A wild list appears!

Hello everyone!

We have a list for you to register your interest in the Alpha, at last! It is time to entertain a wider audience of Glitchen.

First, you MUST have an account on our website.  Without it, game access cannot be granted, and your request will be deprioritized until we can reach out to you for more information. We will work on making this more efficient, but it just hasn’t been able to be a priority.

Signing up does not guarantee immediate access; but the plan is to add a batch (10-15?) of folks every few days so we can generate some regular activity in the game.  This will allow us to estimate our hardware needs to accommodate a large population of players.

Any questions, concerns, and general enthusiasm can be posted on our forum!

Without further ado, click this link to register your interest!

In pursuit of clarity…

Hello, madamsirs, LadyCeres here.

I’d like to take the opportunity to clear up some concerns I’ve heard since we made our announcement. If any of the points below appear blunt, know that it is so there is as little confusion as possible.

Ur is for Everyone

First and foremost, the game that is currently Children of Ur will remain open while we work together to open up the Eleven world. This was a vital discussion point when we spoke of coming together. It was important to all parties that there is a version of Ur accessible to everyone. There is not, and never has been, an intention to exclude people from Eleven’s Ur, which brings me to the next point.

Eleven’s Alpha has had to limit its community size for really boring, but irritatingly valid, reasons.

If we’ve never explained our reasoning in this manner before, allow me to do so now: when we started up, no one had the experience of large-scale community management. We were dealing with some really janky stuff, in terms of things going wrong in the first few versions of the alpha. Initially we picked people that we knew personally who would be patient with the super-crapness, had a good knowledge of the game, and would be able to get along with others in a very small (albeit virtual) space. It hasn’t been all sunshine and roses, but the work done by the Alphas as the staff has learned to scale up community management efforts (alongside bug tracking and your expected Glitch-y mayhem) has been invaluable.

We grew the community via personal recommendations, forum contests, Facebook contests, Kaiyon’s Dragon*Con contests, contrived SQL queries to figure out who was visiting the forum but not necessarily posting (hello fellow introverts!)…with each group added, the support load on myself and one other dedicated staff member increased. You’re all tired of the schtick about volunteer projects, real lives, and jobs, so I won’t repeat it. I can’t emphasize enough how true it all is. There are approximately 300 members in our testing community. Recent code changes have meant that the support load has become extremely minimal, which is fantastic news! It means we are able to add more people without fear of a hundred tiny disasters waiting to happen. I dearly hope that puts paid to any notions that we were being intentionally exclusionary or that less than 20 people had access. Neither are true, and the continued insinuations that they were have been pretty hurtful.

The world is a beautifully incomplete thing.

Eleven’s initial goal was to have the world exactly as it was at the shutdown. We were all high on purple when we thought that was a good idea! There are many locations that were not released back in 2013. I have had it personally confirmed from the-team-formerly-known-as-Tiny-Speck that these locations are lost forever…at least in their original form. Aside from pursuing server stability, we were also plodding along with this idea that we had SO MUCH MORE work to do before we could be ready…and thankfully, we realized that was just silly. The world is absolutely playable, along with the skills and maybe 90% of the quests (missing locations, tsk!)…so we’re taking perfection off the table in pursuit of a more open world. Locations will be rebuilt and added in as they are ready. Game hardware will have to be increased to support more people. We’re plotting how best to achieve it all.

The game will still be called Eleven.

I’ve seen people debate about what we should be called. There are some tech reasons to keep the game’s name Eleven. One is the following image, which was achievable with the existing art assets:

We may rebrand ourselves with a different team name. Laura from Children of Ur has played with blending our teal and purple identities into the existing logo, which was courtesy of Kukubee himself. We’re not trying to erase Children of Ur’s name or memory, so we’re going to come up with other ways to honor it.

But six f*@$)%g years?!

We know, we can’t believe it either. The merger has given us new vigor to get the problems figured out, my hand to Tii.

So that’s the gist.

We are human. We are Glitchen. We are doing everything we can to prevent this game from dying completely. The blending of the two teams will only make us stronger. When the doors open, they will be open to all. Thank you for sticking with us. If you’d rather not, well, we’ll still be here with open arms anyway.

Please join us on the forum for any questions you might have.

LadyC

When Two Become One

Greetings friends! Have I got some great news for you today!

For a limited time of today only, when you order, you’ll receive not only one, but two!…

Wait… Sorry… That wasn’t it.

Ready for the real news?

Are you sure?

I’ll give you a moment to get properly stoked…

Hums the Jeopardy tune

Is it time yet?

It is!

Drum roll

I am incredibly proud to announce that the forces of Children of Ur and Eleven are coming together at last!

I know there’s been a lot of questions as to why there have always been multiple projects, and, for a long time, we felt we had good reasons. Eleven was focusing on only filling in the gaps that Tiny Speck left for us, while CoU were working to rebuild everything from the ground up.

Over the years, both teams have had varying levels of success in their separate approaches, but it’s recently become clear to all involved that if we want to keep this effort moving forward towards the future, we should join our forces together and come up with a new, consolidated approach.

Going forward, we’re going to try and take some of the best parts of both of our approaches and marry them together. As you all likely know, Flash has been on a slow death march for years and has finally been given much more firm timelines for it’s demise. While Eleven’s current setup would be greatly impacted by this, CoU has a Dart based client that would not. This puts us in a good position to see how well the separate pieces can play together and set up a good plan to move away from Flash forever.

While we’re still working out some further details of how this merging will impact things, here are a few points we’ve discussed internally.

  • The current CoU team is coming on board with the Eleven team setup. While the game will be Eleven, we’re looking into options on how to honor the names of both teams in other respects.
  • The CoU game will live on for now, but will roll off back to the realms of imagination eventually. Details for that will be announced when plans are made.
  • Eleven has been traditionally focused on bringing Glitch back the way it was. This was never meant to be a permanent thing, just, until we got things working. Going forward, we’re going to start looking into new ideas. This means new features and new stories that we’re hoping to incorporate in to the game!
  • Ideas!!! We’ve got a ton! It may take some time, but a few of the bigger ones that we’re talking about revolve around how skills are learned and implementing a new approach to the auction feature.
  • And here’s the one that you’ll all be most excited for, our current primary goal is to open the doors to more of you, our friends! Some recent updates to our server along with additional administrative functionality provided by the recent website overhaul have brought us really close to this goal. We’re currently discussing plans on how we can further stress test the game to determine what extra steps we may need to get there.

Who’s excited for these prospects and has two thumbs? This guy!

As always, keep tuned here and on our social media outlets for updates (including the CoU ones while we’re integrating).

-Kaiyon

Advanced Outage Notice

Greetings, fellow Glitchen!

Just wanted to let everyone know that we’re planning to have the website and game have some down time tomorrow, Sunday, February 17th. I’ll post when the down time starts and then again when we’re back up again.

This down time is in order to perform an upgrade to our web site that will give us better behind the scenes control over the game (which will allow us to triage and address issues quicker and easier).

Once back up, if anyone notices anything that’s not working right, please post in the forum, or, send an e-mail to contact_us@elevengiants.com .

Thanks!

-Kaiyon

ZzzzzZZzzZzzzzz…. Huh! WHAT!?!

Oh crap!!!

*rubs eyes*

I swear it was just supposed to be a short nap…

Oh well. Here I am!

Sorry for the lack of updates lately. As you all know, this project is volunteer based, so, when none of our volunteers have free time to work, things slow down…

That said, there are a few things that we’ve had in the works for a while that we’re planning on/have rolled out.

Item the first: We just rolled out v0.2.13 of the game server on our alpha system. This update includes some changes that we’re hoping will help stabilize the game to make it easier for us to handle a larger load.

Thing number 2: The website is getting an overhaul! I’m hoping to roll this out in the next week or so (issue and time permitting, of course), but we’re upgrading to a newer web framework and have added a lot more useful administrative features to make our lives as devs/admins (and that of the players by extension) easier. We’re going to be rolling out a new set of “God” pages (the main admin pages that help manage both in and out of game content) along with access to different versions of the game client to allow better admin control as well.

I’ll update soon in regards to the web page updates!

-Kaiyon

Side project: Resurrecting another piece of the past

A message from one of our alpha testers, Eris Lord Freedom:

As Eleven Alpha has moved along, it’s gotten complete enough that many of us are chasing down achievements and exploring parts of Ur we never had time for in Glitch. For that, we needed info: What door opens with this key I got in the Ancestral Lands? How many cherries for a Rainbow Potion? I’ve been to all the places in Groddle Heights; why haven’t I gotten the Completist badge? (Answer: Martleby Hare.) What’s the recipe for Awesome Stew, and when can I make it? Where can I find a wood tree?

We had Eleven’s port of glitchthegame.com at http://pedia.elevengiants.com, and the Wayback Machine’s pages for the Glitch-Strategy wiki, but those aren’t complete. The Encyclopedia doesn’t include recipes, and the Wayback capture was erratic; Glitch ended before you could deliberately save a page at archive.org, and many of the saved pages are from an earlier version of Glitch.

We needed something better.

Eris Lord Freedom, a devoted Lemming and occasional Cosmapolitan, decided we needed a new wiki. With help from Ladyceres and Varaeth, we now have…

The Glitch Forever Wiki.

This is the alpha version. Many pages are still outdated. A lot of details from the end of Glitch – new recipes especially – are missing. The database used to restore it was from early alpha Glitch; most regions and streets aren’t there yet. (Oddly, most of the images referenced in the Wayback Version are there. Weird database issues. Ladyceres had days of fun trying to import a 5-year-old wiki database into modern web software.)

But it’s here, and it’s ours, and we can fill in the gaps and add pages for all the post-Glitch activities and Glitch revival projects. Join us.

Breaking the Silence

Oh!

Hello there.

I didn’t realize you were there.

Me?

Yeah, I’m still here.  Always have been.

Sorry about the lack of official updates!  That’s all on your Chief Chicken Tamer, here.  Whoops!

Anyways… Octo did a great job of filling everyone in on some updates earlier this month, so go check out that post for some of those details.  We’ve got plans to roll out some website changes relatively soon that will go a long way towards helping the team manage users and game access.  Nothing too exciting for you, but if we’re able to go about rejiggering and fixerating broken users and such easier, then maybe we’ll be able to open the doors for more of our Glitchen bretheren.

-Kaiyon

Notes from the Undergrowth

Hi all! We’re still hard at work on this, but the current focus of development effort involves a bunch of server-side reliability and data consistency work which isn’t particularly shiny or fun to write about!  (Some user-facing stuff does make progress–aside from characters needing to be unstuck less, there are small bits of progress like the Greedy Street Spirit quest now working properly.)

The Eleven Giants forums are a much better place to stay a bit more up-to-date with what’s going on, or at least admire some screenshots. (Thank you, Eris Lord Freedom!)

Other eventual work involves recreating the locations (190 or so) that weren’t in the Tiny Speck asset release (oh, Gwendolyn!) and figuring out the future of the client, but until we can keep the game going for the current community of alpha testers (thank you for your patience!) without an extraordinary support load, reliability is where it’s at–this is super-frustrating for all involved since the basic mechanics of the game are all there, but a more open test right now would not be supportable.

On that note–if you are or someone you know is interested in wading through server-side javascript and figuring out data consistency problems with an eye towards performance and scalability, drop by the forums, it’d be great to hear from you!

%d bloggers like this: