It’s been a long time since our last update. A full calendar year plus nine months. We want to revitalize this platform and post more regularly about our technical work. It’s been so long we feel we should write an update. We’ve completely changed gears from working on Next and spent our time updating TagPro Classic. What follows is a timeline of our work since then.
- 2016 Birthday Event: Tower 1-2
- TagPro Next Map Maker Preview
- 2016 Saint Patrick’s Day Event: Pup Drunk
- 2016 Easter Event: Egg Throw
- 2016 April Fools Event: TagPro Next Warp
By this point the community had made it clear we weren’t doing enough work on TagPro Classic. The hot topic was about getting new players to play the game. For a long time our primary source for new players came from AskReddit threads, and since being banned for vote manipulation we could no longer participate. The lack of new players was noticeable. We shifted our focus to develop more features for Classic.
- You are concerned about classic and player retention. We hear you.
- Redesign the website
- Texture pack picker
- Change default texture pack
- Live tutorial system
- Muting toxic players
- New “How to Play Video”
- Release 57,000 reserved names
- Website Redesign
Mentioning our plans for Kongregate blew up on us. As always it took us much longer than we expected to finish this up. There was enormous difficulty in building a user account system for Kongregate users. This time-consuming task made it difficult to put other features in, and we also had little to report for a while since it’s all invisible backend changes. Not to mention it was summer and we step back to have fun in the sun. We still added updates in the mean time:
At this time the community was in full force meming hard on the volume slider. Some of it was pretty funny. Immense frustration with our lack of visible progress for Kongregate created an atmosphere of doubt we’d be able to do the job . We then created a new role for a community manager to help us with keeping a respectful communication channel with everyone.
- First Community Update
- Texture Pack Picker
- 2016 Halloween Event: Pumpkin Toss
- November Community Update
- Update default texture pack
- Invisible !mods calls
- Preview texture packs
- Kongregate Release
This was where we had drawn the line for Classic, we met our initial goals for Classic and even went further and put it on Kongregate. From this point it was unclear what we should do. The community still desperately needed more players and our efforts only minimally paid off. In addition more and more features are requested for Classic.
- Surprise Christmas Event
- December Community Update
- Power-up delay
- TagPro news at end of game
- Ping tracking analysis
- 2017 Birthday Event: Tower 1-3
- Add Discord
- February Community Update
- Cancellation of Next
- Add Latin characters to chat (for the Frenchies)
- Server lag stress handling
We realized at this point we can’t simultaneously work on two games. Splitting our efforts increases the difficulty to add features. All our attention had been on Classic and we had little time to work on Next. Members of the community who believed in that project saw no progress while we kept saying in every monthly update Next is still planned. We needed to decide on one project. We tabled development on Next and attempted to keep the larger group of Classic players happy.
- New Flair and Muting
- Add Ball Spin
- March Community Update
- Paypal bugfixes
- 5v4 bugfix – 9 players could be in the same game
- Sorting texture packs
- April Community Update
- Update moderator tools
- Database fixes and upgrades
- Balls warping from spectator mode bugfix
- Add table list to maps page
- 2017 Easter Event: Eggball
- May Community Update
- Eggball in groups
- July Community Update
- Feedback we needed and announcements of no-script soon
- No-Script Option for Leagues
- Live Player Position
- August Community Update
- More recap and upcoming timers and gate fixes
- No September Update
- Personal Issues
The community didn’t take this last update well. Our community manager helps us facilitate a respectful communication channel with everyone. That month of September we had several updates ready to be pushed into production once they went through a final code review. Our community manager tried to meet with us, but we couldn’t coordinate a time. We were unable to relay our progress, and our community felt abandoned. Overall a rough month.
Here we are today. We’ve announced in previous updates we’re working on a single world joiner. We want to use this to help reduce latency and spawn a simple matchmaking system. This is another idea likely to blow up on us. These massive updates take time, lots of testing, and patience. We have other features in the pipeline too. We’ll likely finish the smaller things before the joiner.
Be patient 🙂