Dev Logs

prompt & event development

May Rollover // Starting.

August Event // Brainstorming.

Website

Current Project:

Our upgrade to Lorkeeper V3 has been intigrated with our testing site, which means we can officially begin bug testing! We hope that this update will be ready and published to the live site in late April or the first few days of May.

Upcoming Projects:

Following v3 bug testing, we will begin working on the following tasks in the listed order:

1. 1. Update Direct Messages for a better user expirence.
   2. Ensure all Encyclopedia pages "Availability" sections display item sources properly.
   3. Update our submission grading and clarify it's wording.
   4. Install custom emoticons, allowing Safira Island Discord emotes to be used in comments, forums, and direct messages. c:

Daily Explorations

AnimatedCritter here! Dailies still occasionally fail to refresh on random days. I was honestly too tired to devote much time to coding, so I've only attempted "simple" fixes so far. I will begin delving deeper into the issue now and will hopefully publish a fix soon.

We will bump our previous development log with an update when the issue is resolved.

Images

Navigation images were temporarily deleted mid-March during attempts to resolve Daily Explorations. They have since been reuploaded.

Tutorial Pages

Several minor changes to wording and layout have been applied to some tutorial pages. Notable changes are listed below.

Tutorial Index:

• Renamed "Submit a New Design" to "Create a Safiran".
• Created a new "Redesign a Safiran" page.
• The former "Submit a Redesign" page has been renamed to "Create a Design Request".

Creating an Aqualox:

• Updated UI to the current Tutorial Page design.
• Removed mouth placement requirements.
• Update ears to allow forward-facing ears.
• Moved the "Design Checklist" to the top of the page.
• Added some trait images to the "Design Checklist" section.

Creating a Pokey Smoke:

• Added some trait images to the "Design Checklist" section.

Create a Safiran:

• Updated UI to the current Tutorial Page design.

While daily explorations are scheduled to refresh at 6AM CST, there appears to be a bug that occasionally doesn't allow this refresh to run. We are looking into the issue, but if explorations do not refresh on schedule, you can expect a manual refresh to be performed around 9~10AM CST for the duration of the Ether Hunt event.

We will update and bump this post when the problem has been resolved.

Additionally, to compensate for any issues, we are extending Sweetheart Summit explorations to be accessible until March 19th.

Happy exploring!

prompt & event development

Ether Hunt // Working on a few more items, but otherwise ready for launch February 12th. c:

March Rollover // Not started.

Rainfall Festival // Planning.

Storylines // Storyline prompts are still on hold.

Website

Current Project:

We are working to upgrade our website to Lorkeeper V3.  While we're about 60% done integrating the changes, we'll need to complete extensive bug testing before publishing the upgrade to the live website. We do not currently have an estimate for when the changes will be published.

Holiday Shoppe

We've updated how we handle the Holiday Shoppe. Our holidays previously used one "Holiday Shoppe" location, but they have since been seperated. Visually and functionally, users should see no change, except:

• • Encyclopedia entry "availabilty" sections state which Holiday Shoppe an item is purchasable from.
  • Each Holiday Shoppe now has it's own URL.
    • For example, https://safiraisland.com/shops/4 links to the Rainfall Festival Shoppe, while https://safiraisland.com/shops/8 links the Ether Hunt Shoppe.

Bug Fixes:

• Purchasing items from a shop granted users double the requested amount.

Lore

New Pages:

• Glacier Port: a trade town between the Northern Island and Central Shores.
• Farport: a small, frigid trade town of the Northern Island.
• Sweetheart Summit: home to the glory, beasts, and mystery.

Lore:

• Revisited Community Characters' profiles and updated their lore.
• Added personality adjectives to all Community Character profiles.
• Added residency locations to all Community Character profiles

Misc.

• Added links to the Pokey Smoke species page.
• Reworded Pokey Smoke and aqualox species pages.
• Created an "Agriculture" item category for all seed- and egg-type items

Hello, hello again!

AnimatedCritter here to let you know we'll be back in time for our annual Crystalfall Celebration! Here's the rundown of the schedule:

December 2nd (Today!)

December Poco Discovery and Activity Corner return.

December 18th

Last year's Crystalfall Celebration prompts return.

A new raffle design will be released.

December 26th

A special activity will be released, although it will close on the last day of the month, so keep an eye out... c; More information will be available in a newspost on the twenty-sixth.

January 2nd

Poco Discovery and Activity Corner refresh for January.

January 7th

Palace will open the Crystalfall Holiday Shoppe, where you can spend your hard-earned Fortune Tokens from prompting.

January 14th

Our 2024 Crystalfall Celebration concludes! The Holiday Shoppe will remain open for another week.

January 22nd

The Holiday Shoppe closes.

Hello,

Due to some real-life events, I am taking a short break from developing the ARPG.

All activities will remain (shops, prompts, MYO submissions, etc.), and we will still be addressing questions and reports, but nothing new will be published during the break. This includes prompts that require a manual rollover and our Halloween Event, All-Fright's End, which has been canceled for 2024.

I’m unsure of the specific date, but we will return in December or January at the latest.

Thank you.

Surprise! Someone *cough* yours truly *cough* was a little overzealous for today's Smokesignals chapter, so there's been a delay.

What would have been today's chapter and it's newpost will be released tomorrow at noon.

As a thank you for your patience, there's a free Pocket Watch item that can be claimed over in the General Store, and those of you who like to peruse the site may have noticed some new information was published on the Playable Species page. c;

Again, thank you for all of your patience and support! See you in tomorrow's newspost.

prompt & event development

Rainfall Festival // Progress is beginning.

Storylines // New storyline prompts are still on hold.

Website development

User-Owned Pets

We have improved how users can manage and customize their pet-type items. This includes stacking the same-type pets so user inventories are less cluttered and updating the layout to allow for mass-customization of your pets. No longer will you need to go to each individual pet to name them or attatch them to a Safiran!

Shelter Surrenders

When submitting a Safiran to the Shelter, users are only able to see the Safiran's name and masterlist number. To mitigate the risk of surrending the incorrect Safiran, the image of the selected Safiran will now display next to the selected Safiran.

Bug Fixes

• Selecting "Clear" on the Currency Grant notification category now clears only Currency Grants, as opposed to formerly deleting all notifications.

Minor Changes

• The Completed Raffle List will be ordered by most recent instead of oldest.
• Spacing has been added above the bottom page selector on the User Index.
• Increased spacing between trade status icon and removed hyperlink from species name on the Masterlist browsing page.
• (Admin-Side) Mitigated the chance of early publishing of sales posts.

The site is scheduled for maintenance around midnight tonight, CST. There may be periods of downtime during the following ~30 minute window, but maintenance should be concluded after 12:30 CST.

Poco discovery

Poco Discovery, one of our monthly prompts, has been revamped! Now, instead of allowing users to draw any poco to receive a random poco in return, Poco Discovery features one specific poco every month that users can draw to receive as a guaranteed reward. With this update, Poco Discovery will refresh alongside Activity Corner,  closing on the last day of the month and reopening on the second day of the following month.

January's Poco Discovery is already available, featuring a Hypnotic Poco as this month's reward.

Official Toyhou.se Account

As of recently, Safira Island not only has an official Toyhou.se world, but also an official Toyhou.se account! Toyhou.se/SafiraIsland is the account used to hold the Toyhou.se profiles of Safirans that do not belong to any one specific user. This encompasses not only our community characters and NPCs, but also all Shelter Safirans who had a Toyhou.se profile before being surrendered to the Shelter.

If you surrender a Safiran to the Shelter, and they have an external Toyhou.se profile, we now ask that they be sent to SafiraIsland@Toyhou.se.  (This can be done at any point during the surrender process.) If you do not have a Toyhou.se account and/or your surrendered Safiran does not have a Toyhou.se profile, this update does not affect you and no further action is required.

If you would like to link an NPC to an image/literature you've published on Toyhou.se, or send a link request of a personal Safiran to an NPC, all users are welcome to do so! Please remember to adhere to Safira Island's Community Guidelines when linking works to the official Safira Island Toyhou.se.

prompt & event development

Lunar New Year // As a reminder, our Lunar New Year flash prompt will be returning on February 10th. We are currently concluding the sketching phase for the prompt's rewards. Progress is on track.

Ether Hunt // Ether Hunt is scheduled to return on February 12th. We have decided on the event's mini-theme, allowing us to begin development, which includes more friendship-based prompts for the less romantically inclined. Progress is on track.

Storylines // New storyline prompts are still on hold.

Website development

No features are currently in active development.

Hello, hello! A few changes, most notably bug fixes, have been pushed to the site:

Forums

You can now edit your forum posts. This feature was seeminly overlooked, and we noticed it with the addition of the Forum Games category. Speaking of, anyone is welcome to start a forum game in the category, of any type or style. Just be sure to clearly state any rules the game may have. c:

direct messaging

We've fixed a bug where message links would send users to the current page instead of the desired message. We have also enabled the rich text editor, so no more massive, one-line messages. The final change made was the removal of mail IDs from subject lines to prevent confusion.

trade center

Trade listings that were seeking a user's default wishlist would not publish, saying that "one or more of the selected wishlists is invalid". We have addressed this issue, so all users should now be able to include their default wishlists in their trade listings.

In the background, we have also installed a feature for the upcoming October event. There should be no visible changes from this, but as always, please submit a bug report if you experience any issues.