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Summer 2015 Newsletter!

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Created: Saturday, 15 August 2015 04:20

Written by Emerald Flame

Hope everyone is having a great Summer! (Or Winter for our friends Down-under!) :)

Furcadia has been busy celebrating summertime with M'rill's Festival of the Sun. It's still going and you can still play the games, quests and ride the barge in the Festival Grounds! Pretty soon though it will be time for Rameen and a huge Beach Party with Prime Jemmion. These festivals include some 32-bit patches and the new lighting for sneak peeks too!

Our theme this Summer is Mythical Dreaming and we have some awesome contests where you can earn many Golden Dragonscales! The Dream Contest encourages the use of player interactions and Mythical themes. For the art contest you get to design a Mythical Creature! You get a chance to write a Myth for the writing contest. For our social media contest we have a coloring page of the new Mythical Ferian Phoenix coming with the next update. The deadline for contests is the 23rd of August, so get your entries in soon!

In the mean time, the Dev Team has been very busy getting Update 31 - The Second Dreaming: Part 1 ready! This update is in the testing and bug fixes stage and is majorly cool! Not only will it include the new default avatars and default patches in 32-bit, it will give you all the editors to get your own Dreams ready for 32-bit, lighting and double-size! It should also include the sexy new Character Create/Edit with Costumes and Account login. There's new DS and a brand new Allegria Island map too! Behind the scenes we have a complete client, DreamEd and FoxEd overhaul! Exciting stuff, so watch for when Backers can start testing!

If you want all the details of what we've been working on you be sure to watch the Youtube live stream! Its very long but that is because we've been very, very busy and had a lot to show! You can also follow along with news on our other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Twitchtv, Pinterest, Instagram, and Vine. Make sure you join the Furcadia social media site of your choice so you are in the know!

Our Coders have also been busy making many bug fixes to the CMS, Group Pages, Digo Market and other issues that come in through the ticket system. We really appreciate your feedback and your patience as we get everything working right. Changing the backend on almost every single system we have in Furcadia has created a lot of bugs but if we all work together we shall get them all ironed out!

The Second Dreaming Donations are still open with all their cool prizes at least for awhile yet! However, some of the items we created as new features are starting to appear on Digo Market. You can now get Custom Desctags and monthly Gold Sponsorship on Digo Market! We even have a very special prize this month for one lucky Digo Market customer: a Custom Avatar Space! The Angelcat and Direhound, of course, will never be sold on Digo Market.

Speaking of Digo Market, there are two new Minkins, the cute, magical Kitterkin and the adorable, diminutive Gryfkin! We also have a new Flutterbun, which you can use for free if you have a Lifer Noble Lapine and Lifer Butters and Bats for each gender. We've only put out two new avatars because we've been so busy putting out a whole new set of default avatars and wings which Backers and Sponsors can see in Naia of Second Dreaming World! And announced here first is our next avatar, the Adorapus!

Spring Newsletter!

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Created: Tuesday, 31 March 2015 21:09

Written by Emerald Flame

Happy Spring! This is just a quick Newsletter to let you know what is up as people have been asking! :)

Our big news is that The Second Dreaming donations (Kickstarter and Paypal combined) have reached the 250k funding level which adds the promise of the 32-bit Windows Furcadia client along with all default art being redone in 32-bit! Luckily, we knew this from the beginning and have already been working toward 32-bit along with all the other Second Dreaming features! :)

In celebration of reaching the 250k Goal, we are throwing a big party on Saturday April 4th and you all are invited! We will have a Free Digo Day for a whole week and lots of events in Pineapple Lake Resort. Additionally we will be running a live stream all day hosted by Felorin and Emerald Flame with presentations from all of the DEP staff updating you on their Second Dreaming projects! There are some really exciting new things that haven't been shown before!

You can still donate to the Dark Dreaming, but only for a bit longer. If you have your sights set on one of the rewards, now's the time to get it! We will talk a bit about our ideas for the future of fundraisers at the party on Saturday as well as tell you all about where the current features are at.

In case you haven't seen yet, Jujinka's Spring Festival is up with the awesome Kitterhouse Community Build, Maypole Dancing, Egg Hunt and a quest for a pet dragon egg! So much springtime fun to be had! Besides that, there are also the Spring Contests! The theme this year is 'Seeds of Hope' with contests for Dreams, 32-bit patch items, Palindromes, and an adorable coloring picture featuring Jujinka turning Ferians into Flerians by blessing them with magical seeds! There are many Golden Dragonscales to be won, so be sure to participate!

In avatar news we have a new addition to the Minkins, the hoppity Jerbokin. For Ferians we have a very cute little Hedgen and the adorable Bearling. On the Anthro side we went with a feisty and mischievous Raccoon avatar with a Steampunk flair. Also new this year, we started the Birthday Hoard Gem collection that you can collect from Dragons each month. Once you collect them all, you win Lifer Versions of your choice! You can find all these and fantastically fresh Spring Sales on Digo Market. Remember, although your donations help us build The Second Dreaming, Digo Market keeps the game running day to day!

We hope everyone has a lovely Spring (or Autumn if you are down under) and we hope to see you on Saturday!

~Happy Dreaming from Felorin, Emerald and the Team!

Welcome Koolpin!

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Created: Tuesday, 13 January 2015 22:04

Written by Emerald Flame

Yay! Koolpin has agreed to come help us on The Second Dreaming as a Junior Coder. He's a long time players and volunteer in the Scribes and Bugge Hunters but we really needed his help with Java Script! Be sure to tell him "Thank you" for volunteering his time to help us with all of these awesome new features! Below is a design mock-up by Gar for the new Character Create that Kool will be working on first.

As I said recently said, our whole team has moved into "Crunchmode" and are really on fire! So many very cool new features are being built. We are focusing right now on the editors and interfaces so you might not hear much from us in the next few months while we are working very hard!

Double the help!

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Created: Tuesday, 06 January 2015 19:49

Written by Emerald Flame

The Pixels have gotten more than 3000...yes, over three thousand! items double sized and polished into pretty 32-bit. Though even with all that we still have more items, floors, walls, effects, regions, and avatars...so many avatars to get through. But, with the help of the Coders (Treeki, Ninja, and Kashi especially) and Gar, we have come up with an automated process to resize the art and still have it looking lovely!

Rat the Unloved has been very busy working on his main project for The Second Dreaming: getting the older Digos all ready for the new clients! Majas and Gar are working with him on the project as well. We are getting some of our ancient avatars looking better before we run them through the resize process. Old Avatars like the original Dragon, Phoenix, Gryffe, Wolven, Chinchilla, Werewolf, etc. have some isometric perspective and anatomy issues, along with attachments incompatibility that we have to fix before we can release double size Furcadia.

Here are some of the older Digo touchups!

"A Home for the Holidays"

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Created: Wednesday, 24 December 2014 05:07

Written by Emerald Flame

Hello Everyone!

We wish you Happy Holidays and a fantastic New Year! Thought you might like an update on all things Furcadia! We also hope that this note finds you well and in good spirits.

Just a few days ago, Furcadia celebrated its 18th Birthday! It's all grown up and legal now. :) We've had a magnificent party in 32-bit Meovanni Village with hundreds of players attending in the game and on Dr. Cat's Twitch Channel where Furcadia staff streamed for many hours into the early morning. Thanks to everyone who attended and celebrated with us, and thank you all for being a part of our community all this time.

Speaking of events! Danival's Winter Festival recently opened its snowy gates with creative contests for you to participation! This festival's contests are:

• Dreamweaving: Build a Dream that is a home for the holidays.
• Art: Draw a Furcadia home inside a snow globe.
• Writing: Write a store about giving a friend (or pet, or ferian) a home for the holidays.
• Social Media: Post a screenshot of your favorite holiday dream on an approved social network.

Read all about the different competitions here. There are only a few weeks left to enter!

As every year, Holiday Sales shine brightly on the Digo Market, too! We have an 8-week sale going on where every single For Life avatar gets discounted by up to 70%! The Digos on sale change weekly, with a different theme each week. New this year, you get a different Adoption Ribbon desctag FOR LIFE included in every sale, with a new ribbon each week! If there's an avatar you've always wanted, or that would put a big smile on a friend's face, now is the best time to make dreams come true.

Since our last newsletter in the hot summer, our family of Digo avatars has grown. The Minkin avatars have arrived with magical mini-furres that can be used in all areas of Furcadia. So far, the Minkin line includes the Drakkin (a little shoulder dragon), the Lemurkin with its colorful, ringed tail, the soon-to-hatch Jerbokin, and the very popular Kitsukin, perhaps cutest and fluffiest of all avatars!

Now for an update on The Second Dreaming! We are very close to our 250k Donations Goal that will fund 32-bit all over Furcadia, which is very exciting! We have already released the lovely new Pages and many of the promised web features! The newly designed Dream and Fox Editors are almost complete, they just need a few more features, and the 32-bit Fox files. Then the Editors and newly completed Lighting System will be ready for Backer testing! Our artists have over a thousand of the default objects done in 32-bit, double sized and are working on the rest. As well, the avatar upgrades and new Butlers are making good progress. You can see a lot of these already as we start to update many of the main maps!

As you know we are making a web client to increase our new players! This has been available for Backers to test for quite some time and as soon as the new Fox format is ready we will start applying the sexy, modern interfaces we've been working on. The big news though is that along with the Web Client, we will be releasing a C# Mobile Client! It will be made first for Android phones and tablets, but will port easily to iOS, Mac and even to Windows. So much excitement for this coming year! Furcadia will be mobile, modern and beautiful!

If you want to follow what is going on year 'round be sure to check out our Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube and TwitchTV. You can also follow the Second Dreaming Blog (Make sure you are logged in as a Backer or Sponsor to view the exclusive articles) and of course, over system announcements in Furcadia. We are very happy to have you part of our Home for the Holidays!

~Felorin, Emmie, and Team Dragon

Ninja is Making a Mobile Client!

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Created: Friday, 19 December 2014 13:23

Written by Emerald Flame

Big news! In his spare time (as if a guy who is in University to be a doctor, flies planes, plays piano, sings, has somewhat of a social life and programs for Furcadia on the side, has extra time), Ninja has been working on a C# client for Furcadia! Originally this was to be the native Mac client, but he is currently focusing on it being an Android Client! We chose Android because it is the fastest growing market and easier to develop for than iOS! Though it will be fairly easy to port this client to iOS and Mac, or Windows for that matter! This is all very exciting and we will have our first test versions out next week and we can start having Second Dreaming Backers testing early in the new year!

We will be putting out both a phone version of Furcadia and a tablet version for mobile devices. The interface will be modified to work for touch screens and it will have a modern design with lots of fun bells and whistles. We are going for one interface for all OSs of which the style is somewhere in the middle of other common iOS and Android devices. Gar had a brilliant idea for making the very small screens of a phone (and smaller tablets) work well. Mostly on a phone you will want to whisper friends and chat with people, so the focus of the interface is on the portrait messaging side. It will have a small play screen with a larger text area in the portrait view to optimize space to type. However, if you want to explore or play a game in Furcadia, you just flip to the landscape view and you have a larger play window to move about. Majas and Muun are also helping with the interface!

Gar is Helping!

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Created: Wednesday, 10 December 2014 07:32

Written by Emerald Flame

We've all been very busy but I thought you might enjoy hearing about what each person has been working on lately in our journey towards TSD! I will do a different Team Dragon Member every few days.

I'm starting with Gar because while he often helps us out in his spare time, right now he is between jobs so he's been volunteering a lot. Gar is a professional Game Designer, working at game studios in San Francisco and Las Vegas. As many of you know he worked for DEP for over 10 years before he moved on to work at companies that actually have funding to pay him what he's worth! Primes know we could use him full time!

Gar is very versatile even for a Game Designer! Since he's been here more he's been helping Ciro and I to design and write sales and ads, as well as other bits of needed writing. He also has been helping me with the lighting effects for the Winter Festival and Snow Maps! (Be sure to check out the contests!) The lighting feature is still super buggy and Treeki had to come help us figure out ways around the bugs so we could make Christmas lights and a really cool frost effect in the dream! You can see what the frost effect does to the roads in the screenshot. It also frosts furres!

The big jobs we need Gar to do are all Second Dreaming though. Gar has the ability to work with the Coders, Artists, Community Staff and Administration, helping everyone to understand each other. As a designer this is hugely important! As Dewi and Treeki are working on the new editors and new Fox format implementation, Gar works with them on the design of the editors and helps make user friendly layouts. He's also helping with the designs of the interfaces for the Clients, Character Create, Dream Editor and any others that come up.

Besides all of that, he also helps with the move of the art to 32-bit that Rat, Majas and the Pixels are working so hard on. Right now he is developing an automated process to get all the avatars double sized, in 32-but shading and remapping. With about 100 avatars all with at least 20 frames each, this is a huge amount of work and his automated process will get the avatars most the way there. He also helps with avatar construction and critique, as well as doing things like helping Sync make the Vinca symbol portal piece for the amazing new Dream Portals she is making!

Gar does a lot more than this but it is a nice round sampling of his awesome help! If you see him around, be sure to thank Gar for working on The Second Dreaming to make Furcadia better for us all!

Felorin's Big Adventure

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Created: Saturday, 22 November 2014 05:25

Written by Dr. Cat

Hi everyone! I've been streaming some work on the 32 bit Dream Editor on Twitch TV, in their new Game Development category. Last weekend though, I took a little time off for a very special event. Talzhemir and I got to re-unite with some of the people we made the Ultima games with. We were the NPCs for a weekend of questing for 40 very dedicated fans!

Talzhemir played her Ultima character Penumbra the fortune teller, while I was Dr. Cat hosting the Cat's Lair Tavern! I served drinks and "Frasier's Folly Stew", and we gave out quests. (It looks like The Cat's Lair is going to be appearing in another computer game in the near future - more on that later.)

I also got to fight in a battle game between the pirate ship and the castle, all of this hosted at Lord British's miniature medieval village in Austin. Everybody had a great time! One of the players gave me a Lego version of Dr. Cat he made, complete with pointy purple wizard's hat, and a silver tabbycat at my feet. I even got knighted by Lord British at the closing ceremonies!

Here's a photo of me being a Chess-shire Cat. I'll be in Furcadia this weekend looking for another game of Chess or two in Sanctuary. So if you'd like to challenge me, come give me a shout.

Me and Talzhemir also gave out beautiful DragonScale certificates to some of the players as quest rewards. (Thanks to Gar for designing these at the last minute!) So we'll probably be seeing some long-time Ultima fans coming to Furcadia in the near future. Be sure and give them a warm welcome! The organizer of the event, Joseph (also known as Rustic Dragon) is even thinking of re-creating all the quests and locations and NPCs from the event in Furcadia. I think that would be a lot of fun!

I'll try to stream some more the next couple weekends on my Twitch TV channel as I work on the new Dream Editor, maybe some evenings too. Until then, I'll see you in Furcadia!

New Dragons!

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Created: Saturday, 01 November 2014 07:14

Written by Emerald Flame

We have some new help in Team Dragon! There are a couple of new Dragons and some promotions within the team! We also have had a lot of reassigning of duties lately as things change and everyone has been hugely busy as usual. As they say, we all wear many hats in TD! Let's start with the new and promoted ones!

First, we welcomed Kitasu in as a Junior Coder and TD member! Kit has been volunteering in Furcadia for many years and is a Head for the Bugge Hunters and a Scribe. She's been busy on other coding projects but still finds the time to help us out when she can. As she gets trained in, she will be focusing on coding needed for the webpages. The transition to the new pages is going well but we needed more help with fixing CSS, Javascript and PHP bugs that regular Scribes don't have access to handle. Thanks for agreeing to help, Kit!

Juliet is the next addition to TD! Julz has been helping for a long time in our Community Outreach Team and other Beekin Groups. She always willing to work on promotional art, holding events, social media, helping with sales and promotions and much more. In real life, she has worked as a 'Director of Advertising and Marketing' and has brought a lot of experience and knowledge to the team. Here's a graphic she created to promote an event on Facebook. You can also see some of he adorable new Butlers the Pixels have been working on!

Xxysthstris was added a bit ago but we should mention him too! Xxy has long been a strong supporter for Furcadia and the community. He's been helping in our Community Outreach Team for a long time and is a Head for the Eventers as well as assisting with many other community management tasks. His dedication to the Welcomers and new players in Furcadia has been exemplary though, so we were happy to ask him to be Associate in Charge (AIC) of the Welcomers. The Welcomers are one of our most important volunteer groups as new players are the life blood of Furcadia. We are very pleased Xxy agreed to manage this group!

We are also happy to announce that Treeki and Frostyfrog have moved up to full Coder and Associate status! These two guys have been working with us for over a year and have been absolutely fantastic with helping on coding, bug hunting and helping customers with technical issues. Treeki concentrates in the Windows Client and editors mainly, while Frosty works on the web pages, templates and services. I'll talk more about their current projects in another blog!

Be sure to thank all of these fantastic volunteers when you see them. They are a huge help to keeping Furcadia going and getting The Second Dreaming finished!