All apologies for yet another long-term delay in Hack Wars' development, the developers are all still here and hard at work with several things at once. At this point in time I'd like for players with a few moments and enough frustration to be sure to post bug reports to the forums. I would like to make sure that a lot of the content related bugs are fixed (i.e. broken quests). TerribleTrioJoe will also be keeping an eye out for other bugs that are really irritating and consistent. What I have right now:

• Ombeke quest and a few other "Beginner" quests
• Ignore is still broken
• Disappearing Items (although I do believe this is mainly the HD refresh problem, we'll look deeper)
• Game Store (Credits) issues
• High Score list... whoah.
• Display for quest rewards, however this is a problem between the NPC website/messages and game messages. The "~GAME MESSAGES" output doesn't round any numbers, making it confusing.
• Popup Message spam for things like loops that contain file i/o functions pointing to files that don't exist (just one example).

There's a few others floating around, of course and we'll do our best to get to them. Thanks for the time, patience and dedication!

Sidenote: There's a few developer twitters and blogs running around the net. If you'd like to keep up on some information regarding Hack Wars, Game Development and programming, you can follow some of us:

http://twitter.com/HackWars
http://twitter.com/DraconisRavenix
http://twitter.com/TerribleTrioJoe
http://twitter.com/mecha_cephalon

http://www.benjamincoe.com/
http://draconisravenix.blogspot.com/
http://terribledevelopment.blogspot.com/

Does anyone really think that I'd leave Hack Wars? If you believed this prank to be true, think again. There are only 2 reasons I'd ever leave Hack Wars: 1) If my fiance says she'll leave me if I don't quit Hack Wars [Yeah, right. She's 100% supportive of my work with Hack Wars] or 2) Of course if I'm dead, there's no physical possibility of me coming back to Hack Wars. I will admit that I have been gone for a long while. Life is (and always will be) busy and at various times I just do not have the time to dedicate to Hack Wars depending on circumstances and money.

Not all is lost! Even during my 'sabbatical' I've still put a bit of work into Hack Wars (silently) and now that I'm past another few of life's obstacles and rushes I'll be back in action again. You can expect a good sized content update to include new missions, fixing broken missions and even just updating old and functional missions. I've got a couple small treats for Juniper (the city in which Hack Wars resides in).

Anyway, if you believed the previous post, you've been fooled. I know this prank isn't/wasn't the best but, it's all in good fun of the original "All Fools Day" celebrated by various countries around the world in different ways. However, they all have one thing in common - practical jokes. For a link to some April Fools' Day information/history, let's start off with the old wiki link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_Fools'_Day

Also, for some fun reference, everyone who has used Google for years knows that they take April Fools' pretty seriously and definitely pull off some great pranks. Here's another wiki link for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google's_hoaxes

Happy April Fools' Day everyone (now it's late of course). Laugh, have fun and take everything with a spoonful of sugar... otherwise what's the point?

Enjoy the reads and do not worry (if you did)... I won't be going anywhere. As long as Hack Wars exists, whether as just another player, a moderator or a developer, I'll be around.

--Draco

HackWars community,

It is with sadness that we announce that DraconisRavenix, developer and a long-time member of the HackWars community, will no longer be returning to HackWars. He has done invaluable work in improving game content and balance, and his tireless dedication to the HackWars game and community will be greatly missed. We will do our best to make up for his absence and we will continue the work he has started. What he has done for HackWars will never be forgotten.

Keep Hackin'
the HackWars Dev Team

Well, we finally got around to releasing an update! The known network map issues have been fixed as well as several other minor things, and Zombie Attacks have been updated. Zombies now use a window similar to the attack window, and damage updates actually make it through. (No more blind-guessing how much damage you've done)

Happy Hackin'
The HackWars Dev Team

There's a nice little post about HackWars here:

http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2010/01/evidyon-hackwars-and-slothrpg-free...

In other news, I'm not dead, just insanely busy at my start-up job in Toronto (eh!)

I will continue to work on weekends -- in other news we're always looking for new Devs, email bencoe@gmail.com

Ben, a.k.a., Johnny_Heart