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Two weeks without an update?!! Am I unconscious? Am I dead?!

The answer to all three questions is: yes. But I have clawed my way through the lid of my coffin and several feet of dirt to bring you this journal update. Lord knows nothing brings a person back from the dead like unfinished business.

OMG WURZ DA QUESTS!?
I've been hearing a lot of users saying "you said you'd make 2 non-sponsored quests in May but we got 2 sponsored quests! RAWRFFLJFLHGH!".

I never said we wouldn't make sponsored quests, I just said we would make non-sponsored ones. Due to time constraints, this may be limited to 1 non-sponsored quest. Sorry guys, I said no promises!

Tsubasa
We released a quest for CLAMP's Tsubasa. This is a pretty simple quest, but it's probably the hardest and most varied to date (aside from the New User Quest). We got to use the "Collect Items" quest step type for the first time, which was exciting for me, as we'd never tested it before.

All in all the response to this was good, which gave me enough juice for another few days of quest coding rofl

Gracie
Today the Gracie sponsorship was released. All in all it's a much tighter experience than past promotions (we're using our own flash client for example). Also, we were able to use our new NPC dialog system to create an actual Gracie NPC rather than resorting to Rina just because she had a shop, which is what we did with some of the past ones.

NPC dialog screen
One thing I haven't heard about from users which I was particularly proud of was that we now have a place where you can talk to NPCs that isn't a shop. It debuted with the Tsubasa quest (you can talk to the Feather Master here) and we will probably be re-using it a lot more going forward.

The main benefits of this are that we can use NPCs that don't have shops, and create new NPCs on-the-fly that can be used in quests. Whereas before, we could never use say, Ron Bruise on a quest. There was no place where he could give you the quest dialog.

With the release of Tsubasa we were able to make a lot of quest system upgrades, none of which should be immediately obvious to you except this one feature. Ideally, though, all these enhancements mean that we can develop quests much, much faster going forward.

Fanime Fever
So I meant to announce this several weeks ago when I found out, but obviously I've been WAAAY too swamped to even post a journal update in that time -- but I'm going to be on the Gaia panel at Fanime.

I don't know what I'm going to talk about, but I'm going to be up there with a few of the other crew members of this dastardly pirate ship, so it should be good for a few laughs.

I Don't Care That It's Old News #213: Cinemas
I never had the chance to talk about one of my favorite features ever: Gaia Cinemas.

The reason why I knew this would be a good feature has a lot to do with the fact that, in the weeks before release, everyone in the office was playing with it. We were joking around all MST3K-style, and generally having a really good time.

We're supposed to be releasing some new films very soon. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to debut some really, really cool things.

It's About Time #13982: Collectible Museum
Last week (?) we released the Collectible Museum, which basically was a showcase of every past Monthly Collectible we've ever released. It's really super cool, and really super unavailable at the moment.

We had to take it down while we stabilized it. Sometimes things don't work so well when 60,000 people attack it at once. Hopefully it will be back up soon! (It's the only way I'll ever know what my avi looks like with a halo crying )

Now it's time...
...for me to go back into my hole and wear my fingertips down to stumps. I'll pop up sporadically to chime in about what's going on around Gaia, but I really must rejuvenate. Someone stole my precious bodily fluids, and I must replenish them. Back to the grave with me!