The new update is out
Hi everyone! As you might have noticed, Olvand v10.2 is out, so all of the things I've been describing in the latest few blogposts (and are displayed by Gaming pepper in his [awesome] [videos]) are now ready for you to play with. Also, the first group of 100 new playtesters has been invited, and has reacted with lots of enthousiasm, AND I succesfully managed to run the Olvand server software on a (cheaper) Ubuntu server, so you can imagine I'm quite happy with how things are going.
Except maybe that, directly after the update went life, I discovered this:
While building carts, I accidently broke construction sites: when a construction is done, and the construction site turns into a building, the fact that the construction site should be deleted is not correctly stored in the database. If you then log in and out, you see both the building and its original construction site rendered on top of each other.
Originally, I thought that this wouldn't be too much of a problem... until I logged in at my own (Linux!) server, and discovered that there where buildings like these everywhere, which kind of ruins gameplay :/. I've uploaded a patch for it already.
The next update
All right, about the next update then. I've of course already started! What will be the main focus of it will be a secret until next week, but let me give you this hint:
Whatever that may be, it's going to be another main feature of the game that might have a huge influence on the way you play, and I'm very excited about it!
But I'm not telling you about this new update only you to tease you with the things I'm not yet going to reveal; I also need you help: one thing I started to notice is that each time a new update is released, I'm talking about things like 'the current update', 'the previous update', 'the last update', etc. which I think is not only a boring use of language, it's also very unclear for outsiders. I've started referring to the version number more often to fix this a bit, but I'm still not happy about it. I think new updates are kind of exciting, so why can't they have exciting names?
There should more software developers with this problem, though... for example, operating systems also work with an infinite stream of updates, improving the main product. How do they fix it? As you might know, by naming versions after things. OSX had its versions named after cats (snow leopard, mountain lion) and now after californian places (Mavericks), Android after candy (jelly bean, kitkat), Debian is given names of Toy Story characters (Buzz, Wheezy, Jessie). And I recently saw the game Starbound use 'koala' as a version name.
So that's what I'm going to do for Olvand as well; I decided to go for flowers. What flower should I start with? This might a nice opportunity for some community interaction. I've no idea how many of you would be interested in voting here, but let's give it a try:
Click here to vote for one of the following names for Olvand v11.0:
- Olvand lily
- Olvand rose
- Olvand hyacinth
- Olvand daisy
- Olvand violet
If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].
Olvand Violet ALL THE WAY.