Otherworld - sandbox, crafting, persistent browser game

I didn't post in about 3 months but I just wanted you to know that things are relatively well. Recently we have been up to 5 daily players and some of them have 600+ lines of events.

Most recently I made it possible to save people from the wraith. It took two days of intensive coding and I didn't sleep very much last night. I have also made minor adjustments to the javascript functions to reduce repetition and unclarity.

The current big project is changing action buttons to use graphic icons instead of text. I wanted to use dropdown menus but my friend said that adding an extra click is bad for the user experience and it's better to have all the buttons visible at a glance. At first I was quite upset and I only made a set of icons out of spite, but they were received well, so after converting the inventory page into using graphic buttons, I later converted the ground items and container pages. There are still areas that need to be converted but reusing the same structures makes each new step take less time than the first ones.

There have been several small visual changes. I changed the background to be less distracting but it still has ghosts on it.

The website will soon be a year old. A few months ago I wasn't certain if I was going to renew the domain for year 2 but since there are active users with hundreds of lines of events, it wouldn't be fair towards them to close down the site when it doesn't cost all that much to keep it.

 

Hi. I'm still trucking, although it's been a bumpy ride. I recently even paid 4 dollars for advertising (just a one-time fee) and I've been surprised by how many people have clicked the banner.

On a sadder note, just recently I was targeted by a hacker. After about 500 "status: forbidden" page loads I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they finally took the hint. It was very nerve-wrecking. I have learned some new things about cybersecurity as a result. Yesterday, I went to bed at 4 AM and today I went to bed around 1 AM, startled awake 2-3 times with nightmares of someone penetrating the server, and finally got up around 5 AM.

We are getting close to the 2-year anniversary. If everything goes well, I will renew the site for a third year, although to be honest, I'm starting to feel like I'm running out of things to implement. My Trello board has never been emptier since the project first started. Which is a good thing but it makes me a little wistful. This project has been such a big part of my life for the past 2 years and even after adding all the features, I'm not entirely sure if it has been worth all the hours. There are some active users that keep me going.

In recent updates, I added building ownership and rewrote the child characters system. Since then, there have been 2 child characters and one that was my test character. I'm still getting used to the building ownership system. The main benefit of it is that a keyholder can grant access to guests without having to copy a key, which is very convenient. But I've mainly been using it in my local environment. Additionally, I made some changes to combat with animals, namely the dodge ability and that player characters can start bleeding when they take a critical hit. For the first time since the beginning of the project, wild animals are a viable threat to characters. I might have to tone it back a bit, but we'll see.