NextWorldGames
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September Development Update
🕑 Added 2024-10-04 15:12:36 +0000 UTCHi everyone, based on some feedback I've decided to try writing some monthly dev updates, going over what I've been working on and what's coming up for the next one.
So September was all about the release of the new Song Library and bug fixing on it.
The Song Library development ended up dragging out longer than planned, so I decided to release it as soon as it was ready, which meant it was missing some of the planned functions, such as new uploads and recent wrong guesses.
September there went with getting the final features into it the Song Library, while getting some minor fixes/updates that have been delayed due to the Song Library work, which was pretty much as planned.
On the Nexus front, Sheepy have been focusing on it and really getting used to that part of the code base, so expect to see more Nexus updates getting released going forward, with two new avatars added to Nexus this week. Sheepy is also working hard on getting multiplayer saving added to Nexus, which should hopefully be ready towards the end of October, early November.
As most of you probably saw, the game was also hit by a DDoS attack last Friday, overloading the server and causing issue with some of the infrastructure. Normally the server receives around 5 million web requests a day, doing the DDoS the server got 20 billion requests in 5 hours, by far more than the server is able to handle.
To make matters worse, the attack happened while I was out of country for a Yu-Gi-Oh tournament, so when it hit Friday evening, I was stuck trying to figure out what was going on from my mobile. It wasn't possible to stop the attack, so I ended up closing down the server, hoping to be able to bring it back up in the morning once the attack was over.
Sadly, the DDoS attack also caused some issues with the server infrastructure, which got maxed out from all the requests, so I couldn't simply start it up again in the morning. Still stuck on mobile and with an entire day of tournament in front of me it wasn't looking too good, luckily Sheepy didn't have any plans that Saturday, so he was able to work on finding the issue and a workaround, while I checked in between tournaments rounds helping with what I could.
This was the first time the game have been hit by a DDoS attack, so it was a big learning experience. I've already rolled out some server improvements to help protect against future attacks, and if it happens again we're much more knowledgeable about how to detect and handle it.
Finally looking forward to October, beside cleaning up the last couple of servers issues from the DDoS attack (waiting on the server host to fix some stuff), I'll be focusing on getting the planned custom quiz system added. This will be a system where people can create custom quiz setup, where they can pick individual songs, samples and/or rules for the quiz, in practice crafting any AMQ quiz they want. Beside using these for training or playing with a favorite list, I also plan on having a discovery system, where everyone can play custom quizzes designed by players.
The Song Library was actually the first step of this, as I plan on using its design for when picking songs when creating quizzes.
I really hope to have this ready before the next AMQ anniversary at the end of November, so I'll probably be pulling some long evening during October to speed up the development. I'll keep you all updated here with more previews and info about this!
To end out, I hope to do a dev update like this once a month. For the future ones, I also hope to include some community questions, so if you got any questions about the game, development or anything in general, post them in a comment below, and I'll include a couple of them in the next dev update!
A huge thanks to all of you for continuing support the game, can wait to share more of it with all you!
- Egerod
