Hey everyone,

It's been a while since our last post. That's mostly because a) we now have a Twitter feed for everything we do and b) we've all been up to our asses in work — to serve you better.

Nevertheless, I'm sick of my seeing that same stupid Zunecast post of mine! So, here's an extremely vague and unsatisfying meta-update for those of you curious as to what's happening with your seventh-favorite browser-based Internet culture RPG and Twilight fang-fiction repository (see what we did there?).

• The Apprentice thing is moving along nicely. About half the original team picked for the Apprentice has been fired or downgraded to Auditor status, keeping the creative team small, tight and shaved. To keep things tasteful, we'll keep the details behind the scenes. But your remaining Apprentices are: Bashy, blahquabats, crayoncakes, kraigu, PhineasPoe, plk and Shii. A hearty congrats to them all for making it this far.
• You know The Secret Thing that Invariel was hired to work on? That's also coming along well. He recently ran his first testing thingy on the codesy stuff [NOTE TO SELF: FILL IN TECHNICAL DETAILS LATER] and it actually worked! He's also been knighted an official Crotch Zombie recently, noticeably lengthening his E-Peen™. Kneel before him in shame and arousal.
• Meanwhile, Evil Trout is busy working on the gameplay tuneup, which many of you are already involved in. Basically, without blogging you down with details (see what we...aw, fuck it), it's going to change the way you pwn forums forever. And as far as we can tell, it's not completely broken (yet)!
• Contrary to popular belief, BINGEBOT 2015 is not dead. He's alive and kicking and healthier than ever, now that he's taken Auser's advice and gone on Atkins. He's got an overhaul plan for Domination in the works, but we're putting it on hold until the gameplay revision and Episode 3 are ready to roll.
• Finally, with all this stuff going on, here's another one: Crotch Zombie is going to release a hip, new iPhone application soon! Because you haven't pressed "1, 2, 2, 1" until you've done it on a touchscreen.

Until next time!

It's been a long time since we've had a Zunecast (yeah, I'm calling it a Zunecast, wanna fight about it?) and last time I was unable to participate thanks to technical difficulties.

Since we have some major features coming up (Episode 3, Forumwarz Apprentice), and I love the sound of my own voice, I figured now's a good a time as any to answer some of your questions using a medium other than my keyboard.

UPDATEZ0RATION: You can download the 'cast here!

Jalapeno Bootyhole is looking for a summer intern: a brilliant, talented wordsmith whom he can mold into the next great writer of online parody role-playing games — a very in-demand career choice, we might add.

Does this sound appealing? Check out the ridiculously long application on our Flamebate boards and then decide if it's right for you!

This could be a fantastic opportunity and a chance to help make Episode 3 even more awesome than we assume it will be. Good luck to all applicants!

I'm happy to announce that greasemonkey superstar Invariel is joining Crotch Zombie over the summer to work on a game extension to Forumwarz. Invariel caught our attention by writing a useful script to make Forumwarz raiding easier.

He's also going to be sitting in on our Episode 3 meetings, so I'm sure he'll get his fingerprints all over that too!

More details on what he's working on will come in the future!

It has been about 6 months since we launched Forumwarz Episode 2!

The initial plot for Forumwarz was written quite some time ago. Based on a few meetings where the team discussed what we'd like to have in the story, Jalapeno Bootyhole wrote up an outline. (At the time we were planning on releasing the entire game in one go, where half way through you'd be forced to pay to finish the storyline.)

As we got into the development and writing we figured out that it would be a lot more work than we thought to finish the whole story before we ran out of money. We decided to split the game into Episodes. Three made the most sense, so we found logical end points and adapted the story accordingly. Reviewing the document now reminds me how far we've come:

First mission: You get a popup message, that refers to whatever search term you came up with. Bottom corner: Dr. Mysterion/Johnny Anonymous/HornySanta24/AnonImus/Shallow Esophagus has added you to his IM list! Some presence (Sentrilion? Googhole?) adds itself to your IM list. I know you were searching for pictures of monkey snatch, but: Can I talk to you for a minute? Yes/No, doesn't matter. Singles you out for never having done anything in your life. Says you can change the world forever, just have to listen to instructions. "Why me?" etc. Not important. Asks you to destroy this forum. He'll make it worth your while, and if not, you can block him.

Hah, part of me wishes we went with Dr. Mysterion now!

Throughout the design stage, I referred to the overall storyline as the mythology. In other words, the story that glues together the entire universe. We also introduced a lot of side missions, which are basically interesting characters with a gripe that want you to help them out for money.

Episode 3

Episode 3 is the last piece of the mythology, as far as we've written it. People keep asking me what we have planned for the game after that. Well, just because this particular storyline ends doesn't mean we can't create others. We aren't about to abandon the franchise just because what we initially wrote runs out!

We are committed to working on Forumwarz as long as it is viable to do so. I'm not sure what form that will take, because we'll likely want to take some time to imagine our options, but it might be a new storyline split up into episodes, or single one-off episodes that have shorter but self-contained storylines.

In a little while, Jalapeno Bootyhole will enter the heavy lifting aspect of the writing process. We'll work together to create a detailed outline of the events in the game, the actor dialogue, the forums, the gameplay, etc. It will take some time, but once the ball is rolling you'll hear a lot more about it and what's contained.

But first, the combat revamp!

While Jalapeno is fleshing out the writing, I plan to spend some time beefing up the existing gameplay. In Episode 1, you spend so much time learning about the different aspects of the game that time flies quick and before you know it you're finished. In episode 2, the storyline is much longer, so the limitations with the existing combat engine are more evident. It ends up playing too much like World of Warcraft, where you hit the same combination of keys on the keyboard over and over.

I have some good ideas on how to improve combat and make it more intelligent, and I want to spend some time implementing them into the existing game. I'll need a bunch of volunteers from every class to help test the new mechanics, and there will likely be some speedbumps along the way, but in the end I think it will be worth it.

Look for more on that in the coming weeks.

The three most common question:

These are what I get asked most frequently about Episode 3.

When is it coming out?

We aren't giving a release date because we'd rather launch it when it's stable than push it out too soon. Based on our previous history, a release towards the end of 2009 is likely. Episodes 1 and 2 were both released in October.

How much will it cost?

We're not sure yet. It'll depend how long it is and how epic it feels. We are certainly not out to gouge people so it'll stay affordable like Episode 2 was. Last time the pre-order was successful, so we'll probably offer that again when we have a release date in sight.

Can I beta test it?

Last time the beta tester feedback proved to be invaluable. However, we made some mistakes about letting everyone into the beta at once. Once most people had finished it, they had little reason to start again and test it fresh. This time I plan to have multiple beta sessions, staggered from each other.

We'll probably be hand picking most testers based on their feedback of the game (we even like harsh criticism) and based on their ability and willingness to spend time playing an unfinished game. However, we might end up doing a random selection of people. If we create a sign up list for random selection, you'll hear about it on this blog!

As part of the continuous effort to introduce more players to Forumwarz, we have coded up a Beta system for running affiliate ads. We're looking for people who have sites and are trying to monetize them.

Basically here's how it works: We give you ads to run on your site. We then give you a percentage of the revenue earned from any users you refer to us. We also give you a special tracking page to see how many people clicked on the ads, signed up for Forumwarz accounts, etc.

Right now we're only interested in sites that get a reasonable amount of traffic. If you are the curator of one, contact me and we'll talk about getting you set up. In the future, we might allow anyone to run the ads regardless of the level of traffic their site gets, but for now it's very much beta and we want to figure out all the kinks.

We've listened to your feedback on itembuildr and pushed out a few updates:

• The item-generating code is a lot better. There should be fewer random repeats of the same item class. You should never get the same item class twice in a row. Secondly, there are fixes to prevent pricing from going way out of whack (like with the Dragon Ball items.). Thirdly, we can create special items for all classes now (like Hackers!). Unfortunately, I had to make adjustments to a few of the existing items to keep their prices in line with our economy.
• There are two new E-Peen(tm) for itembuildr -- one is for having your idea chosen. The second is for having your image chosen.
• A bunch of items built with itembuildr have been moved into the regular stores. Each item will display credits for its creation. They have subsequently been removed from the ItemBuildr consumer's co-op.

I'm hoping these fixes will go a long way to making itembuildr a lot more useful and fun for everyone. As always feedback is appreciated.

One of our most requested features for IDC is the ability to ignore other players. Lately I made some changes to how IDC works on the back end that allowed me to implement the feature. Here's how it works:

On the IDC console, if you type:

/ignore name

Will start ignoring the player in IDC with the name supplied. If you want to unignore them, simply run the ignore command again (it toggles.)

If you want to list all the people you've ignored, type in:

/ignore

Without a name. It will tell you everyone you're hiding from!

You can now purchase your own word filters in IDC. To avoid rampant abuse like people purchasing word filters for "the," a moderator has to approve your filter.

Word filters have to be at least 2 characters long, and they'll cost 3BP for 10 weeks of use.

Some of the most recent people who were previously given word filters will have them for free for 10 weeks. For people who had them before that, unfortunately you will have to buy in.

Enjoy guys!

I spent some time re-factoring our image uploading system to allow for more user submitted content. It was a lot of refactoring, but from now on it's much easier for users to contribute to our game.

The first step was implementing custom emoticons. These can be purchased for 5BP on the Support Us page. A few have been added already:

:highfive:

:manphin:

:goatse:

They have to be approved by a moderator, but we're usually pretty quick at doing that. Enjoy!

We're pleased as punch (the tasty kind that you drink, not the painful kind you get from mean people) to announce that we've added five new mods to create an all-star, balls-out, ass-kicking team of internet arbitration!

Say hello to spacekadt, Nicco, dobnits, Aldo_Anything and Sergeant Cid (aka Acid Flux)! They're going to be making things a little less Goatsey around these parts.

Show them some mod-love in this official announcement thread!

I've been updatting Twitter a lot more lately than the blog, mainly because most updates don't warrant a full posting. If you have a Twitter account you can follow forumwarz for more frequent updates. Actually, even if you don't have Twitter you can just subscribe to the RSS feed there and you'll get all our updates. Here's some stuff you might have missed:

New Hardware

The site has been pretty laggy lately. We decided to finally do something about it and ordered 3 brand new servers, all of which are faster than our current server. They're currently being set up by our hosting company and hopefully we'll be able to switch over pretty soon.

There will be some downtime as we switch over. This is a pretty major change so it might take the larger part of a day to switch over, but it should be worth it for the performance we'll gain.

Tubmail Updates

I've pushed out some early upgrades to Tubmail, which should help if you have many messages in your inbox. It's now paginated, and you get much more screen real estate to view the list of messages.

ItemBuildr Results

We've published a few ItemBuildr items already. You should check out the ItemBuildr section of the site and the store to see the awesome stuff our users have come up with.

What's next?

Over the next little while I'll be putting out many little enhancements to existing parts of the site such as Tubmail and Flamebate. If you've been part of the community for a while I'm sure you'll be glad to have some of the new tools we plan to build.

We're starting to work out a schedule for Episode 3 development, too. It's a long way away, but we're getting ready to get the ball rolling on that one too.

Forumwarz is looking for a great new moderator to help our team with day-to-day activities.

It's a fun, responsible position and it'll give you access to the secret, inner bowels of the Forumwarz engine.

If you're interested, read this thread and tell us why you think you deserve the gig!

Today I'm delighted to announce the launch of itembuildr, our latest system for players to create content in the Forumwarz world. Whereas forumbuildr allowed players to create forums, itembuildr allows you to create items that your player can actually equip!

Here's how it works:

Step 1. The itembuildr gnomes come up with an item type and stats.

This is done automatically, and is mostly random. The item will either be an equippable item or a junk item. It can be anything from a .moar file (in fact, our first build is a video .moar file) to a tattoo or even a special item. Pretty much anything that can be equipped can be designed by our players.

The stats for the item are generated by marrying two existing items together from a particular class, plus a little random mutation thrown into the mix. So you don't have to worry about designing some kind of super item that's better than anything in the game. Everything should be within the limits of what we consider acceptable.

Step 2. People submit names and descriptions

Any character on Forumwarz can submit a name and description for the item. They are told what type of item it should be and what it's stats will be, and they can submit exactly one idea. The submission period lasts 24 hours.

Step 3. People vote on the names and descriptions

On the second day, people will anonymously vote up and down other people's ideas. Again this lasts 24 hours. After the voting period ends, the winner is picked as the official name and description of the item.

Step 4. People submit images for the item

Now that the item name and description is known, people can submit images for it. Each character can submit one image for consideration.

Step 5. People vote on the images

Again, a new voting period occurs and people can vote on the best images. After 24 hours, the best image is picked and..

Step 6. The item is published!

The item will end up in an itembuildr store at first for a limited time, along with recently published items. People can purchase the item and begin trading it on Kyoubai (or just stockpile it for their collections.) The best items will also be moved (at the discretions of admins) into the actual game stores, so anyone playing the Forumwarz storyline can purchase them.

Working in Parallel

Now that we've explained the pretty straightforward flow of the itembuildr process, you've probably figured out that it takes 4 days for an item to go from concept to the store. That would mean about 90 new items a year, which isn't nearly enough for our rabid users.

Instead we've designed the process so that we're designing two items in parallel!

The way this works is that we've broken it into a two day cycle of submitting and voting. During the submitting day, you can submit ideas for items, but you can also submit images for the previous winner. Then on the voting day, you vote for both. So it still takes an item 4 days to be created, but there are always two on the go. Cool huh?

How to access it

You can start using itembuildr right away by logging in and clicking on the multiplayer tab. Today we are only submitting item ideas since it's the first time it's being run.

Feedback

As always, we welcome feedback on the process, the interface and the integration into Forumwarz as a whole. Let us know what you think and how we can make itembuildr a great piece of the Forumwarz universe!

Thanks to a recent ad campaign, Forumwarz recently passed the 150,000th registered account mark.

When we launched Forumwarz nearly a year and a half ago, we had no idea if people would enjoy it or not, so hitting this milestone is quite meaningful.

Attracting that many eyeballs doesn't come without a cost, though. When Forumwarz had 150 users, I would personally respond to every piece of correspondence I received, whether it was a bug report, game feedback or just people saying 'hi!'

I remember a couple of people remarking on the fact that they'd received a reply, saying they never thought a bug report on a web site would incite a reply, from a site founder no less! It was flattering.

However, as the site grew, the amount of feedback grew with it, and it became far too much for me to stay on top of. Have you ever tried to email someone from a popular web site? Did you receive a reply? Probably not!

The thing is, is our business has changed. We used to sit around thinking "well, what next?" Now it's more like "OMG, HOW LONG UNTIL THAT IS DONE?" We struggle with the complex issue of prioritizing.

Recently, in our chat room, someone told me they were surprised how nice I was, because he'd heard that I didn't care much about the game. This is a site that I've invested thousands of hours working on and one that I spent countless hours of my day thinking about. I have even taken a huge pay cut to work on it full time. And why? Because I love it.

At one point, Forumwarz was just an idea in my head. Now it's something that many people have enjoyed. That accomplishment is incredibly meaningful to me.

The one thing I want to convey above all else is that a lack of a reply does not mean we don't care about your issue. Nothing could be further from the truth. We want Forumwarz to be an awesome game too!

Our current solution is a spreadsheet that lists upcoming features we want to deliver (currently about 50). We have a column for estimated development time (which is often wrong!) and a column for our best guess at the value that feature would deliver to our product. Then we came up with a formula that spits out a "score" based on those two factors. If something can be developped quickly and adds a lot of value, we do it first.

Unfortunately, as a player of our game, this might mean the feature you enjoy the most tends to not get upgraded or looked into for a while. I know, it sucks, but it's a bad side effect of having limited resources. Larger companies than ours can afford to hire more employees to work on more features in parallel, but ours is a simple web game, and we have to make do within the limits of our current revenue steams.

Having said all that, we still appreciate all the feedback we receive even if we don't act on it right away. Every ticket and email that falls into my inbox gets read, and ultimately prioritized.