Hello!

As stated on the previous DevBlog #91, we had a pause in DevBlogs until today as our team was having the Summer vacation. This time around we had staggered the vacations people took a bit meaning that there was still development happening!

I've just recently come back to Finland from my hiking & traveling trip that went around the Europe, so as promised in the previous DevBlog, the content on this DevBlog is going to be light and vacation related. In our next DevBlog on 17th you can expect some stuff on the content that's been worked on and more on that's coming next!

Okay, let's dive into what we did to recharge during the vacations.

What we did during the vacations to recharge

Schamppu

Me somewhere in Latvian countryside enjoying the start of the trip

I traveled for multiple weeks around the Europe. I started off by meeting up with maxchill in Latvia, and spent a good while at his summer cabin just relaxing and looking at all the stuff he's been building during his vacations. Also tried out the sauna he built last year, and it was amazing (coming from a Finn, we know all about saunas).

Then I continued towards Poland where I visited Warsaw, Katowice, Wroclaw and Wisla. I did hiking in both Wroclaw and Wisla, and actually went on one mountain hike with a WalkScape player from Poland! I also visited Bratislava in Slovakia.

During the summer trip, I carried my new drone with me and did something very nerdy in all of the cities: I took videos of trams and the cities I visited. I made a small video of all the places I went to for this DevBlog (link below). If you want to see more of the videos I took, I have a tiny Instagram account called @onlytramz where I posted more of those during my trip. It's just a weird hobby I had for this Summer :D

Video of my trip, not the greatest edit I've done but to highlight some of the places I went to!

Myzozoz

Myzozoz finishing his ever ultramarathon, he hides his pain with a smile

I had much simpler goals for my vacation. At the beginning of August I attended my first ever ultramarathon in Latvia. The weeks before it I spent recovering and preparing for the trip, and afterwards I was too busy recovering to do much else. Latvia was awesome, the weather was great and running felt good!

Since I wasn't able to do sports for most of my vacation, I instead played a lot of disc golf and video games. Oh, and of course I walked a bunch

Maxchill

Maxchill's painting project during his vacation

I spent his vacation enjoying time with his family in their countryside home. Alongside mushroom foraging, cow gazing, and schamppu hosting, I managed to fulfil one of his New Year's resolutions of making at least one oil painting this year!

Crushy

Some of the crowd that gathered at Kaivopuisto Observatory that day. Not looking at the sun because you shouldn’t be doing that even during an eclipse! :D

I usually schedule my holidays to skip the worst of Finnish Winter but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get some downtime to enjoy the near-total eclipse (hey 83% is nothing to laugh at) on the 12th at an event organised by the The Ursa Astronomical Association. They were there with telescopes, lots of different types of eclipse glasses/filters and a lot of very knowledgeable people filling in the crowd on what was happening.

Unfortunately it went below the horizon just as it was getting nice and dark!

Weasel

Weasel doing some work

Weasel has been powering up our e-mail servers as usual.

Other news & updates while the vacation was going

One important thing that happened but shouldn't to our knowledge affect any players is that Flutter (which we use as the underlying tech for the game) updated and bumped their minimum iOS version to 15.

During the vacation there was also a problem with the character history rolling back, but this has already been resolved while I was away. Good job on that Crushy and myzozoz!

Also just before going to the vacation we deployed the Bank Rework update, which had two different changelogs posted in DevUpdates: DevUpdate #34 and DevUpdate #35.

With the staggered vacations, both myzozoz and Crushy has been already working on trading & some general improvements to the game. Weasel and maxchill have also been cooking some new content, but more on these in the next DevBlog on 17th of September.

Until next time

That's all for today, I hope you liked it even though this was mostly just about how we spent our vacations. But now we're back to work again with our minds (hopefully) fully recharged for everything that's coming next.

Keep walking and stay hydrated!