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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 🙂

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