap progression this year, while next year and the following will be of adding content to existing features.

The intention of all new features/additions is to ensure they can be re-used and expanded upon in the long-run, so we aren't revamping old system repeatedly.

We'll be looking at significant publishing this year between ArmorGames, mobile (Android-Only probably for now), and setting up localization for going a little more global.

We also have a lot of design issues that need to be taken care of, for example what makes a new user engaged in a 2 year old game? It's fun but there's no sense in competing with the current designs.

Publishing
I'm publishing on ArmorGames later in January. It's official, and thanks to finally having the new graphics in, we can clean up some engagement issues along the way for new users.
I don't know whether IOU will do as well as it did on Kongregate or through iourpg, but whatever, it's new players. Works for me, and we've done our research on the engagement issues, and delayed publishing IOU further long enough.

I will slowly be setting up windows to work with multiple resolutions for multiple devices/mediums of access.

Auto-updating APK's should be setup before the middle of this year for testing, then we'll be publishing through Kongregate/Gamestop on the mobile market for about as big a push as you can get in the indie flash industry. Plenty of plans for optimizing things in a simple manner to make this work/possible.

Features
Expedition System Clearly the expeditions need to get done, like 2 weeks ago. We haven't been short of updates, but short of progress on this system is obvious. I'm finalizing the battle system for the AI battles to start, so you can begin performing the battles and upgrading your ship.

This system has a TON of room for expansion via resources, which we'll definitely be coming back to with future features.

Legendary System - The assets for this are for the most part done (just some icons). It shouldn't take long to duplicate the ascension-style upgrade system and add this one. Lets aim for Mid January for this.

Guild Rehaul - This is happening this year soon or later. Once voted upon we'll have a lengthy (or multiple) community discussions on how it will be accomplished. It's definitely a huge part of the game that needs a rehaul though to be able to expand anywhere with guilds.

Classes / Abilities - This will be happening this year as well. We have some ideas on how to accomplish this, but it will require discussions and significant testing. I would like the focus of party play for challenges to allow for strategy, not just pure DPS.

Challenges - This system is pretty clunky. I don't care to completely rehaul it (other than the window), however I would love to expand on it and make it a major source of the game's content, beyond challenge points, and more to receive resources for crafting. A daily limit for rewards is planned, but it would make repeating challenges and helping others have a more meaningful yield.

Battles - There's room for significant improvement on monster death, coin drop / collect / animation. It's not a massive engagement issue, but it wouldn't be a massive undertaking either. Simple effect changes that could go a long way for new and old users.

Black Screen - After being idle for a while. I think it might be necessary to black-screen. Removing all animations and significant processing and provide the player with simple 'Current Status' screen. I would actually like to set something like this up for additional devices, with minimal functionality allowing you to change zones, or perform daily tasks (fishing,woodcutting, expeditions, etc) without actually having to go INTO the game. Consider it a remote management system. This feature is however one that would sit at the end of the priority spectrum, but I do feel that it has its importance factor in the long-run.

Crafting / Gear / Avatars - I really don't know if I can squeeze in avatars AND crafting at the same time. That is just an insane undertaking. I feel perhaps setting up templatable avatars, and allowing users to setup who they are as a start is the best bet, then expanding with gear/crafting with visual consequences is the best way to go.

Pets - I think there's room for one more expansion on pets. Whether that's gear or something else. However that will likely not be a focus this year; instead the focus will be to allow users to select their pets look, instead of being bound to tiers. This will allow community created pet competitions, skins, and so forth.

Pet Upgrade Map - After discussing the simplification of this system, I'm actually considering against that, and simply allowing two parallel builds for pets: Arena-based, and Combat-Based. Arena based would be for pet arena build, and the Combat-Based would be for hunting in your party. No more having to reset to make pushes in arena, then back for hunting.

XSolla - I can't go into too much detail, but I proposed using this payment provider for non-kongregate sites as a means to be able to make purchases in a larger variety of ways, especially internationally. However I discovered something when testing it, where international conversions were....far from correct. I contacted some people and an investigation is going on. So far it's not looking good, but we'll see how things go in the coming weeks. I'm definitely looking out for users here by avoiding them until they (hopefully) resolve this conversion practice. I'd rather people wait on such purchases or not purchase at all, than support people getting scandalized by an extra 6-10% from conversion rates. I have morals, believe it or not.

That's it for now. I'm sure there's a ton more that could be mentioned here, but it's new years and I have been at this for countless hours already.

Happy New Years. Drive safe, especially if you drive drunk.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 25 :: 2016 :: December

Fri, 02 Dec 2016 20:17:19 +0000

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

Dev Diary 24 :: 2016 :: November

Sun, 06 Nov 2016 23:44:28 +0000

Am I the only person who hates the months that get closer and closer to the winter holidays?

Anyways, November is here, and so comes the first blog of the month.

Event
Not much to say here. I will be having Jay improve a couple other stats in the event to potentially allow alternate builds...nothing major.
The event's end date should be assumed to be Dec 1st, however it could be pushed a few days.

The next event will be a repeat of the old Santa Event, however i'll look at a couple simple changes to make it less of a hassle (less clicking for the snowballs).

Expedition System
I'm really going to have to push things to get the second phase of this feature out by the end of this month, but I do have a good 3 weeks to get moving on this for at least a beta testing version of it. Please don't ask for details as internal testing -> public testing can very quickly lead to major changes, and every time I release tidbits of information, it gets abused and twisted, so on those questions: PASS, lol. Wait for the public testing of the feature and you can judge and go from there.

The first phase (The rehaul to the 'expedition'/ harvester portion) has progressed a lot. The window layout and some art is missing currently as Isael is swamped with a lot of these assets, but this week should be public testing for sure. We are already undergoing internal testing with one person at a time before pushing for public testing.

We're also missing a couple important pieces to this, which includes some new game resources. The purpose of these resources is quite a toss-up, but we'll be testing some things this week before making anything in that regard final. In the meantime you will have access to test the new system in its current state, as mentioned, this week.

Some unorganized points of interest:

You will be able to cancel/refund expeditions for fuel
Gold can be used to upgrade the Fuel Station. Long-term players...expect to click a lot initially, as the cost starts pretty low to allow younger players this new investment as well. There will not be mass purchasing because it will not be an issue once you hit a formidable upgrade level.
You will be able to select more currencies with this system, (likely including entirely new resources to the game)
You can fast track expeditions by spending stored fuel (which generally is what will occur if you fall away from IOU for a while)
Every ship is individual, and each ship has a: Hull, Sensor, Thusters, Fuel Injector, Extractor, and Drill)
You can select between tier 1 and 9 currently, depending on the level of the drill on the selected ship for send-off
You can inspect an existing expedition to see how much fuel has been used, and what can be refunded
There will be a visual Min and Max amount of resources you can receive (not including bonus resources, or failed expedition)
Expedition points will be refunded within a few seconds of logging in when the new system is published. The old system was completely gutted, but you will not lose your hard earned expedition points!
The expedition trophy upgrade will reduce the delay on fuel recharges, instead of expedition times

Xsolla
We will likely be changing our payment methods over to XSolla on iourpg.com by December, which will open up a LOT more payment options for users (still includes Paypal), supposedly even supporting subway cards.

Handling payment via Paypal only, and managing it on our end causes a bit of overhead, so this new option is probably one of the best out there for us.

Delegation of Work
Because a lot of the work for newer systems entails placement portions and asset materials, i'll be tackling new features independently for the most part, while having Jay handle an assortment of other items, that way things don't need to sit stagnant and become septic while new features are worked on.

Keep in mind I'm generally the only person who handles client-side work, so some things may need to be delayed in waiting for me to be able to jump on the client-side portions.

In any case, here's some things we have coming up along side the survey-chosen feature:

Bingo (Testing should be included with the new expedition system)
Private Messages (This requires some UI changes, so there will only be work-around testing coming up in the next week on this)
Server Optimizations (Reducing server processing even further to reduce server load, thus, server issues)
Fishing Auto-Start after a disconnect (This does not include after a refresh yet - that's the task system)
Bug fixes - Plenty on the Trello board, we'll be working to clean that up this month

UI and Asset Rehaul
The art-house claims all the planet monsters & backgrounds, along with UI final touches will be done this month. That means we will work out the rest of the new monsters/backgrounds and work to present the game with a more consistent style & flexibility on devices.

This is a step we've been waiting for internally for a while in order to expand the game's horizons. We expect this will begin in December, parallel to the next voted feature.

I have a ton of new shots I could share, but since it's coming up, i'll save them for next week's blog, or simply provide them in-game.

Cheers,
Ray

Expedition system WIP 2

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 23:43:55 +0000

Hi to all!

      Just posting some progress on the assets of the space expedition system currently under development! Here is a pop-up window that will potentially pop-up, hence the name, when selecting a building of the space station. At first it was only rocky, but found out would be nice to add a bit of space vegetation (yes yes, there is in IOU space) around.

       In the window, i just put together a bunch of ressources that will be given to the player, beside the upgrade parts for the ships, that will be made this week, as well as the space lab building , one of the building available in the station.

From left to right, planetary core, ultinum particle, dark energy, star dust, infinite matter, gaz.

  pop-up_window.png (Size: 254.59 KB / Downloads: 967)

Expedition system art WIP

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 02:58:01 +0000

Hello IOU fellowship!

             Just dropping by to show some art work-in-progress for the new expedition system. I spent the entire week creating assets (and putting a bunch of them to the garbage meanwhile), trying to capture what this system should look like, the ambiance player would feel browsing through buildings and upgrades.

           It was quite difficult trying to fit the art-house style, or what their work on such a part of the game would look like, being given the fact i used to draw with big black strokes (even for backgrounds), and that they rather use stroke-free shape and gradients, but i think it's finally leading to something good.

         In first place i made a concept sketch that looked like the layout2 you can see below, with buildings standing on floating islands with a central node, then i thought it would be nice if the space station would actually be on a deserted planet, something that looked like the moon, having this calm, hermetic and secluded landscape. Then finally we came back to the first version with the islands.

Sorry for the small images you have to click on, will do this differently next time, i am just currently too sleepy to upload them correctly and play with those blog options.

layout1

  layout1.png (Size: 320.42 KB / Downloads: 1167)

layout2

  layout2.png (Size: 231.57 KB / Downloads: 1127)

     The central node would probably bee a small township instead of a kind of blue photon like reactor, the 3 other building currently not defined would just be shape with an 'under construction' banner or sign over them. Anyways, still some details to add in those , and LOT of stuff to create for this system. I'll try to write back in this blog next week with new assets and WIP to show.

                             Thanks to all for the support, i need some sleep!

Dev Diary 23 :: 2016 :: October

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 02:30:24 +0000

Hey folks,

Community discussion went well. I think with the new setup for these, we can arrange to do them consistently and frequently (at least once a month).

You can find the details (at least while it still exists) here: https://discordapp.com/channels/14600738...2968256512

--

Now while usually the first Dev Blog of the month is a big one, but with the new roadmap release, the Q&A Discussion and the event still not yet released, I don't have a ton to communicate just yet. I'll add a bunch of random upcoming art and final thoughts however.

As asked in the Q&A, we have some challenges ready but they may be held for end-game system(s) instead. Here's some shots of those:

And tons of drafts (some are very early stages, some are nearly complete, and
some are experimental drafts, such as the splash screen - which is getting some major changes for the next draft):

Final Notes
I think we will be tossing together a very quick poll feature after the event release (5-7, maybe 7-9th depending on how well testing goes) in order to prioritize the next major feature appropriately.

With utilizing commercial assets as a temporary means, it should suffice to allow us to move forward with the more anticipated features.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 23 :: 2016 :: September

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 06:13:24 +0000

Hey folks,

I won't be around for the first Sunday of September, so i'll be releasing the full monthly dev blog early.

We are getting overwhelmed with so many different aspects of development, but it's getting more and more exciting to think about the improvements we can accomplish ahead now.

We don't have anything overly exciting gameplay-wise with the patch coming this week, but I think our plans ahead are something to look forward to.

The New UI
This is being released in the upcoming patch. Please note:: THIS IS A FIRST PASS! It is expected that many changes and further improvements (including further complete rehauls to many windows) will occur. Most of the work has been done with a kit by myself, and i'm quite terrible with UI lol. The arthouse will be focusing on each separate window as time passes.

For example, the World Select is getting some very early draft work done (This isn't ready nor being included in the upcoming patch yet):

There will probably be some inconsistencies or oversights in some of the first-pass rehauls. Feel free to offer some feedback on second-pass improvements in the meantime

We will also be releasing 1 planet of complete rehauled monsters/backgrounds frequently very very soon. I even anticipate the first world release in the next week.

The bugs/issues
Pet Arena NO-AP Record - We're aware of this. This should be completely fixed in the patch this week. We have been releasing many resets in the meantime.

Challenge Lag - We aren't 100% sure what is occurring with this, but we have made some pretty big improvements in the backend, and have some higher scale improvements planned in the next 1-2 months that should resolve an assortment of issues related to challenge lag, and the diminishing quality of rooms over time.

Party Breaking - There has been some occurrences for parties where they get stuck at loading character data. I think we have caught this issue and it should clean up in the next patch. I appreciate the reports on this as it has helped us locate a couple problems with room shutdowns.

Offline Gains - This may still be a work in progress. Jay is on this issue, so if you have any helpful information please toss some information his way. A couple issues were fixed, but without a larger scale test group it's difficult to know whether it's fixed or not.

We will be continuing to look at improving stability in parties and fixing other annoying issues that may have plagued some players for a while now. I truly apologize if you are one of the groups that have been running into the party/offline issues.

Upcoming Patch
As mentioned, this patch contains a lot of UI change, and it has been a LOT of work. This will be a long-term work-in-progress.

We have also rebalanced tiny pack trading costs. Please note, we have no plans of allowing the trading of any other pack type...I have seen several mentions of people claiming to be waiting for such a feature, but it isn't something we are looking at.

Chat - I've added the ability to chat while in a challenge queue to the other players in the queue. We have also implemented a new broadcasting system which should allow for some pretty nifty features in the future. Currently it supports global chat, however we may wait before releasing global chat until mid-september, when I return as to avoid spam and to give us time to implement moderation features.

Leeching - We turned back a bit in regards to limiting gains, for now, but have worked to fix the ability to go to higher inferno difficulty tiers until you reach level 200.

We have found and fixed quite a few backend bugs during this patch as well.

Plans Ahead
We have so many plans ahead, but we are looking at reorganizing some priorities again due to community feedback/complaints.

Fishing - We understand this is a rather annoying daily grind, especially when it fails if you get disconnected to continue fishing. We will be looking at adding internal values to auto-fish, including the ability to auto-fish while performing other tasks within the game.
Cohorts - This may not see the light of day until late September or early Ooctober to give us time to clean up some other features.
Upgrade Map Resets - We are looking at changing the way resets work by allowing codes or purchases of resets to allow you to reset your build as many times as you like for a few hours, as opposed to a single reset. I also understand people want distribution saves for fast switching but this just isn't possible at this time until we work out some compression methods on account data.
Bingo - This was revamped yet again using our new broadcasting system. It's about ready but we felt like we needed to add more rewards to it, and wait until the global chat is working before this feature can be pushed out. While we keep procrastinating its release due to so many changes, I think testing will begin very soon.
Level-up Reward System - This is something we started working on, to make milestones a little more exciting, but it probably won't see itself in testing until later in September, or early October so we can better design this feature.
Trophies - We would like to look at trophies and completely revamp this system as a growing priority. Let us clean up some features and get things rolling...from there we can start pushing this as a high priority and make achievements a lot more fun to work towards again.
Guilds - I'm going to give more information below on this....

Guild Plans
Guild Beast / Challenges - First off, with the new UI changes with party members listed at the bottom of the screen, and plans to significantly optimize how attacks are handled in larger groups, I think guild challenges are something we can start looking at finally.

Guild Buildings - We have a rather insane rehaul planned for buildings.....
In the current system, no matter how many buildings we add, there just is never going to be a way to keep it balanced, or something that is fun to invest into. That being said, here are some of the ideas we're contemplating:

Buildings get a level-cap of 100, and further investments start giving other smaller passive bonuses
Investments activate a bonus for everyone in the guild for amount of time, up to 48 hours. Every investment adds 60 minutes to this bonus.
Players who invest get a personal bonus from the building for each investment, to motivate and reward those who perform these investments.
Buildings still to hold passive bonuses (for a smaller amount) based on their level. However continuous investments will activate the global and personal bonuses for even further bonuses.

Now comes the dirty details:

We are looking at refunding everyones stone since the beginning of the game. We have a record of all the stone you ever accumulated. Many players have lost stone from changing guilds, failed investments, etc. This would give players their total stone back to re-invest as they like.
Since the rehaul of buildings is so significant and different, guild building levels would be reset.
This new system would allow for a more robust variation of new buildings in the future, without hard caps
The bank would no longer be necessary (perhaps still an option)

This is a rather crazy idea, and i'm not sure how the community will take it, but I feel such a rehaul is required to make investments have a purpose in the long-run. The current system became unbalanced, and there's no clean way to truly improve upon the current setup without a clean rehaul.

We are also thinking about different ways to improve buildings with different resources which would come from expeditions (after that rehaul) to tie in these systems together.

I would like to see some feedback on this idea in the forum!

---

This is probably the last true development blog for two weeks as a heads up. I'll still be around here and there for discussion, and might have another post in regards to other topics.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 22 :: 2016 :: August

Sun, 07 Aug 2016 16:35:57 +0000

~~Winter is Coming~~ Summer is really flying by here...but we have some things coming up!

UI & Asset Rehaul
The art for the backgrounds/monsters has really been taking a long time, but the quality I think speaks for itself....

Final Stages for these:

Almost Final Stages:

Draft Stage:

Here's a sample of the beta production:

UI Rehaul
Finally getting some acceleration in terms of swapping out many of the windows with the new UI style. Consider the new windows to be a first phase, as i'll be getting the artist to clean them up (I'm doing them with a UI kit for now). I expect that we'll have most of the new UI done by September.

We're looking at bringing chat back but i'll be waiting for the arthouse to come up with a clean design for that. I've come up with a draft idea that I think is ideal. I'm excited for this as it would bring global chat to the game and make things feel a little more lively for those not on Kong or unaware of the Discord Community.

Lineage System
We are probably going to have this enabled in testing next week.

Central Node System
We designed a central node system a little while back but haven't had a chance to really jump on it. The central node system features those big central nodes, being an alternative upgrade system using a new currency that will be added into the game for upgrading entire branches within the upgrade map. I'm aiming to have testing for this next week as well.

Bingo
We have had a couple hiccups in draft setups for this system that required changing the way everything worked in it....switching the bingo games from being server-based, to session-based, now to being a global game that is procedurally generated for little to no moderation required on our end. We have some cool rewarding ideas to go with Bingo coming up. No ETA, but as testers have seen there is already an icon in the battle window which we've used for minor testing, so it is definitely moving along

New Event
Jay really wanted to do a more strategical event this time around but at the last second I felt a switch turn on about going a retro-rpg route. I don't have much to spoil as it's quite a toss-up right now between ideas. I am expecting a very new event, and new gameplay style for said event next month.

Expedition Rehaul
People are asking about this every day, and all I can say is we have some great ideas backing it, just stay tuned please.

Fishing
We know about the issues pertaining to the costs for upgrades. We will be looking at balancing the later costs this month as well. Sorry for the delays on that!
Also - Fish Horn addition has been delayed. End of the month or mid next month.

Leeching
I understand the want by the community for this, and I even support to it a (very) minor degree. However we are looking at ways to diminish such crazy gains early on (130-250) from being carried so quickly. I still intend to support higher gains if you want to carry friends/guildmates, but not at the current pace it is occurring.

Vacation
I'm quite burnt out from everything (not just IOU, just this crazy, ridiculous MURPHY'S LAW year). I haven't had a vacation in years and wake up every single morning to work or some kind of drama (again, not just IOU) before I even get a chance at a coffee. I'm looking forward to waking up and just having a coffee, going outside and then realizing i'm very hung over.

Regardless of the time I spend developing IOU, I feel like my efficiency has diminished, and I allocate a lot of that to the fact that I haven't had a chance to clear my brain cache in a long time.

That being said i'll be taking a vacation between September 5-11th (just a quick week) for a good reset.

I have a feeling i'll be a hell of a lot more efficient after my sun-burnt return, especially with all the major systems, rehaul, publishing, etc this year.

During the time I am gone, the rest of the team should be prepared to keep things in check.

Other Things
There's a lot more I want to get into, but this is it for now. Lets get through the next week and catch up on more for the next blog.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 21 :: 2016 :: July

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 18:58:49 +0000

Hi Guys....

Sorry for the late dev blog post for this month.

Listat had a nice Q&A, and one of the questions was regarding our updating the community on what is going on. Since things are always so chaotic here it tends to be hard to hold consistency but we are going to try:

-1 major monthly Blog Post (This one)
and
-Weekly dev blog posts on Sunday

-----------------------

Lets get started on what we are doing, how things are going, and the direction we are headed in.

Monthly Events
-We will be working on more permanent setups to events, with far more testing involved. We still need to design a few events to ensure we have 12 unique monthly events, but i'm looking forward to finishing those and being able to work on more fun activities like events.

-August's event will be the Invasion Event (rehash). For those that did not enjoy this event last time, don't worry, it's being simplified and will not allow or require playing the same levels 400 times.

-We will be looking at a way to improve how Event Points work soon for newer players, or long-term players who may have missed out on prior events, without diminishing the value for those who have been around since the beginning of IOU.

Event is out, so....what are you working on?
We are taking ~2 week break from jumping into some massive system. We needed a break away from creating new monstrocities to go back to the drawing board and start fixing some long-term issues/oversights. I think some of you will be excited for these changes

Just a few to name that are already in the works or completed:

Ability to force start challenges without required amount of players (Part of recent Q&A by listat - sorry for the delay on this)
New top rank system that allows you to see your overall rank and those around you, even beyond the top 200. New cohorts to be added with potential new rewards
Ghosting - If a member logs off while in your party, or goes into a challenge, they will go into ghosted mode, and continue attacking just as if they were online
Online Gains vs Offline Gains - Kill-based rewards are coming back! I have never been satisfied with the online gains setup since the offline gains system change, and we have some great ideas to ensure the positive portions about online gains vs offline gains remains, while ridding you all of the ugly confusing timer-based gains.
Quicker server maintenances & update publishing

Other things about to be worked on in the next week:

Invasion Event (private testing)
Bingo
Server stability issues
Client-tracking of failed loads, stuck on Loading Character Data - auto-retry system
Ability to change your password (iourpg.com users)
Ability to trade your tiny packs for larger packs
Option for purchase confirmation

And then...

We have been talking about a new system similar to the Support System, but based on amount of days played instead of how many diamonds you have accumulated. This system will stack.
A new challenge this month
A brand new event game design for September
New expedition & PvP system design

July 20th is the date i'm looking at starting to prep all development into the new expedition & pvp system.

There's plenty more going on behind the scenes (I think a brain gasket blew recently) , so hopefully I can fill in more details on our weekly Sunday blog posts.

Cheers,
Ray

Dev Diary 20 :: 2016 :: June

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 03:06:03 +0000

Hey Folks,

Feels like New Years was yesterday....this year is flying by...

I feel like things have been on much better track now since the migration was completed (and most issues from it fixed). We still have a list of bugs/QoL to work on, but more importantly the major pet rehaul.

Every update this year has felt incredibly rushed and hasn't been what most people envision 'game development' is about - stressful. But on a better note (for my own health, and for IOU in general) we have realigned the track and are moving forward on the bigger systems.

Upcoming:

Pet Rehaul
-Pet arena rollover with rebalanced difficulty system (opponent 31+, 31 will be opponent 1 again but with opponent 31 difficulty, for example - similar to series challenge)
-5 new pet tiers (with 5 more planned, at least)
-Major rebalance on pets
-Upgrade map with a TON of potential upgrades via Pet Points. The existing PP shop will be removed and PP will be refunded for the new system. There will be a few exciting paths to take in the upgrade map, even new passive pet abilities, and tiers of pets will have a more impressive purpose, as will performing the daily pet arena.

---Expected date of release: Hoping to be pretty much done and set for testing mid-late next week. I'm taking my sweet time on the public release of this simply because instead of releasing parts slowly, we'll be releasing the full package all at once.

Clean Energy Event
I'll never understand the hype on this event, but since we definitely don't have time to write a full event-game for this month, I intend on recycling the Clean Energy Event, except i'll also be looking to change it up a bit more, as from my understanding of this event, was that it just motivated scripting since it was an upgrade & wait event. What the changes will be and how much will be changed will depend on the release of the major pet expansion, as the event will be released shortly after.

---Expected date of release: 20th-30th. Impossible to tell at this point.

More Playerbase?
After the promo on Kongregate we appear to have secured an astonishing +30% increase in the already sizable user-base.

However, Kongregate has been working with another medium-sized publisher to push IOU on. Not sure what to expect, as this wasn't on any of the major portals we have planned after UI and other updates are complete, but a sizable increase in the player-base is expected. In the efforts to prepare for other portal preparations has lead us to integrating XSolla, a new payment provider that can go as far as accept a subway card (along with paypal and all the others), so that might be a plus for iourpg.com players who have their limitations with Paypal when we move everything over to them.

In any case, no development direction will be changed or guided differently from new publishing.

---Expected date of release: Before the 10th

I know people are heavily concerned about the expedition expansion & new gameplay mode into the ships/pvp. I have plans that i'm excited to get moving forward on for that, but I doubt we'll see progress on that until the beginning of July.

That's all i've got for now!
Ray

Dev Diary 19 :: 2016 :: May

Mon, 02 May 2016 14:06:39 +0000

Hello May.

I'm sure you have all noticed how quiet it has become with me avoiding the front lines.

There has been far too much work (both in and out of the game) for me to jump into a whole lot of communications lately, but i'll go ahead and share the IOU portion of the madness.

Migration
This is next to complete, however we just need to fix some minor kinks and speed up the migration process to diminish the downtime caused by it. We've cleaned up many of the most severe issues (rollbacks / stuck loading character screen) with this, and just have data migration-created bugs to clean up at this point.

Publishing
Further publishing is upcoming and some changes have had to be made to ensure this is possible.

UI Restructure
I have been working with the arthouse on improving the interface, among follow ups with the design changes with monsters and other assets.

Plenty of work ahead on that, and we likely won't see the new UI in action for a couple months, but it's heavily in the works.

Offline Gains (Well, online too)
We're moving forward with this in the test server today. I'm thinking a simple presentation on XP and GOLD per minute will suffice for now as it gets tweaked in the coming weeks.

Upgrade Map
It's hard to show its current state right now since the map is just so gigantic, and zoom in/out feature isn't implemented yet. It's nearing a higher focus once migration is complete.

Fishing
A lot of people have shared their excitement in this system while not yet having much to go off. So here's some of the design assets (by Isael). I'm pretty excited myself for this system:

So I apologize for not being on the front-lines as much, but there's just an incredible amount going on that I personally feel needs more attention to avoid further delays.

Ray