State of the game and plans for the future

Hello everyone! 

Lots of things have happened since the Alpha version released 19 days ago (feels like a lifetime). After hearing you out on Discord and our social media, we thought it would be good to make this post. Let's talk about what HAS happened, and what WILL happen.

· Alpha release (we love you Android users)

After waiting a long time for Google to approve our release, we launched the game on the Play Store. This was a huge step, and it came with a lot of new stuff (You know: New monsters, new UI, new snow world, new items, new features). A week later, we made it even better: We added emotes, in-app purchases, and a friend system! These, together, make up the biggest Crystal Realms update ever.

· Our rise to fame

In two weeks, we went from our usual ~10 online player count to a whopping 1000! In addition, our discord went from a cozy 700 members to an insane 6000 (and counting). All of this was made possible by the recording, posting, and streaming of dozens of lovely content creators who liked our project and believed in us. 

Of course... this had downsides. The server got a bit of an upgrade to manage all these players (since it started to lag). On the other side, we had trouble making the game behave normally on some phones (and we still have a long way to go, we will keep working on phone compatibility). We also had to expand our moderation team to ensure a safe and healthy community (quickest mod selection ever). Not everything is bad tho, we were really happy to see our project grow with the excitement of thousands of players.

· What is happening lately with Crystal Realms?

As most of you already know, the server has been under attack. People getting disconnected, outrageous lag, and lots of chaos on Discord. You might ask yourself: why didn't you buy DDoS protection for the server? Our response is: we did (it just wasn't strong enough, we didn't expect people to attack our game, since it seems to not benefit anyone). We have looked into it, but there is a limit as of how much we can do.

Besides this, we have recently also experienced a couple of unrelated server problems which have forced us to close servers for a while (not all of them were our fault, at one point the server just kinda broke and the provider had to change it lol). We apologize for all of the inconvenience and hope that you understand that a solo dev can't fix everything immediately. Sorry!

· What is gonna happen now?

In all truth: We are not 100% sure.  We have considered shutting down the game for a short time (a couple of days or even a week) to work on the game and make it better for the players.  We have also been thinking about maybe closing registrations for the game while we reach a more stable state, to not disappoint NEW players trying the game. This is a very difficult situation, and we hate giving players a bad experience in-game.

DISCLAIMER: Even if we DO shut down the game for a while, NOTHING will be lost. All worlds and accounts will be SAVED and it would only mean that you would need to take a short break from playing. No worries!

These options might not even happen btw. We are experimenting with server alternatives and working hard on very needed bug fixes. Maybe everything gets fixed fast and the game will not need any extra downtime at all. It might seem like we have distanced ourselves from Discord, but it is only because of all the hard work we are putting into the game (also because Discord DM sounds are haunting my dreams at this point).

DISCLAIMER 2: Yes, iOS is being worked on, we simply don't want to release it while all of these problems are still happening, since it would add new bugs to fix to our workload.

· How can you help?

1. First of all, don't panic. I know some of you guys' first instinct is to go show your unhappiness on the Discord chat but... maybe don't. Let's be civilized and just wait a bit, please. We don't want to overwork the ONLY dev.
2. When playing the game, be nice. Keeping the game healthy will give the moderators a well-deserved break (well-needed too).
3. Report things that aren't working (USING THE CORRECT CHANNEL FOR IT). First, please look up if it has been reported before.
4. Helping out on ko-fi. As you might have noticed, we turned off in-app purchases (on Android) because we felt bad about selling stuff while the game was lagging so much. If you still want to donate to the game (and you can afford it), remember that ko-fi is still open and we appreciate each and all of our supporters there. No worries if you can't donate tho! We don't wanna pressure anybody.

·Final thoughts

This whole attack situation sucks, but we gotta get through it. We believe in this project and we WILL continue working on it, whatever happens. All of our choices will be made with you, the players, in mind. We are terribly sorry for any discomfort we have caused as of late and hope that you will keep playing as we navigate through this... mess. Thanks for reading our very long post and remember the main goal of the game: Feeding frogs!      I mean... Having fun!

-Sincerely, Piemen and Anubis