Sand Saga Insider: August 2024
Welcome back to Sand Saga's monthly update! As the summer holidays draw to a close, we're seeing a steady increase in player activity once again. This month brought some significant additions and our first paying supporters – a milestone I'm deeply grateful for.
August Additions
Update 24w31a
• Scenarios: Introduced Mission: Demolition
• Scenarios: Updated Sandbox: Rain (Napalm rain)
Update 24w33a
• Web: Introduced Workshop
• Web: Introduced Leaderboard
* Minor bug fixes and tweaks are not listed
Mission: Demolition
A new mission has been added where you can break, melt, and dissolve. However, it turned out to be quite short, so it will likely be expanded with an additional phase or task.
Leaderboard
We now have a leaderboard showcasing the top players in terms of completed scenarios.
Historically, only a small fraction of players bothered to log in, which is understandable since there wasn't much incentive beyond saving a list of completed scenarios.
However, with the introduction of community features like the workshop and the leaderboard, there are now more reasons to log in.
Workshop
The workshop is now live, offering a space for exploration and sharing.
A few features are still missing, such as rating, editing (but you can delete an item and add a new one), and browsing options (pagination, sorting, ...).
To publish a contribution, login is required, and the number of contributions is limited for non-supporters.
But there are some concerns. Compared to the core game, the workshop is significantly more resource-intensive. It's likely to generate much more outbound traffic – a costly metric – and put additional strain on the server due to increased requests, including database access and more. Let's hope it will be fine, and as the number of users grows, the number of supporters will increase as well, helping to cover the costs of any necessary infrastructure expansion. If not, I may need to impose certain limitations (e.g., limiting the number of items displayed, download limits, access for logged-in users or supporters only). Any potential restrictions will not apply to supporters.
And did you know that the first contribution was a kettle?
Internal Changes
This month also saw some extensive, though less visible, internal changes. I've improved the way the project is organized, streamlined the deployment process for new versions, and refactored the website. Along with these improvements, numerous minor tweaks and fixes were implemented.
Further Development
Improvements for the workshop are already in the pipeline, with some features already implemented. These include new sorting options for items (by popularity and publication date) and pagination for easier navigation. Additionally, various improvements are being made to ensure the game can handle all sizes of snapshots that players upload from various devices.
Conclusion
That's all for today. Stay tuned for more updates!
Discussion
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