- Giftlets are spawning!
- Birthday Cakes, and NEW Birthday CUPCAKES, are dropping as loot and from Giftlets now! Birthday Cupcakes are the BEST way to increase your crafting experience in a single bite!
- Candy fish are swarming the waters!
- Time Warp Crystals are dropping! Collect them to use during an upcoming release!
- High scores system has been re-implemented!
- Server stability patches!
A Brief Note From The Developer:
Server Patches and High Scores!
As many of you know, Krafties had an incredibly fun and fulfilling adventure in recreating and migrating our database to a new system recently! So, so fun! While the bulk of things were thankfully up and running nearly perfectly within the week-long event, somehow 90% of the work was hidden in what seemed like the last 10% of the project. That means an extra amount of residual FUN has stuck around over the past couple of months!
One of the things that wasn’t immediately apparent during the migration was how tightly coupled the high score system of Krafties was to the exact server implementation that hosted our database, as it was one of the first things EVER made for the game something like 14 years ago. As it was so dependent on the old server, and the coding standards weren’t established in really any way at that point in time, over the past few months most of it has been remade and integrated into the much more modern codebase running the rest of the game’s backend. On the plus side, this makes it much more accessible and extensible from a development perspective. While we’re still looking at a bit more work the get it perfect, today marks the first day it’s back up on our homepage once again! Note: the weekly and monthly score values will be off until they are reset at the appropriate times on the next week/month interval.
On a related note, server stability has been monitored and addressed over the past couple months, as the aforementioned database changes have caused a few very esoteric and hard to track down issues. There are some systems/queries that don’t play exactly the same as they did with our original server setup, and this is unfortunately requiring them to be tracked down and addressed one at a time as they manifest. This week, to apply a sort of global patch, I’ve decided to go with the “nuclear” option of falling back on full server reboots a couple of times a day, which (paired with patching the holes on a case by case basis) should result in a large increase in overall stability. The downside, and why I avoided it until now, is that each reboot takes approximately 10-20 seconds in which the servers are inaccessible. So maybe a bit over a minute total of intentional un-reachability a day. While it’s not the most ideal, and can hopefully be patched out soon, it makes the most sense for now. I don’t envision this needing to stick around for too much longer, as I *think* that most of the glaring things have been patched at this point, but I’m opting to err on the side of caution until we’re at more or less 100%. Essentially, I was casting spell[0] on these bugs, but now I’m casting spell[10]!
The Birthday!
This year, when planning for the birthday event I had to make a difficult choice early on. Usually during birthday celebrations for Krafties the development and content planning is focused on a fun event that lasts for the duration of the birthday, while ALSO striving to push the game forward in some way. However, this time around there was an added area of focus in overall backend stability that was competing for attention, and in the end it was ultimately deemed the highest priority. Still, you know we’re gonna throw something new your way, and bring back some old favorites. I hope everyone likes the new cupcakes! With all that being said, there’s a reason this is the PRE-party. You’ve seen the Time Warp Crystals before, and should be expecting a little something more to hit coinciding with next month’s bounty credit run reset that might introduce some new content or push the game forward in some way, because… I like to do that.
That’s it for now! I hope you all enjoy the birthday celebration.
Have fun!
