4/26/2021 - devlog
Michi goes on a bug squashing tirade and Nick gets back into the groove of ads and contacting content creators.
Michi (molp)
This week's focus lay on getting all the issues and bugfixes for the next release finished. It will mainly be a maintenance release, we updated several of our core software frameworks. But as usual there are also a few changes. If you followed our last few devlogs you know that we are working on improving the new player experience. This release will contain a UI tutorial as well as gameplay hints. You can find the release notes in the forums.
I want to talk a little about two of the bugfixes of the release.
I spent quite a chunk of time this week figuring out a bug that came in early this week where a player described that they have a PRO license but are still unrated. In the past, this was often the case right after a purchase of a PRO license was made; the rating was only updated once a day so. We changed that though, and the rating should go from UNRATED to PENDING almost immediately. In this instance it wasn't. A day later or so another bug report came in, describing the exact same situation. The first company still hadn't received a proper rating, so it looked like a systemic error and not just like a randomly lost message. Eventually I found the bug the next morning, but it became one of those tickets where the original estimate of maybe one or two hours quickly turned into several hours...
We had another bug report saying that if you start typing in the destination field of a Local Market shipping ad field, Chrome tries to auto-fill the form with address data it has stored locally. I could reproduce the bug quickly after turning addresses on again (apparently I had disabled that feature long ago). To my surprise, the field had already been set to disallow auto-fill in the code. After some Googling around, I learned that Chrome actively ignores that parameter if the label for the field contains some word related to addresses, and thus breaks the corresponding web standard. The only work-around at the moment is to mark the field as new-password, effectively disabling Chromes auto-fill feature. The joys of web development!
Nick
Wow I certaintly learned something new from Michi's entry today. Squashing bugs sounds like solving a mystery. Anyway, last week I was able to get our YouTube ads running again and now they are configured to push the algorithm to find players that want to become PRO License players and not only Free-to-Play. This is crucial for us since we need to recruit more devoted players that want to stay in the game and not just try it for a minute and jet. I'm hopeful that we will see an improvement this time with this type of ad platform.
I also got content ready for the UI tutorial that is coming very soon. I am extremely excited for these changes since I have been begging for them for so long haha. I constantly receive feedback from influencers and press that the beginning of the game is too opaque for them to sit down and figure out when they also have to devote time to other games and making content. Looking forward to seeing more influencers and press articles in the near future!
As always: We'd love to hear what you think. Join us on Discord or the forums!
Happy trading!