Greetings, avatars, and welcome to WEEK 3 of a brand new Shroud of the Avatar, and we’re long overdue for sharing some updates!
First, on the website, while the new server is fully functional and just in a polishing state, moving to the new website has been delayed until early next week. The amazing web engineer who has been hosting and maintaining the old site for us, Tasillo, is working around the clock right now, helping other clients fix their servers after the major PHP exploit was discovered! The new site can be seen https://play.catnipgames.net/ and is still undergoing more polish daily.
Now let’s talk about the planned patching schedule. While the daily patches of the original CHAOS shard are a thing of the past, we will still be shooting for a higher velocity than a monthly patch would allow. At least through the end of the year, our target is going to be to have weekly patches. We’ll target doing a Wednesday night build and push the build to live by Thursday afternoon.
By now, you have probably noticed that we haven’t done much to promote or draw attention to all the massive changes. That is because, while things have improved a TON compared to what you had less than a month ago, there is still more work to do before trying to build a bigger audience. While the server population is 3x what it was before, that is purely due to word of mouth. Once the team feels the game is ready for a much larger audience, we’ll be sending out emails to hundreds of thousands of potential players and doing paid ads. When will that be? Possibly as soon as Thanksgiving, but this time around, we really will be doing it when it is ready.
Episode 2 progress is finally moving along! The final steps to wrap up the quests and all the loose ends have been planned and mostly implemented and will be testable on QA within the next few weeks! The goal is to have it 100% done and wrapped up for Thanksgiving, giving you guys a dozen new quests to work through while you recover from your turkey-fueled food coma!
Episode 3 is coming up right behind it! In case you have missed the last few streams, Episode 3 is heavily focused on boats and pirates… YAR MATEY! The storyline is largely wrapped up, and quests are in the planning stages. Tech for boats and sailing is already in the works, and expect to see demos as soon as the next few weeks!
We expected to have the new website live by now and more frequent updates flowing. We’ll keep doing at least a stream a week and a post a week at a minimum!
Tune in for a stream today, Thursday, Oct 22, at 4 PM CT at https://www.twitch.tv/shroudoftheavatar, and I’ll add patch notes here as soon as they are ready!