Blossom Festival and New Features

Thank you to everyone who helped out with and played in Blossom Festival!! A lot of exciting stuff got released this year!

Our new game, Haitchi Havoc, was provided by the amazing Comic Sans #1801, with custom music donated by Lapin. Comic has been very responsive and we've fixed several issues since the game launched; please let us know on the forums if you have any other problems or suggestions!

Of course, the biggest new feature this year was the Auction House! Hosted by the charismatic new NPC Theo, this has been a long-requested feature. This is something I'm very proud of, and I've been excited to see all of the feedback and interest about it!

First, a big thanks to all of our moderators for helping test the interface and provide suggestions. I used (and learned) a lot of new techniques for web page design, and tried to make something that fits in with the site design and aesthetic while still offering some modern conveniences. I wanted to briefly answer a few common suggestions here.

*We've definitely thought about an Auction House or other sale system for sprouts. It will involve a lot of user interface and design work to make sure it's useable and searchable, so it would be a major feature.

*There are a few styling problems with the Auction House, particularly in darker themes. Those are the first thing I'm hoping to address, for accessibility reasons.

*Adding better "browsing" features to the Auction House is something we're hoping to do in the near future. It would be great to have filters for seeds, tiles, boxes, alchemy items, etc. In the meantime, the "search" box is really quite powerful, and typing in "seed", "plant", "tile", etc. may be interesting.

*Right now there are no limits to the number of auctions you can post or the length of time an auction can stay unsold, and there are no fees until an auction sells. I don't like setting unnecessary limits, so I'm going to take a reactive approach to those three things. The performance should scale very well, and I hope that as the search and browsing features improve, there won't be any problems with having "too many" auctions. If we do need to change things, we'll be sure to communicate clearly.

Please feel free to leave feedback and suggestions on the Auction House as a reply to this post, or otherwise on the forums. I hope you all had a happy Blossom Festival!