This patch will largely be a patch of small fixes, some of which won't be terribly noticeable, but some of them should make a bit of a difference to the quality of life for the players.

Full patch notes to come once the release is out.

Julie :)

Released September 5, 2020

WHAT'S NEW

• Barb the bear and her cubs have been informed not to disturb users who are still in the introduction, but beware carrying too much food on you afterwards!
• If you have more than 20 energy when you go to sleep, users will be informed that perhaps they may not want to go to sleep.
• The plural and singular version of "hour" and "minute" have been fixed when you do go to sleep.
• Most (all?) white pages with a confirmation or error should now be styled. Let us know if any were missed!

BUG FIXES

No bug fixes, just some quality of life changes as above.

KNOWN ISSUES

• Chasing down a potential bug with iPhones and apostrophes. Let me know if you've encountered anything weird where your answer should have been correct and it contained an apostrophe!
• There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!
• Only one challenge exists at the moment, two others will come along as time permits.
• There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

From a user perspective, this is a boring patch, as there will likely be nothing visible to you as a result of this patch. What I'm trying to tackle here is to migrate the database out of my Docker containers and into an Amazon RDS server.

This represents a big change, so even though preliminary testing on staging has gone well, it's possible there may be some hiccups. This maintenance window may be as short as an hour or several hours long, as I will need to run some tests on production after updating things.

I'll keep this thread updated, as per usual.

Thanks so much,

Julie :)

It's a biggish patch with a lot of database changes. Most notably, the first challenge, The Rapids, will be implemented. Full patch notes will be posted here, of course. That said, this is liable to take, oh, you know, several hours.

I'll keep this thread updated, as per usual.

Thanks so much,

Julie :)

Released May 16, 2020

WHAT'S NEW

• The first challenge is live! It's called The Rapids. You'll be asked to select one of five random categories and, as you proceed down the rapids, you'll need to answer as many of the 10 questions displayed as you can... in 60 seconds or less. It's called The Rapids for a reason!

* A new answer-matching algorithm has been implemented for answers input during the challenge. It should be more lenient. If it works well, it'll be implemented throughout the rest of the game.

* In order to have people actually test The Rapids, everyone who has completed the intro has been moved to 475km. You'll hit the challenge at the 500km mark.

* For this phase of testing, new users will start out at 475km.

• 100 new questions about the US version of the Survivor television show have been added.
• Fire Opals have been implemented as currency of sorts for the game. Right now, there's just one way to earn them, which is to do very well on The Rapids, but more ways to earn them will be coming soon. As to what they might do, Dorene will let you know when you get some.
• In certain cases, you may be blessed with a temporary companion for your travels.
• The maintenance routine has been updated to account for the temporary companion.

BUG FIXES

• Rephrased a question about Dixon Hill in the Star Trek: The Next Generation category for clarity.
• Fixed a typo in a Human Biology question, from "medican" to "medical".
• Added a missing question mark to an Astronomy question.
• Added alternate answers to two Supergirl questions.
• Hardened user-input sanitization to better protect against certain types of attacks.
• Fixed some CSS styling on fishing and foraging pages.
• Some of the introductory questions still had "Test Questions" as their header. These have now been properly set as "Questions from Metis".

KNOWN ISSUES

• Chasing down a potential bug with iPhones and apostrophes. Let me know if you've encountered anything weird where your answer should have been correct and it contained an apostrophe!
• There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.
• There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!
• Only one challenge exists at the moment, two others will come along as time permits.
• There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

Estimated downtime is maybe an hour? We'll see. :) As always, I'll keep this thread updated.

Julie :)

Released February 29, 2020

WHAT'S NEW

- There is now a small chance, under certain conditions, to encounter a special event while foraging for food.

I'll be adding more of these sorts of things as time goes on.

BUG FIXES

- Fixed up some punctuation issues in the incorrect answer code

- Added an alternate answer to the question about the longest nerve in the body

KNOWN ISSUES

- There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.

- There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!

- There are currently no "challenges", at least one of which should be implemented for beta, with the others being added incrementally in beta.

- There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

If it doesn't go out this evening, it'll be tomorrow, Sunday, January 26, around 6pm ET (GMT-5).

Patch 0.3.0a will not bring with it new questions, unfortunately. What it will bring is mobile responsiveness, so you'll be able to use your phone, a tablet or a desktop machine to access River of Kurn. I know, I know, it's about time.

Also included in the patch will be a small fix to some JavaScript which I seem to have inadvertently broken with the release of 0.2.0a. 🙄

And, if everything goes super well, maybe a gameplay addition as well.

(Spoiler: everything probably won't go super well.)

Edit: This has been changed to Sunday, January 26 at 6pm ET (GMT-5).

While the mobile responsiveness is going pretty well and is just about done, there's a bit of a bug going on right now with something that I should fix before deploying anything and I'm not sure I'll get it done this evening, so I'm pushing the deploy back to tomorrow.

Released January 26, 2020

WHAT'S NEW

- Friends, the site is mobile responsive! More or less, anyhow. I'm sure there are still some rough edges. Please let me know if you have issues on any device and please let me know:

• which device
• which browser
• what the issue was (screenshot is super helpful!)

- Some navigation tweaks (hamburger menu, etc) to ensure mobile users can easily get around the site.

- Added the Twitter logo at the bottom of all pages where you're not logged in, linking to @RiverOfKurn on Twitter.

BUG FIXES

- Added an apostrophe to a question that was missing one. Again, my apologies for the horrific grammar that existed for four months.

- Fixed a nasty password bug that I'd inadvertantly caused when writing the forgot password stuff and refactoring the password functions in general back on January 5. Whoopsiedoodle. All better!

KNOWN ISSUES

- There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.

- There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!

- There are currently no "challenges", at least one of which should be implemented for beta, with the others being added incrementally in beta.

- There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

Released January 4, 2020

WHAT'S NEW

- A forgot password function! Haven't logged in for ages? Can't remember your password? No worries, just click on the "forgot password" link on the login page.

- A bit of guidance on the sleep page to let you know when your energy will be refreshed has been added.

- The music question in the intro questions has been changed to be something that should be more common knowledge and less niche.

- Text has been added to the registration form to indicate a valid email address is required.

- 200 new questions have been added! The categories are:

Entertainment: Movies: Star Wars

Science: Human Biology

(I promise there are no spoilers for The Rise of Skywalker in the questions. :) )

- Additionally, I've created a tool for myself to add questions much more easily than I was able to do previously. As such, expect more questions to be added regularly. (For real!)

BUG FIXES

- The introductory text said you'd be asked three questions but you're asked five. The text has been updated to reflect the actual number of questions you're asked.

- During the last maintenance window, on December 14, a bug was introduced that prevented maintenance for running for, oh, three weeks. 😐️ This bug has been resolved. As compensation to anyone who might have been affected, I've set anyone who has completed the intro to have logged in today and have granted 100 energy to everyone and will ensure that persists through maintenance tonight, so on your next login, you'll have a full 100 energy.

- Rejoice! The issue of expiring sessions should be fixed! Sessions should now expire after 1 hour and should log you out automatically if the session expires.

KNOWN ISSUES

- The site is not currently mobile-responsive. Coming Soon (tm).

- There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.

- There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!

- There are currently no "challenges", at least one of which should be implemented for beta, with the others being added incrementally in beta.

- There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

I'll post here when maintenance is complete and will also post the patch notes.

(Edit: 8pm instead of 7pm!)

I'm taking backups at this time, so no data should be lost in case things go awry.

Thanks for your patience, I'll post here again when the game is back up.

I'll be fixing this up later this evening, probably around 11pm ET (GMT-5).

Apologies for the issues!

Released September 22, 2019

WHAT'S NEW

- A new maintenance routine has been created and users can now expect maintenance to occur at midnight in the Eastern Timezone (currently GMT-4) for a minute or two, rather than the ten minutes that maintenance previously took.

- 100 new questions have been added! The category is Science: Astronomy.

BUG FIXES

- Maintenance now checks when you last logged into a game, not the site. Previously, maintenance would look at the last login time of the user, not the last time you logged into one of the games. This meant that if you logged in and played the green game and you had previously been active in the blue game, but chose not to play the blue game that day, the game still thought you logged in and dinged you for not eating and not building a shelter. This should now properly look at the login time for a specific game and will calculate things from there. Since I truly don't know the last time someone logged into a game, I have not populated these results and so you may have the side-effect of maintenance not having run properly for you. I did try to populate other values so that the game should think you ate and built shelter, just in case you were adversely affected. Overall, expect some weirdness the next time you log in, but that shouldn't carry over to subsequent sessions.

- Some questions had some extraneous quote marks or weird formatting. These have been fixed.

- A question asking who played the film version of Supergirl has now had an alternate answer added.

- A question asked "Who vehicle" and not "What vehicle". This has been fixed and I sincerely apologize for the horrendous grammar in that question up until this point.

KNOWN ISSUES

- If you get errors about an undefined index, please log out and back in. This is your game session expiring and is a top priority in my next release. For best results, don't leave the browser window unattended for a long period of time.

- There is not currently a method to retrieve a forgotten password. Please contact us directly with your username and email address if you need to reset your password.

- The site is not currently mobile-responsive. Coming Soon (tm).

- There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.

- There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!

- There are currently no "challenges", all three of which should be implemented for beta.

- There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

ALPHA FAQ

A small FAQ for Alpha can be found here:

https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/5/river-of-kurn-alpha-launch-patch-notes/p1?new=1

This will be to update the game to version 0.1.1, with some new questions and some backend changes.

Updates will be posted here as events warrant.

I'll post updates in this thread and will post when the maintenance is complete.

Thanks! :)

Released September 2, 2019

WHAT'S NEW

- Everything! Everything is new. You may now begin your journey down the River of Kurn.

- In the future, this is where you can expect to learn what kinds of questions have been added in a patch, or what new and exciting functionality has been introduced.

- We're currently in the alpha phase (designated by the a in the version number). Beta is expected in early February of 2020 and its versions will be noted by a b in the version number. We expect to be out of beta and officially launch in July of 2020, which will be our version 1.0.0. Small changes, including the addition of questions, will increment the third digit, while more significant changes will cause the second digit to increment.

CHANGES

- In the future, most notable changes will be listed here.

- Yes. Most. Some secrets should not be discovered so easily.

BUG FIXES

- In the future, most notable bug fixes will be listed here.

KNOWN ISSUES

- The art is not wonderful. I know. Working on it. ;)

- The site is not mobile-responsive. I know. Also working on it for the beta at the latest, but probably a lot sooner.

- There are a number of pages that a user will come across that are not at all styled. These will be fixed before beta.

- There's a really annoying bug in the paddle functionality. You'll know it if you see it. Please don't abuse it. Thank you!

- There are currently no "challenges", all three of which should be implemented for beta.

- There is not currently an end to the game. This will hopefully be implemented for beta, but way before launch if not.

- Some questions have odd quote-marks.

- If you get errors about an undefined index, please log out and back in. This is your game session expiring and is a top priority in my next release. For best results, don't leave the browser window unattended for a long period of time.

- There is not currently a method to retrieve a forgotten password. Please contact us directly with your username and email address if you need to reset your password.

ALPHA FAQ

1) Will the game be up 24/7?

- The game will be accessible throughout the day except for the ten-minute maintenance window that starts at 11:55pm ET (GMT-4).

2) Can I get my friends to join?

- Sure! Please do let them know the game is in its very early stages, though.

3) Will the game reset at all?

- It's an alpha version, so I'm sure we'll have some resets. That said, your user account will remain intact, even if your progress and advancement in the game gets wiped out with various changes.

4) Will I get to keep all my progress when the full version of the game launches?

- No, I'll reset everyone to start from scratch when it launches.

5) What happens if I find a bug?

- Tell me about it! Post here: https://forum.riverofkurn.com/discussion/6/report-a-bug

6) Is it just me, or are there exceedingly few instructions in the game?

- Good catch! I'm trying out having players discover things for themselves. If you, my trusty alpha testers, have a lot of trouble, I'll likely add more helpful hints. Try asking here on the forums for help.

7) Oh, and that's another thing! Why on earth do I have to have a login for the game and for the forums?

- I know it's a pain. Sorry. I'm going to try to link those logins in the future. Thank you!

More answers to your questions can be found here at the main site.