Pixel Progression #30

Welcome to Pixel Progression #30!! It’s been about a month since the last Pixel Progression, and there are a few interesting things to share.

I won’t go into detail on the upcoming development since Mel already talked about the summer planning in the last blog post.

Previous Updates

Since the last Pixel Progression post just over a month ago, we’ve released a LOT of new content.

• The travelling merchant is available with brand new offers for you each day when you use /trade (or pls trade).
• A whole new grind command, pls tidy was added to the bot. It introduced new tools and brought back some legacy loot items which had become quite rare to obtain.
• If you don’t like the complexity of fishing, you can enable “simple fishing” in your /fish settings and just spam “pls fish catch” for some free coins.
• The level rewards were updated, omega and prestige costs were reduced, and the omega shop grew to include a lot more content.
• Bundles were balanced, “aura” was added to the rate command, and commands can be user installed.

A new, free to play adventure with loads of things to collect; ranging from cosmetics, to pets, and new items. During the last survey a few people asked me to talk about what happens “behind the scenes” during the development process. An adventure is a nice example since there’s so many different aspects that need to be covered:

• The idea: it all starts here. Melmsie thinks about a topic that has enough variety to be used for an adventure. This also includes a few notes on encounter options which serve as pointers on what can happen on different nodes, and a list of rewards.
• Art: artists are required to create loads of new art. It starts with the banner you see when you first run the command and continues with all the rewards you can get. There’s new pets, new items, and a lot of new pet room decorations.
• Writing: every single possible node on the adventure needs text. There’s text when the node appears, and text for a response depending on which button you click. Not only does it have to be written, it also has to fit the theme and be interesting.
• Rewards balancing: it’s not as simple as assigning a reward to a button. Some need to be common, others rare. Some nodes need to have a chance of you dying, others let you lose an item but continue. All of those odds have to be balanced to make sure the adventure is both challenging but still fun and rewarding.
• Development: adventures are an established system so there’s not as much to talk about here. A few scenarios did have to be covered, like making sure you couldn’t get the same pet room decor twice. If you’re interested, I can go into detail on the software development aspect of a new command in a different post.

Season of the Abstract is well underway and we’ve almost reached the halfway mark to season 8. Like many of the old seasons, this season had a new seasonal location with seasonal creatures. With shorter seasons, development has to happen a lot quicker so we asked for your feedback on this season too. Here’s a few interesting insights from the survey:

Cosmetics:

We often get mixed feedback on cosmetics. People complain there’s too many or are upset when there’s not enough. For this survey, the same question was included for everyone who answered “Do you fish in Dank Memer?“. The first image shows the responses from those two answered with “yes”, and the second from those who don’t fish. I was honestly surprised by quite a few things here:

1. Item skins are most important to fishers, while non-fishers prefer titles.
2. The guidebook skin is about as important to fishers as titles are.
3. Pet skins have a solid 3rd place for both groups.
4. Fish tank decorations and skins were rated as least important by fisherfolk.

Season Length:

A season length of 2 months seems to be something most of you are in favor of.

New Challenges:

Since the last survey, two new skills and six new challenges were added. In this survey, even more of you were in favor of new challenges.

Seasonal NPC:

Of the 54% who wished there had been a seasonal NPC, almost 35% did so for the lore/stories!

I’ll share a few more charts from the survey in the dank-fun-facts channel in our community server in the upcoming weeks.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed the insights into the feedback you provide. Since a few of you also asked for more insights into regular bot usage/stats, I’ll try to include that in the next post!

Go outside and make the most of the summer, or enjoy the cooler weather if you’re “down under”!