[NEWS] November Updates & Gift Exchange Signups!
Posted 2 years ago :: Last edited 2 years ago by baoHello everyone! Hope you all had a great October! ^^
First off, here is the result of our mini halloween event! With your help, Bao has made a rather, er, delightful concoction... it looks rather fishy, but the smell seems to have attracted a rather curious Bonesby! As a thank you, Bao has generously given you a portion of his gloop to take home... eek!
Definitely shouldn't drink this...
Trick - 21 | Treat - 11
UPDATE: Rewards have been distributed. Let us know if we missed you!
As a reminder, our Blooming Season Event is ending on the 30th of this month. There’s also still time to enter the blooming cumulus raffle if you haven’t yet! In addition, MYO baoberry's have been restocked in the Event Shop (edit: sold out!).
Next month, we will be having an art exchange! Sign-ups are open from today and closing NOVEMBER 20. Please fill in this form to join: https://forms.gle/JB6J55y6sCe71MYr6. Due to the nature of this activity, we will be allowing drawn entries only (either by yourself or commissioned). Allocations will be given out by December and the final deadline for each piece will be DEC 20.
SIGN UP DEADLINE: NOV 20
ART DEADLINE: DEC 20
REVEALS: DEC 25
Anyone can join, even if you do not own a baobear! The minimum requirement for gifts is a coloured fullbody, but going above that is encouraged! You will have two weeks to sign up, and then about a month to finish your piece. If you can't make the deadline, let us know ASAP so we can have a pinch-hitter fill in – things happen, no hard feelings! : )
We will be continuing our Guest Artist sales this month, too! Here is our auction schedule for the first two weeks:
NOV 5: Muffet Crumpet by cottean & miyabau
NOV 8: Drowsy Dor-Bear & Tea Party Princess by wyrmbloods & bearwithglasses
NOV 12: Favourite Old Teacup by veil-dust
NOV 16: Spiced Apple Cider & Afternoon Bumbles eggomancers & emacodo
The next half will be a surprise ^^b Please look forward to it!
I just wanted to give a huge thank you for making our first event & launch so successful! I’ve collected site feedback information, and for those interested you can read under the spoilers. Otherwise, that’s all for now, and I'll see you soon!
I'm always rather hesitant to speak of my future plans because I don't want to leave people waiting for something that might not come anytime soon or at all,.. but just this once I will speak a bit on it! I recieved ~52 responses from the site survey, and here is a rather quick & dirty summary:
Top five interests according to the poll: dailies, achievements, personal questlines, pets, lootboxes
Top five features mentioned: mini-games (click to play, ex. gardening), scavenger hunts, rotating prompts, customization, non-art prompts
Going forward, I'll be focusing mainly on the 'groundwork' of the site, namely:
- Collectibles: achievements, pets, items
- Quests: one-off questlines, general prompts (possibly seasonal), bon baoyage (lowest priority atm)
- FTO-specific activities: planning a "newbie gift", just have to think about the contents...
- Aesthetics: page revamps (ex. our new homepage), making everything more accessible/easy to find (ex. /info/world), etc. unfortunately there is a limit to how much I can make things more clear in terms of like, navigation & using the site itself because that is simply how lorekeeper is coded, but, like, I'll do my best (organization also hinges on what I personally find most logical, but feel free to give me suggestions if you have any!)
Future plans are much more up in the air, and will be for rather 'superflous' things that would be nice to have but aren't necessarily vital to the site. I'll speak of the more popular requests & why I can't exactly implement them ASAP:
- Dailies/mini-games: the initial conceit of lorekeeper was as a masterlist site, so implementing more complex features would require an experienced developer (of whom I would have to first find, and then compensate fairly for). An extension is not currently publicly available for features like 'gardening' or 'farming' or any mini games really, and while I have a few 'workarounds' in mind, these may be unecessarily complicated in practice... I might try something for an event, but we'll see.
- Scavenger Hunts: maybe for an event or for a Bearlock Holmes side-quest? I'll play around with the extension for now.
- Bulletin Board: I have plans for for user-submitted quests, just hashing out some the finer details. Might come late 2023 depending on user growth & interest?
- Housing: I have plans for this but it is unlikely to come anytime soon since it will require a lot of assets/planning! ):
- Community Lottery: I'll test run this sometime soon!
- Customization: I'm just unsure of how popular / wanted this idea is? If implemented, it will just be an 'item' and you'll have to draw it on your baobear yourself so it's a bit underwhelming to me...
- Crafting: Not sure how to implement this just yet, plus it would require so many assets; basically I think this requires a tie-in with dailies & other features I don't currently have, so will probably not plan for this for quite awhile (may add one-off recipes just for fun, but nothing major).
- Wishing well: I have a vague idea for this, mostly thinking about workload & how often to grant wishes. Might do a one-off event for this.
- Jobs/levelling/stats: not a priority.
- Returning Retired Items: I have plans for this, not sure when I can implement it, lower priority.
- RLC shop/subscription tiers: 18 interested / 22 neutral / 11 not interested... not a priority atm?
I left out a LOT of things & I do have more things planned they're just very. Up in the air! Anyway, there's plenty of stuff I'd like to try out, even if it's only as a one-off haha! In any case, I would appreciate it if you could continue to fill out our suggestion form which will always be open: https://forms.gle/81L9du8freef9JHMA it really is useful to help me decide what to focus on & to determine our future trajectory!
I think that's all for now... just as an added disclaimer, I am just one person working with a small team, so please don't expect or push for releases/updates (no one has ever done this, to be clear, because you are all very nice). But, Baobears is very much a passion project & I would love to continue having fun making content for it. So, thank you very much for allowing me to do that!
Thanks for reading this far & I'll see you in the next update! : D