December Progress Update!
Hello everyone, we hope you’re having a great winter holidays month! We’re back again, this time to bring you all a new update on our development progress. We’ve got several sneak peeks to show you, as well as feature adjustments and Beta feedback implementations, and finally a solid launch time frame!
The Dappervolk community has been excitedly waiting for an update regarding Dappervolk’s official launch, especially because of our previously announced launch goal of late 2019. Unfortunately, a 2019 launch will not be feasible for our team due to a variety of reasons.
Due to our core staff’s various life circumstances outside of Dappervolk, the scheduling and timing of progress has been unpredictable and difficult to estimate. Additional developers were hired on to provide extra workload support, but bringing on new staff always comes with an adjustment period consisting of training with potential roadblocks along the way. Because of this, progress was still not as smooth or timely as we had hoped in order to reach our previous loose timeframe estimate.
At this point in time however, after several months of development, we have been able to gauge our progress and take stock of the remaining work in a more concrete manner. We did our best with each team to create more specific and firmer estimates for each portion of work to be done, which allowed us to calculate a solid launch timeframe which is outlined in the Launch Timeframe section below!
Since our last update in September, the artwork side of development has been progressing very smoothly. Many of the assets that we’ve just recently completed are special things that we can’t reveal yet—such as seasonal event items—but here are a few sneak peeks of some less-secret art assets that have recently been finalized!
As you may have seen in one of our past art development streams, the variety of icons above are Guild emblems that players can choose to display on their Guild homepage. The majority of these emblems were concepted in-stream and then processed into finalized assets that will allow you to customize their outline, color, and flag shape to better fit your Guild’s theme. As your guild progresses, you may even be able to unlock some special emblems & flags!
Our pixel artist has been hard at work on our asset work list for Adventuring. Below are some previews of assets in progress.
A few Active Mode obstacles that you’ll need to jump over!
Remember the mysterious gate from the last update? Here are 3 more
gates, all in their before and after refinement stages!
And finally, here’s a small sneak peek at just a few of the many new avatar items that will be available in-game at launch. Players will get a chance to uncover the details on what these items are and where they’re obtained when the game launches!
Some of these seem oddly… familiar.
In order to breathe some new life into our pet system, we’ve coded in some new features and quality of life updates involving pet interactions!
Pet Moods: Users will now be able to improve the mood of their pets each day by giving them gifts, treats, and interacting with them!
Appetite: The old “hunger” bar on pet profiles has been swapped out for an “appetite” bar to better reflect the fact that your magically animated companions do not actually experience hunger - they just enjoy tasting nice foods on occasion and thus will only eat a certain amount per day. Each day, a pet’s appetite meter starts off full and will deplete as you feed them treats.
Affection Milestones: As you build up affection with your pets, you will now be able to achieve pet affection milestones that give out various rewards!
Birthdays: Pets can now be given presents on their birthday for extra affection points.
During Beta testing, various premium features were tested by users and we received lots of great feedback on what people would like to see from them once Dappervolk launches. With all of this in mind, we’ve implemented several changes and additions to our premium features that we hope everyone will enjoy!
Premium Item Bundles: A bundle item containing a full set of the current month’s premium chance items will be available for purchase in a new, infinitely stocked turnip shop for a higher price. Users who do not wish to take a chance on a better deal through the Turnip chance machine can now utilize this option to be guaranteed a full set of the current month’s premium items!
Turnip Chance Machine: Your bonus prize claims in Pai’s monthly turnip shop will now expire 2 months after the month in which they are obtained, as opposed to after 1 month.
Monthly Item Recirculation: A new NPC will be in charge of a mechanic that recirculates old monthly items rarely/occasionally. In this way, limited items that appear in the monthly turnip/potato shops will now have a small chance of being obtained after the fact. This feature will not include pre-launch items such as the Alpha/Beta hatching items, Kickstarter items, or Support Bundle items.
Premium Undergarments: An avatar’s undershirt will now be able to be toggled on/off in the wardrobe. This also applies to the regular non-premium undergarments!
PET ACCESSORIES QOL UPDATE
Our pet accessories system is now coded so that pet accessory makers are only consumed when an approved accessory design is applied to a pet. This means that users may now submit their designs for approval without needing an item - once approved, they can then choose to apply that accessory to pets at any time for the cost of 1 pet accessory maker item per application. This should allow accessory maker artists to upload their designs, get them approved, and then share their designs/give usage permissions to others without costing any items to do so.
In addition to this, pet accessories will now display artist credits so that all copies of an artist’s approved design will properly credit them for their artwork. This gets rid of the need for users to manually credit pet accessory artists in pet profiles, and should make it easier for everyone to remember who they got their designs from!
We have now switched to a new text editor with better functionality, which should make everyone’s lives easier in the forums. It will still use BBcode like the last one, but there should be less quirkiness with copy/paste, editing, and so on.
That’s all for the feature updates that we can announce right now, but stay tuned for our future dev updates as there are more feature refreshes and updates currently under wraps for testing!
After an extensive amount of discussion and scheduling with our coders, writers, artists, and testers, we were able to create solid estimates for each portion of closed development work that is left for each of our teams. In order to avoid unreasonable crunch times and rushed work, we have tallied up these schedule totals and added on a buffer for last minute testing—this final calculation has given us a solid timeframe for official launch.
We’re now aiming for a firm launch in May 2020!
The exact release date and time will be announced at least a month prior to the month of May.
Closer to May, we will also begin marketing Dappervolk to reach beyond the current user pool and ensure a bustling launch!
Over the last few months, we’ve heard several requests from users in our community about having another Support Bundle sale as a final opportunity to support Dappervolk and get some sweet limited items prior to our official launch. Ask and you shall receive!
In the next few days, we will be releasing our final Support Bundle set for purchase—they will be available up until the 2nd week past our official launch date (exact date pending), after which they will be retired permanently. Full details will be posted shortly in a separate update, but for now here is a sneak peek of the bundle items that will be included!
As always, thank you for sticking with us all this time! Your support and feedback have been an immense help throughout our development process, all the way from the beginning of alpha testing to the Kickstarter, beta testing, and beyond! It has been a much longer journey than we had ever expected, but we are so grateful to have had all of you with us along the way—even through various unexpected delays that have set us back from our release goals. As such, we are incredibly excited to finally have a solid release month lined up according to the schedules of our coders, writers, artists, and maintenance teams!
If you’d like to follow our development progress more closely, Quisling will be updating the #status-and-faq channel in our Discord server every few days as assets are completed.
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