Weekly devlog #12 - rollback + future of crystal realms

Hello everyone! This week I released the pre-alpha 1.8.1 update. This update is a minor update, so it was mostly balancing changes and bug fixes. But it also added 3 new items: the frog terrarium, the eyeball in a jar, and the crystal ball. More info about this update is in the changelog in the discord server.

Rollback
One change in this update was that I resized the sideways doors to be 2 blocks wide. These blocks used to be special, because they resized whenever a player or entity opened the door. Many players got confused why their door won't open when another block was blocking the door from opening. So I decided to remove this behaviour. But when the pre-alpha 1.8.1 update happened, worlds with sideways doors blocked by other blocks got corrupted. What was supposed to happen is that those sideways doors would get destroyed. So I had to rollback the games database to a point before the worlds got corrupted.

What is next?
Now that the 1.8 update is done, my focus will once again be on the mobile version of the game. This time the goal is to have all the features from the PC version in the android version. If you want to be part of the android testers you can fill out this form. I will also be working on content of the alpha version. Because pre-alpha 1.8 will most likely be the last major update during the pre-alpha stage. This means that it will take a while before the next major update. But once it happens it will be the biggest update yet!

Pre-alpha vs alpha
So you might be wondering what exactly is the difference between the pre-alpha and the alpha version. One of the major differences is that the alpha version will be on more platforms. We are planning to release it to android, and hopefully IOS and mac OS too. And the alpha release will also have more frequent updates. This is because I will be able to work on the game full time, and because the core of the games code has already been written. 

So that was everything for this week. Next weeks I will update you on the progress of the android version!