It's been a long while. Given the poor reception and the fact botters lowered the prices of all items to the point Steam can't pay me, I didn't feel like this was really worth much of my time and effort. Even so, it seems some people still like this project, and the changes they wanted are small. So, patch notes: Removed the daily item cap. This was put in place to help discourage botting, but it didn't work. Changed "Early Bird" to just "Bird", and removed the reference to it only dropping in the first week. Seems I never published the changes to remove it from the drop pool, and it feels unfair to do so now. I was surprised to learn people are still finding this game, and still enjoying collecting the items. This was my first time releasing a game, first time hiring artists, first time programming with the intent to turn my code into a thing people outside my house can see. Releasing something so public was daunting, but I wanted to work with the Steam API, wanted to learn more about how Steam worked behind the scenes. The project was small, development was short, and the launch was rushed and messy; even so, I have learned things, and I now wonder what I can do to apply these skills in the future. Today was the first time I logged into Steamworks, (the developer backend for gamedevs on Steam), in months. as of this moment, 1,628 accounts have downloaded Dice, and including those, a total of 16,150 have added the game to their account; most farming items with idling software and apps. Sixteen thousand. I've lived in towns smaller than that. In those times in my life I could count every face on every street, greet everyone in their homes, talk to the cashier at every shop and visit every workplace and chat to every worker on their breaks. And I would not find 16,150 people. To everyone who has touched my game, thank you.
As you are all likely aware, there was an issue in the previous patches where items were not dropping consistently. With the help of Sky from Banana's development team and some other programmer friends I have now been able to find what went wrong and how to fix it. Basically, my previous code was prompting the Steam servers to drop items, but not reliably waiting for that process to finish before moving on. So my code would prompt item drops, but only if that process happened very quickly. I have now switched to a different method that waits for the game to finish prompting Steam's inventory server, giving enough time for item drops to be prompted. Thank you all for your patience, and special thanks to Sky from the Banana devteam for teaching me this process.
