Daily Awards is something we’ve been planning for awhile. It’s something I really wanna tackle this year, earlier than later.
This year we also plan to share the entire calendar of events for the entire year, including many new holiday events that involve different parts of the game. For example, Valentine’s Day will have a Valentines Day sale on furniture and Valentine items.
The main issue that’s really been effecting these events is that we are often working on a bigger project, and then the events push everything back.
Last year (2022) was probably the worst on our development team in many years. We sat down and discussed plans to improve it this year.
We had the Dark Voyage release, which was a huge amount of work for Halloween 2022. Because of that ride, we didn’t have a lot of time to touch any other aspect of the Halloween Events. Then right around the corner, Winter Holidays came up and because of the ride, we just ran out of time to do what we wanted to do for this Winter Holiday. We got about 95% done with the new Unannounced Condo Feature, which was due to be released on Winter.
Unfortunately, we ran into unrelated build issues with our code, our Plaza light build, and our server hardware. It took us a week and half to recover and figure out the build issues, come up with a temporarily solution for the Plaza light build, and try to buy expensive hardware to avoid this in the future. These issues led to us having to work all the way until Christmas Eve, something that we haven’t done in previous years (nor something I’d ever want our team to experience again).
The point being, a lot of the reason these events are the way they are is because they put a huge strain on development and push back every other feature.
Looking forward, we don’t have another Dark Voyage to release this year and the Unannounced Condo Feature will be released this month. This will probably make this year’s events a lot easier to organize and free up time to fix issues with the coins.
As for Daily Awards/Tasks, we need to create new fun unlockables for these awards. I understand that we can give Units and Tickets for awards, but I think it would be more fun and exciting if you could unlock:
- Unique items
- Player scoreboard effects (such as custom backgrounds)
- Temporary double EXP/Units/Tickets
- Player Sprays (artwork by us)
- Collectable Cards
- Chat Emotes
- Floating Chat Designs
- Capes
- Trails
The tasks would include all the Game Worlds, such as getting a HIO for the day, or fishing up 5 fish. We’d also need to incorporate Condos this time around and that one is difficult to figure out. Doing it based on EXP would be okay, I suppose.
Anyways, sorry for rambling on and on, but there’s been a lot of ideas and plans we’ve been cooking up and working towards. I hope this year we’ll be able to implement these into the game as it’ll certainly help. And I also hope this year we can improve on the holiday events and coin system. Another technical issue with coins right now is that we rely completely on Steam API calls for the coins which limits our designs (for example we can only give you 1 coin every X minutes). If we move the coins to our backend (AGC), then we can design a better system. This is something on our immediate tasks to do.