Hello everyone, we hope you’re having a great winter holidays month! We’re back again, this time to bring you all a new update on our development progress. We’ve got several sneak peeks to show you, as well as feature adjustments and Beta feedback implementations, and finally a solid launch time frame!

The Dappervolk community has been excitedly waiting for an update regarding Dappervolk’s official launch, especially because of our previously announced launch goal of late 2019. Unfortunately, a 2019 launch will not be feasible for our team for a variety of reasons.

Due to our core staff’s various life circumstances outside of Dappervolk, the scheduling and timing of progress has been unpredictable and difficult to estimate. Additional developers were hired on to provide extra workload support, but bringing on new staff always comes with an adjustment period consisting of training with potential roadblocks along the way. Because of this, progress was still not as smooth or timely as we had hoped in order to reach our previous loose timeframe estimate.

At this point in time however, after several months of development, we have been able to gauge our progress and take stock of the remaining work in a more concrete manner. We did our best with each team to create more specific and firmer estimates for each portion of work to be done, which allowed us to calculate a solid launch timeframe which is outlined in the Launch Timeframe section below!

Since our last update in September, the artwork side of development has been progressing very smoothly. Many of the assets that we've just recently completed are special things that we can't reveal yet—such as seasonal event items—but here are a few sneak peeks of some less-secret art assets that have recently been finalized!

• Pet Moods: Users will now be able to improve the mood of their pets each day by giving them gifts and treats!
  
• Appetite: The old "hunger" bar on pet profiles has been swapped out for an "appetite" bar to better reflect the fact that your magically animated companions do not actually experience hunger - they just enjoy tasting nice foods on occasion and thus will only eat a certain amount per day. Each day, a pet's appetite meter starts off full and will deplete as you feed them treats.
  
• Affection Milestones: As you build up affection with your pets, you will now be able to achieve pet affection milestones that give out various rewards!
  
• Birthdays: Pets can now be given presents on their birthday for extra affection points.
  

PREMIUM FEATURES
During Beta testing, various premium features were tested by users and we received lots of great feedback on what people would like to see from them once Dappervolk launches. With all of this in mind, we've implemented several changes and additions to our premium features that we hope everyone will enjoy!

• Premium Item Bundles: A bundle item containing a full set of the current month's premium chance items will be available for purchase in a new, infinitely stocked turnip shop for a higher price. Users who do not wish to take a chance on a better deal through the Turnip chance machine can now utilize this option to be guaranteed a full set of the current month's premium items!
  
• Turnip Chance Machine: Your bonus prize claims in Pai's monthly turnip shop will now expire 2 months after the month in which they are obtained, as opposed to after 1 month.
  
• Monthly Item Recirculation: A new NPC will be in charge of a mechanic that recirculates old monthly items rarely/occasionally. In this way, limited items that appear in the monthly turnip/potato shops will now have a small chance of being obtained after the fact. This feature will not include pre-launch items such as the Alpha/Beta hatching items, Kickstarter items, or Support Bundle items.
  
• Premium Undergarments: An avatar’s undershirt will now be able to be toggled on/off in the wardrobe. This also applies to the regular non-premium undergarments!

PET ACCESSORIES QOL UPDATE
Our pet accessories system is now coded so that pet accessory makers are only consumed when an approved accessory design is applied to a pet. This means that users may now submit their designs for approval without needing an item - once approved, they can then choose to apply that accessory to pets at any time for the cost of 1 pet accessory maker item per application. This should allow accessory maker artists to upload their designs, get them approved, and then share their designs/give usage permissions to others without costing any items to do so.

In addition to this, pet accessories will now display artist credits so that all copies of an artist's approved design will properly credit them for their artwork. This gets rid of the need for users to manually credit pet accessory artists in pet profiles, and should make it easier for everyone to remember who they got their designs from!

TEXT EDITOR UPGRADE
We have now switched to a new text editor with better functionality, which should make everyone’s lives easier in the forums. It will still use BBcode like the last one, but there should be less quirkiness with copy/paste, editing, and so on.

That’s all for the feature updates that we can announce right now, but stay tuned for our future dev updates as there are more feature refreshes and updates currently under wraps for testing!

After an extensive amount of discussion and scheduling with our coders, writers, artists, and testers, we were able to create solid estimates for each portion of closed development work that is left for each of our teams. In order to avoid unreasonable crunch times and rushed work, we have tallied up these schedule totals and added on a buffer for last minute testing—this final calculation has given us a solid timeframe for official launch.

Closer to May, we will also begin marketing Dappervolk to reach beyond the current user pool and ensure a bustling launch!

Over the last few months, we've heard several requests from users in our community about having another Support Bundle sale as a final opportunity to support Dappervolk and get some sweet limited items prior to our official launch. Ask and you shall receive!

In the next few days, we will be releasing our final Support Bundle set for purchase—they will be available up until the 2nd week past our official launch date (exact date pending), after which they will be retired permanently. Full details will be posted shortly in a separate update, but for now here is a sneak peek of the bundle items that will be included!

As always, thank you for sticking with us all this time! Your support and feedback have been an immense help throughout our development process, all the way from the beginning of alpha testing to the Kickstarter, beta testing, and beyond! It has admittedly been a much longer journey than we had ever expected, but we are so grateful to have had all of you with us along the way—even through various unexpected delays that have set us back from our release goals. As such, we are incredibly excited to finally have a solid release month lined up according to the schedules of our coders, writers, artists, and testing teams!

If you’d like to follow our development progress more closely, Quisling will be updating the #status-and-faq channel in our Discord server every few days as assets are completed.

Hi everyone, we hope you’ve been doing well over these last few months! We’re back with another development update covering the progress we’ve made thus far in each major section of development  — with a few sneak peeks thrown in as well!

Since our last update, a bulk of art assets have been completed for launch. This includes all of the artwork associated with our newest town in the storyline, as well as 5 new peddler NPCs who will be selling various new items!

What We’ve Finished:

• All artwork for the 5th town - Town Map, NPC’s, Pets, Clothing
  
• All peddler NPC’s & wares for Peddler’s Port
  
• 3’s Forest, Silvie’s Mine, Aviar Cove Adventuring Backgrounds
  
• Additional avatar item rewards for the affection system, alchemy, adventuring, some new features, etc
  

What’s Being Worked on:

• New Item Art & Additional NPC Avatar Items
  
• All Guild Emblems & Banners
  
• Event Art Assets & Miscellaneous Graphics
  
• A few month’s worth of items for the monthly shops
  
• Kickstarter Backer Design Rewards (To be completed over time before/after official launch)
  

Additionally, the artwork progress for Adventuring is doing great. Not only are all of the multi-layered parallax town backgrounds finished, but our amazing pixel artist has done some great work on Adventuring’s new pixel assets. Below is a little sneak preview of a new encounterable in Adventuring - a mysterious gate that leads to new locations.

We are happy to announce that we’ve recently welcomed a new writer to our team! While they are in the process of learning the ropes of our questing systems, they will be helping out our main writers with new side quests, affection quests, and more.

With the help of our wonderful new developer who is taking on the bulk of the Adventuring overhaul, our main dev is now able to fully focus on creating and revamping other major features. Unfortunately, our overall development progress in this area hasn’t been as robust as we had projected due to unavoidable life and work obligations for members of our team. This has resulted in production delays for certain features that are necessary for launch, and is part of why it has been difficult for us to estimate a launch timeframe.

With that said, we are working hard to make Dappervolk the best that it can be for launch and are still aiming for a late 2019 launch date. If we encounter any unexpected delays that may push back this estimate, we’ll be sure to update everyone on it as soon as possible.

Here’s a brief look at a few of the higher priority features that our developers are currently working on:

• Guild System
  
• Site Navigation Bar expansion
  
• Quest page revamp
  
• Pet System Upgrade
  
• Text Box upgrade
  
• Block/Mute feature
  
• User Profile adjustments
  
• Random Encounters
  
• Shop System expansions
  
• Event System adjustments & additions
  
• Pet Accessory adjustments
  
• Custom pet/item queue feature
  
• The Ad Theater feature
  
• Referral System
  

+ many more smaller adjustments & lower priority features

If you’re interested in our smaller, weekly progress updates, you can tune into our Twitch art streams in which we answer questions about our development process - or join our Discord to chat with fellow DV fans!


As always, thank you for taking the time to read our latest update! We are so grateful for everyone’s continued patience through our long development process, and we hope to be able to give you all more definitive news soon!

Once unlocked, users will be able to decorate and arrange the contents of their homes on an easy to use grid-based system. Additionally, we plan to integrate a player's Adventure sprite into this feature, allowing you to freely hop throughout your home and even invite your friends over to chat in real-time! Each home will also include skills activities and crafting - but more details on this will be revealed in the future, as we are currently focusing on building the framework for this feature and refining the artistic direction that we'd like to take for the massive amount of assets that it will require.

Please note that, while we regard housing as one of our most important new features, the sheer amount of technical considerations and graphic assets that it will take to produce this feature is something that we do not want to underestimate during development. Because of this, there is a possibility that housing may not be completely ready for release at the time of official launch. Nevertheless, we are extremely excited about the feature and can't wait to share more about it with you as we progress further through development!

BETA CLOSING DETAILS
When beta comes to a close, the site will enter into a period of closed development where accounts will not be able to be logged into. During this time, all testing data generated during beta (currency, items, character choices, posts, etc.) will be reviewed and then wiped in preparation for our future official launch of the site. Because of the non-permanent nature of all testing data, please make sure that you save any information onsite that you want to keep before the site closes at the time listed above - for example, your friends list, profile coding, forum guide content, and so on!

If you bought or redeemed any reward codes during beta, these codes will become active again for redemption when the site reopens for official launch. Additionally, any carry-over prizes obtained during beta (such as the event trophy and spring bloom item) will be re-issued to all qualified accounts and should be in your inventory when you log in once the site reopens.

Additionally, once beta closes our two beta-exclusive Support Bundles being sold on Gumroad will also close. The next few days will be your last chance to grab these bundles before they retire permanently - this means that all of the exclusive items within them will never be sold again! For anyone who may be interested in making any last minute purchases, the two bundles are linked below:




CLOSED DEVELOPMENT
The period between the closing of beta and the opening of official launch is going to be a critical moment for our team to focus on improving and building upon Dappervolk. We have a lot of work ahead of us, including implementing user suggestions/feedback and adding entirely new features - so this downtime will give us the opportunity to concentrate our efforts on bringing you a bigger and better Dappervolk for the official launch of the site!

How long will closed development last? This is one of the most important aspects of our closed development that we're grappling with, as it will largely depend on the progress of our three largest and most complex features (Guilds, Housing, and Adventure) and any unforeseen bumps in the road that we may encounter while getting them ready for release. There are bunch of other team efforts that also need to come together to make official launch possible, so there's a lot to be coordinated and considered when trying to give you all an accurate picture of how long we'll really need to ensure that everything is ready. But rest assured, you won't be kept in the dark on this! Our end of beta "farewell" post will include more details on our current development projections and how to keep up with our progress throughout closed development. Stay tuned!


As a reminder to everyone, our custom creator contest will be ending at the same time that beta closes. The lucky user(s) that spun the most of each custom creator will be rewarded with one as a prize during official launch!

• In the spirit of autumn, all of the test items that we're using are an autumn-y witch/warlock theme!
  
• These items will be repurposed into seasonally obtainable items during official launch, so everyone will have a chance to obtain them again in the future.
  
• Bonus Prizes: For every 10 spins in this shop, the shopkeeper will reward you with a free bonus item of your choice from that month's shop stock! This should help reward collectors and give players a bit of control over the unpredictable nature of the turnip chance machine.
  
• When the site officially launches, the turnip chance machine's stock will renew each month, with the previous months' items permanently retiring. This type of retiring system will only apply to items that are "limited" rarity.