River of Kurn Patch Notes: Patch 0.4.0a

julie · May 2020

River of Kurn, version 0.4.0a (Alpha Patch 5)

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