Looking Ahead to 2014
Many players have requested that I share our plans for QONQR in 2014. Those of you who are also software developers are probably familiar with the anxiety of doing this. Promising features is often a bad idea in software, as priorities change more frequently than the Minnesota weather, and you never know when some unexpected issue is going to side track you for weeks or months.
So rather than saying what is going to be done in 2014, let me share what we have started, and might actually finish.
Android. Yes, we might actually finish it. We have implemented a few cheater detection algorithms on the server to watch for people who cheat their location, and have more tests planned to deal with the litany of issues with the hacker friendly phones. We know many of you are concerned with Android and we are doing our best to keep the game fair. A recent survey of some of our Android beta testers indicated they believe we are 90% of the way to being ready for a general release. Let’s hope the last 10% comes soon.
We’ve had a long-time dream of having custom maps for QONQR, something that would extend our brand. We started down this path with an awesome GIS consulting firm in September and after some exploration, decided we wanted maps that shaded the world the colors of the factions that controlled the zones. We later discovered that we have so many millions of map requests every month, outsourcing the custom maps would raise our hosting costs by nearly 400%. We did more work and set up our own mapping server using an open source product called CartoDB. Hosting maps ourselves would be a huge monthly cost savings, but much more effort to implement. That is where we are today. As with most tech projects, the costs for this feature are now double our early estimates, and we are about half way to our desired product. We are working to show what we have so far through the web portal, and this will probably be available in the next month. Work on maps will continue, but probably at a slower and more affordable pace. Eventually, we hope to allow for players to be able to see personalized maps of what areas impact them, or even be able to do time-lapse animations of major battles. These last two are much longer term goals, but if we can get the mapping server setup correctly, it should be possible.
Free cubes? Many months ago, iPhone had the ability to earn free cubes by installing other software, or watching video advertising. QONQR made advertising revenue from this offerwall. We were incentivized to work with a partner firm on the iPhone early, and put it into the iPhone while we searched for a Windows Phone equivalent. We only found one partner for WP, and reviews of that product were not positive. The reality of the revenue and the quality of the iPhone offerwall wasn’t good, and as a result we pulled it from iPhone. The Windows Phone users hated that iPhone users could get free cubes, and iPhone users hated that we took it away. We believe we may have found a solution to provide those who cannot spend money on cubes a way to earn them by fulfilling offers through the web portal. We have some preliminary code written for this. If the quality and implementation seems good, this could be a feature we release in 2014.
If you follow the Swarm comics, you may have seen a hint of changes to the game that allow short range weapons to be deployed over a great distance. That is all I will say about this. Perhaps the comic is foretelling a new feature to be released, or maybe the story will evolve into nothing more than propaganda by Nagumo Industries.
A new and improved help website is on the way. Getting into QONQR can be a big challenge for new players. We are working on better help to make it easier for new recruits to find their way through the many features in the game.
We had made a partnership with a good friend and developer in November. The plan was for him to join QONQR fulltime and his first order of business was to build us an in-game chat engine that would scale to thousands of users in any chat room at once. Ten hours before his first day, he called us to say his old company made him an offer to stay that he couldn’t refuse (we agreed it was very good), and so the task was shelved. Chat is still a top priority for us and we hope to see this happen in 2014. Along with this, we hope to implement new communication systems that will make it easier for new players to get connected with the veterans. We want the veterans to be able to bring the new people under their wing sooner (even getting them to switch factions while in training).
Our intern, Cole, began work on Facebook integration, to make it easier for you to share your achievements and leaderboard rankings on your wall, including the images to go with the awards, and leaderboard charts. The technical requirements of Facebook development required us to postpone this until Cole was off the college campus and had more control of his internet connection and network configuration. We hope to complete that work this year.
Push notification for Apple and Android, with more reliable push notifications for Microsoft. We now have a direct line of communications to Microsoft on a new cloud services offering that allows us to have a single place to push notifications to all platforms. Implementing Apple push notifications is a mystery it seems few have unraveled. We are hoping that this new service offering will allow us to finally get this working.
QONQR lite? With every Apple iOS update, some people’s QONQR app broke. It happened with iOS6, iPhone5, and now iOS7. We’ve also begun to see some issues with Windows Phones in our last update, with 1% of WP players. With Android, broken applications are to be expected, given the fragmentation of the operating systems. We don’t want anyone who has invested time and money to be out in the cold if a new update breaks them. We are exploring the idea of creating a backup scope for all platforms. A second application in the app store you could install alongside the normal QONQR app. This would be a very slimmed down version of the game – only the bare essentials needed to launch, harvest, and create bases. Basically it would do the things that cannot be done through the web portal, and almost nothing else. The idea would be that if normal QONQR broke, hopefully the lightweight version would still run. It would take extremely low memory and not rely on many phone features. We hope a QONQR lite version might save some people who find themselves in a position where the regular app won’t start. We may release a prototype version of this to the general public on one platform to test it. If it is well received, the other platforms will follow.
Finally the biggest coding challenge for us in the first half of 2014 is going to be a rewrite of the battle engine. We plan to keep all the existing formations the way they are. The purpose of the rewrite is to avoid the equivalent of the “Twitter Fail Whale” in QONQR. The outages we had in August were a result of our systems being unable to handle our traffic, just like Twitter experienced in their early days. Specifically, our database hit its limits, which cannot be solved by adding more servers. We fixed those August issues, but the solutions were only temporary. We are starting work now on a new system that moves us past “startup company mode” and into a more robust and scalable system. We now have the experience necessary to see how millions of battles a week impact our systems, and where the weak parts of our solution are.
The battle engine changes will simplify the code for launching nanobots and remove the bottlenecks that cause some launches to fail during peak times. It will also open the door to creating new formations and options for attack. Previously, we were hesitant to add new features to the already complex battle engine, knowing a rewrite was needed. This will remove those handcuffs. However, this will be a major rewrite, and will take some time before fully implemented. The good news is, it shouldn’t change the way you play. The bad news, if done correctly, you won’t notice anything, meaning you might think we spend all our time playing QONQR, instead of working on new features.
We have been saying throughout all of 2013, that QONQR 2.0 will be a massive game expansion that centers around bases as a core component in the game. This is still the plan. We hope to start the 2.0 features in the second half of 2014, but it is unlikely many features will see a release during 2014, unless our development staff is able to increase by a few more developers.
We have several other things we hope to do in 2013, but I will leave those as a surprise. As I said, I will only talk about what we’ve started and might finish. We have a very long list of new features on the white board. Some of those should happen in 2014.
I can’t promise what you might see in 2014 from QONQR, but I pledge that we will continue to work hard to make QONQR better. Thank you for supporting QONQR in 2013 and we hope you stay with us on our startup journey.
-Scott (aka Silver)
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