Pixel Progression #23

Welcome to Pixel Progression #23!

It's been a month since our last, and we've got some exciting things to talk about.

The key event started last week, and it was a ton of fun watching people figure things out. Those who already completed all of your challenges, congrats!

A big takeaway is that people enjoyed using their brains, rather than just mindless grinding or using their coins to participate in this. We'll keep this in mind for future events, and try to expand on it in different forms.

The key event will go on for about another week, we'll post an alert with an exact day and time in a few days.

Famously, we love giving sneak peeks and promising future content. Sometimes this can actually be a bad thing however, as we've all learned recently with the key event.

If you don't know, we promised the key event over a year ago after we deprecated the key item for it. Originally, this event had a slightly different form, and was going to happen shortly after the key was gone. Month after month this got pushed back for more time sensitive changes to balancing, content, discord changes, and more. Then the feelings and hype grew and grew, until it started to fall because it had been so long. This wasn't fun for us to have on our mind for all this time, and it wasn't fun for you guys to be waiting.

So going forward, we'll still preview things that we're working on (and have our public roadmap available!), but we're going to purposely not share EVERYTHING at ALL times in extreme detail, so we can set up reasonable expectations and results. Smaller changes might be complete surprises, bigger changes will often be referenced but not given a timeline.

Development with essentially 1 developer, 2 artists, 1 writer, and 1 manager in a place as fickle as discord can be chaotic, and we need to maintain our sanity and your expectations accordingly. So lets start with the next section, a previously announced project that has been pushed back and changed.

Our vision of what multiplayer fishing was going to be has been entirely thrown out the window, in a good way. We still think our original vision would have been fun, but it would have been a bit niche and kind of janky, like many text based Discord games.

So we do not plan to give more details on multiplayer fishing at this time with timelines or promises, but we are working closely with Discord to look into making it a discord voice activity for anyone to do in any server, even without Dank being there. Due to this being a bigger undertaking, we're early in planning/development on this. We'll talk about it again when it's closer to release, which might be a while!

This is my (Mel) current project that I am now developing/planning after the key event. Not all of the details are fleshed out, but it's on my current sprint board to get all those.

Artists have already been hard at work and have made over 26 new art assets, and that's not even half of what we need for this major update.

To address the elephantnose fish in the room, this is a LONG season and people are itching for things to do. So that is why as of now, I'm no longer calling this the "mid-season" update, and I'll be calling it "Season 3.5" in future posts. Here's why:

New Fish

We're adding tons of new fish, and new fish variants. As many as a normal new season would contain, if not more. These include more bosses, chromas, chroma bosses, and everything in between. There will be a ton of new fish to catch and show off. And before you get all hot and bothered about more chroma bosses, the meta will be changing in this update slightly, and no, not just a straight nerf with nothing to make up for it!

Season Pass Extension

We're going to be adding 50 more ranks to the season pass (101-150), and yes, you'll be able to claim them even if you're already past these ranks. These will mostly be fishing materials and tools, titles, and other "fun" things without being economy breaking.

New Limited Bundles

We'll be replacing the two store fishing bundles (gem bundles) with two new ones during this update for those looking for a short boost for good value. They'll also be slightly different in offerings than in the past, focused more on what people are craving in the "now".

New Badge

We're going to have more than 1 fishing badge, with different badges doing different things as far as skill blocking, so you can do what you want, when you want to with less reliance on "catching all creatures" since we're adding tons more.

New Skills & NPC Interactions

We're going to be adding new skills, skill challenges, and one of those skills will allow you to sometimes summon an NPC to talk to you, and it'll have new art and dialogue for each NPC who is eligible to be summoned.

And More

There are even more features I want to flesh out more before sharing, but this isn't the end of it. This season 3.5 is big enough to be a new season, but we won't be making you pay for another pass. This also is NOT marking the mid-point for season 4 launch, as I'll talk about in the next section.

A lot of people, reasonably, don't like seasons being tied to content releases. A good example is right now, this lul in things to do once the pass and challenges are done isn't fun! For season 4, we'll start decoupling normal content from season passes (and seasonal content).

For instance, if 3 weeks into season 4 we want to release more fish and a new skill, we'll just do it instead of waiting for a midseason patch or season 5.

We'll get season passes and seasonal content back on a regular cadence, and price them accordingly, so there's always something to do! One thing we're playing with the idea of doing is making seasons shorter, but also cheaper. We'll see where we land by season 4, coming in the not so distant future.

In case it was in doubt for any reason, we are still planning on adding gambling directly to Dank Memer this year. It's not on our current sprint list, but it's not far behind either. There are a few unannounced things that are more urgent to help servers with Dank Memer in them we'd like to push out first. I wanted to mention this as there's been rumors that we're canceling it, which I'd like to clear up.

As mentioned on our roadmap, we'll be bringing back a single gamble command at a time and letting it sit on the economy each time to make sure nothing's broken, rather than launching 5 new commands at once and scrambling to make changes to balancing or bugs.

First up will be the slots command!

On top of this, at LAUNCH there will be no badges available for gambling commands. We're tacking data from the start for when/if we add badges for instant unlocks for people, but we want to focus on the mini-games themselves before worrying about progression and prestige and how we'll make it fair to old badge holders.

This last month we spent a good amount of time (and are continuing into this month) managing our internal tooling to develop things faster and more effectively.

One example is that we're planning on creating a system that allows our artists to upload art for us directly without us needing to download, add the emoji to yet another emoji server (did you know we have 1300+ emojis for this game??), and then us need to put that emoji into the codebase.

Another example is improving the "dev gui" that allows me and zomb to write content, without needing to write any code or do any code-like formatting. In fact, most of our website AND bot are doing this now, and we're still converting old systems over!

Internal tooling is important to spend time on as we expand our projects, otherwise we'd be working in a mess of wires and dust every time we do any new content or bug fixes. It future proofs the bot's content cycle, even if it takes away resources initially!

As some of you know (from youtuber, NTTS) Discord is forcing bots to monetize on Discord soon. We are not starting development on that yet, but you can look forward to being able to buy gems and subscriptions directly within Discord by the end of the year.

There's still some kinks that are being worked out on Discord's end, hopefully before the deadline to enforcement. We'll see, but ease of use for buying thins is always nice if the kinks get fixed!

We hear people asking for more drops, even if there are no plans for more at the moment. Drops are fun, but dropping old items isn't always best for the economy, and developing new drop items is costly in more than just development costs. This is not a forgotten system, just one we're unsure where to go with right now in comparison to our newer planned projects.

This is to give information on ongoing known issues or common points of confusion.

Support Updates

Soon we'll be making some support server changes to help better support current questions, such as a help desk option for captchas or better tooling for mods to see things like your currency logs without needing to have you run 30 commands and page turns. Next month should have more info on this.

Captchas

Please make sure you're logged into the correct account on our site when doing a captcha, if it says you have none to do. For some reason people often have "fake" accounts they're logged into, even if they don't knowingly have alts.

Known Issues

These are issues we know about, and don't need reported right now.

• Fight ranking is sometimes out of order
• The image of freemium in /vote is incorrect
• Get the full list here: Public bug tracker

As a recap:

Posting on reddit with the phrase #PixelShowcase in the title or as the flair will give you a chance to be here.

We want:

• Fan art (ZERO ai art is allowed)
• Community made resources
• Concept/Suggestion posts
• In depth feedback
• Funny/Awesome moments

Anyone who gets selected (3-4 per month) will earn EXCLUSIVE rewards, including a title, some gems, and an item that we'll showcase next week that can ONLY be earned from winning this and is non-transferable. A true flex of flexes.

/u/ClericalRogue

Imagine being me and opening reddit at noon while you couldn't focus and wanted to kill some time. Imagine that you open the Dank Memer subreddit and find a cursed pink creation staring back at you in alarming detail. I can't even imagine, bro.

/u/XENON-X1

Meme edits are my favorite thing to watch while eating a bowl of cereal and watching people complain about rare items being too rare. Perfect!

/u/winnawastaken

I low key hate (love) people posting dank themed food, because I'm always jealous that I won't be able to eat it myself. Send recipes!

/u/Protato_567

My favorite was the banana for obvious reasons.. The duck is great too though. Ahhh legos.

Hopefully this amount of detail was worth the month long wait, and next month we have even more to talk about!

Keep your eyes on the sneak peek channel in DMC for some art leaks later this month before season 3.5 is live, the art is REALLY REALLY good this time around for some of these creature variants. I'm amazed by our artists every day.

Drink water every day this month for 100 years of good luck in virtual fisher. (trust me bro)