Two more things for the next update news

Hi all, this weekend I discovered that an important deadline was way closer than I thought, so I had to sacrifice a lot of Olvand development time :/. I'm one of these rare people who plan ahead and don't really have to worry about deadlines (as you might have noticed, because there is always progress on this hobby project because of this habit), but this week I made a slip, apparently.

Fortunately, that doesn't mean I have nothing to show you; I had some things saved up because I didn't want to make previous articles too long. So here you go, two other things that will be part of the next update:

• In my [April Fool's] joke last week there was a thing you probably didn't recognize:
  
  
  

  Yes, that's a statue. Once towns are in, I will add several things you can build to make it feel like a 'real' town: roads, town squares, pubs, banks, trading houses, etc. All these things will take some time to implement, so they're not going to be in the next update, except for statues. Once I've finished the limitation that some things can only be built on the territory of your hometown, statues will be super-easy, so that's why they will be the first town-related thing you can build.

• The revamped achievement system serves its purpose quite well, [as I described earlier]; now that the goals are clear and presented in-game, together with a progress bar you can fill, people get much more out of the game. But there also is a social aspect to achievements I didn't do anything with so far: if you see your friend has completed 40% of the achievements, you might want to complete at least 41%... which then encourages your friend to go to 42%, etc. The first thing I'm going to do with this is adding a highscore to the website:
  
  
  

  I hope this will encourage people to become one of the 'best' players, and get their name on this list for everyone to see :). I should add that I'm fully aware that I'm adding external rewards instead of internal rewards to the game (= playing the game for the achievement instead of playing the game because you like to do so), which might be 'lazy design'... but I think the advantages are worth the disadvantages. If more people try to complete more achievements, that means more people will be online more often for longer periods of time, which increases the chance you will meet others, which probably increases the fun. And giving people a fun game, that's what this project is all about.

If you want more development, see [twitter] or [facebook]. If you want to be a tester, you can subscribe on [olvand.com].