Pizzuno 🍕 game development log (or just Devlog)

v0.18 - 1 year of Pizzuno!

Hello there amazing Pizzuno players,

First I would like to address the lack of updates here. 

As most of you know, I run Pizzuno as a side project on weekends and other free time that I manage, however, unfortunately, I'm having a rough time professionally speaking, as it happens that in my company there are many things happening (It's in the fitness industry, and now that the lockdowns and curfews are fading, my company has to get the momentum thus involving me in many new features). Sadly for us, I couldn't progress much into my so desired new redesign for this game.

I want you all to know that I have amazing plans for the future of both Pizzuno and the family of future games related to Pizzuno. I'm doing my best to be able to have both time and energy to progress my mission and vision.

Important to note, but this specific version of Pizzuno will not receive any updates as it doesn't make sense to maintain the new version in development in parallel with this one.

Now, the important thing, on the 23rd of June marks the Pizzuno 1 year birthday! This 1 year passed so fast! I hope you all had a good time playing on Pizzuno in the last year.

Hopefully, the next birthday will be with the new version of Pizzuno and many more games to come!

About this update, below are the notes:

• Added a list of links for the social networks of Pizzuno
• Added username validation
• Fixed a bug where the user would be instantly teleported to the moon

Last but not least, thank you all for all the lovely messages in all of Pizzuno and my social profiles.

Stay safe and healthy,

Ricardo

v0.17 - Hallo 🇳🇱

Hello Players,

How are you guys doing? 

First, I would like to say that I'm really sorry that my last message and update were 38 days ago! I'm having to focus more and more on my full-time job and my dog also got sick recently so my time was really short for Pizzuno.

Anyway, sorry for bumming you guys at the start, but now, with pleasure and looking on the bright side I'm bringing good news, a very dear friend of mine that happens to speak Dutch fluently translated Pizzuno into Dutch, so I'm announcing the immediate availability of Pizzuno in Dutch 🇳🇱

Also, I would like to thank you all for the amazing emails you guys sent me, either giving suggestions, positivity enforcing messages, or just shouting that you love Pizzuno! I read (and reply when necessary) all your emails, and I hear you guys asking for the possibility of changing your player flag at will instead of our system simply just detecting and assuming your flag. So I would like to say that this feature is also in the works, but might take some time as well.

An update on the new lobby/match-making/find-a-partner feature is that I decided to throw away my current working prototype on this and start again as the complexity was huge and the user experience wasn't so great, so sorry it might take a little bit more time to deliver this.

Again, I really appreciate all the messages, memes on Twitter, Twitch streams, and the whole sense of community that Pizzuno is turning into!

Last but not least, Thank you Chun for the translations! I owe you two Pizzas now 🍕

Please stay safe and healthy,

- Ricardo

v0.16.0 Flags!

Hello card players!

I'm writing to you to inform you that now can see your opponent's country flag!

The full changes can be seen below:

• Added country flags!
• Fixed a bug where players in the German version of Pizzuno wouldn't be able to share or copy the room link
• Fixed a bug that would crash the game on some older mobile phones
• Fixed a bug where the game wouldn't start on browsers like Firefox or Brave

I wish you all have fun!

Stay safe and healthy,

- Ricardo

v0.15.0 Bugfix against cheaters!

Hello, fellow card players.

Today I'm releasing a new update that prevents players from exploiting the TurnHandler and skipping their opponent's turn by clicking super fast on the pile/deck.

For now, that's it, I'm sorry I didn't bring the new multiplayer modes, or the themes, or anything "new".

Recently I didn't have much time to work on Pizzuno as my full-time job is requiring a lot of my brain capacity, and when I finish the day I only have the energy to check Pizzuno on Twitter and interact with some players.

Stay safe and healthy you all,

- Ricardo

v0.14.2 - Autostart and major bugfixes

Hello fellow card players,

In the last weeks, it's been amazing to see Pizzuno growing into its own community. (I loved all the memes on twitter! 😂)

Today I'm glad to announce the availability of new features and bug fixes, which you can see below:

• Added the possibility to Autostart a Singleplayer game (perfect for our Twitch streamers!)
• Added a "modal" that asks your name before connecting you. This way, it prevents bots, bad intentioned users, and many unwanted others to join your game.
• Fixed a bug where a Singleplayer game would crash due to a problem with the way it stores the cards in memory.
• Fixed a bug where the game crashes (both Multiplayer and Singleplayer) on Opera.
• Added improvements for players to be able to play with one hand while holding a slice of pizza with the other hand.

In the meanwhile, I'm working on plenty of stuff related to multiplayer improvements.

v0.11.3 Cookies Hotfix

Hello dear players,

Last night after the deployment of v0.11.2  players sent me messages explaining that they were having problems losing their room after just refreshing their pages.

Turns out it was a problem with our cookies saving library that wasn't keeping your session id.

That's why I'm announcing the immediate availability of v0.11.3 which fixes these problems.

Now on another note, I noticed that I didn't announce on the last update the changes done on the "multiple cards drawing" feature. A lot of people were using it, which was kind of a real feature and difference of this game compared to others, however, after a lot of feedback we decided to change this dynamic to allow to draw only one card per turn. The reason we decided to do it like this is because of **drum roll** CHEATERS! Honestly, I'm kinda excited because there are cheaters on a game I developed and I see this as a milestone or something like that.
The way people were cheating was that they would draw until getting a valid +2 card or a +4 when their opponent has only 1 card. It's silly but still...

Anyway, I really appreciate the feedback and this sense of community that Pizzuno is turning into.

Thank you all for your emails and positive messages, it really makes my day reading it.

Stay safe and healthy,

- Ricardo

v0.11.1 Post Christmas update!

Hello fellow card players,
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas time playing our game with family and friends.

I myself had a wonderful time, and also I'm really happy to say that I had some time to develop some new huge amazing features!!! (also some bugfixes)

For Singleplayer mode:

• Added game sounds (Sorry I implemented first on multiplayer mode, but I did not forget you, single-player friends!)
• Added victory counter that shows how many games you won in the current session.
• Added card played animations (Now your game REALLY feels like a real game)
• Added a "card resizing" to display that it's the player's turn.
• Fixed a bug where the arrow would be stuck in one position.
• Fixed a bug where the player would see no cards in some old Android and iPhones
• Added a bug tracking tool that alerts us when players are having problems
• Disabled Christmas theme

For Multiplayer mode:

• Added a victory counter that shows how many games you won in the current room
• Improved the card animations to display other players cards as well
• Now the player's hand highlights the cards when it's the player's turn.
• Small changes on the way the room identification is stored in the player cookies
• Added a bug tracking tool that alerts us when players are having problems
• Fixed a bug where the player would receive cards even though they declared "the last card"
• Disabled Christmas theme

Now, what's next?

Well, I'm currently working on the redesign of the flow of the multiplayer lobby management, or in other words, I'm reworking the way you join and create rooms so you are able to create (public and private) rooms and join public rooms.

This is a feature that I gotta say is the most requested lately (btw, thank you all for the lovely emails!), so I'm working on it.

I wish you all a happy new year!

Stay safe and healthy.

- Ricardo

v0.10.0 Added italian language

Ciao amici giocatori di carte.

How are you all doing? I hope enjoying playing Pizzuno and in a good mood with our latest Christmas theme!

Today our announcement is to inform the availability of the Italian language in our website! 

Wait what ? It's a website to play UNO with the thematic of pizza and it wasn't available in Italian?

Well, now it is!!

I wish you all a healthy and happy December Holidays.

- Ricardo

v0.9.0 Christmas update!

Hello fellow players.

Today I'm happy to announce one small but beautiful update that I worked the whole weekend to have ready before the 1st of December. It's the Christmas theme!!! 🎄🎅

On the other notes, I'm reworking the whole flow of the multiplayer game.

I received countless feedback, complaints, and lots of people asking for support on how to play on our website.
I understand that there is a huge pain in the process of going to a room because your browser gets stuck to a room. This was a decision in the past that made sense back then, but now that we have grown from 5 players a day to 150 thousand players a month, those decisions have been shown not wise.

So, I don't have anything to show about the new match-making feature YET... but keep tuned because soon I'll have some free time during Christmas and I will definitely work on it.

In the meantime, I wish you all a really joyful and happy Christmas or any other celebration that you do with your family.

Apologies!

Hello dear players.

Today we are sad because we made around two thousand players lose their rooms and their game state.

What does it mean?

It means that all players online at that moment lost connection to our servers due to overloading our server resources. AKA Too many players at the same time in a tiny bit server.

After this, our servers interpreted that these two thousand players left their rooms forever and erased them from memory.

So when these players came back, their games were gone, and our servers treated them as an unknown player that just arrived to start playing.

Now what?

Now comes actually the good news. The problem with our servers was not only solved but improved. We got a bigger server that according to our tests can hold 100 thousand players playing simultaneously.

Also, our team added with priority some optimizations to prevent this from happening again.

I really appreciate all the messages of support and all the feedback sent through the contact form.

Thank you all.

v0.8.0 Server Updates, Translations, Quality of Life improvements & more!

Hello fellow players, today we are overwhelmingly happy to announce so many changes:

• Added French translations (Bonjour, camarade!).
• We migrated our platform to use Localazy. Now you can help us to improve our translations!
• Due to previous incidents, we added some monitoring to our server and created a Status Page for our Servers.
• We changed the logic of when there is no cards in the deck anymore. Now, we create a new deck for you instead of reusing the previously played cards. INFINITY CARDS!!! :D... No, seriously, it was necessary because it can happen that two players have half decks on their hands and then the server crashes without knowing what to do without cards 😢. This might be a temporary change as we are reviewing the rules to approach what you want (Yes, we hear you when you write us on our contact page). 

On the more technical changes:

• We changed our code mangler to something more state of the art due to too many hacking attempts on our servers. (Can you believe, people making effort to hack in a Pizzuno game 🤦‍♂️...).
• We disabled the Halloween theme (it was good while it lasted 🎃).
• Fixed some issues with the server when the player would spam trying to play an invalid card.
• Added some easter eggs (I know it's xmas soon but anyway).
• Fixed a bug when the user changes the language and looses their game room.

v0.7.3 Added German Language

Guten Tag felow card players!

How are you enjoying the Halloween theme ? I will only be available for one more week, so enjoy it while it last!

Today we are happy to announce the immediately availability of the German version of our game!

We also did some server tweaks, and most important, we also reviewed a lot the feedback that you sent us though our contact page. A lot of ideas for improvement were added to our roadmap, so keep an eye soon to see the changes you requested in our website.

Stay safe and have fun playing!

v0.7.2 Halloween update!

Hello there fellow Pizzuno players!

This time I bring the waited Halloween update with plenty of gameplay updates.

The biggest features is that we added animations for when you play a card! Now it feels more natural in the gameplay.

The full list of updates you can see below:

• The player that starts the game now is randomly assigned instead of being always the owner of the room
• Added card animations to improve the gameplay experience
• Improved the offline-cache (which means you can play the Singleplayer mode offline!)
• Improved images to be WebP instead of JPG
• Added a new thematic until 1st November
• Fixed a bug that would crash our servers when the player would spam creating new rooms
• Fixed a bug where the player would disappear
• Added magic mushrooms

v0.7.1 Added Spanish and Japanese translations

Hello Friends, or should we say "Hola amigos" ? Maybe 皆さん、こんにちは ??? :D
We are proud to announce the addition of Spanish and Japanese translated versions of our amazing game!
More translations to come!

Below is the complete list of changes:

• Changed the GDPR plugin we use to a less heavy.
• Added validation/verification for which card the player is playing to avoid cheaters. (Seriously! People cheat in an online UNO ® game :/)
• Added some performance options for the PWA client.
• Banned all players that don't obey their parents.

v0.7.0 Multi-language support added + Portuguese

Olá fellow pizza card players!
Today I'm really glad to announce that we added support for multi-language in our project and starting with today, we added Portuguese as our first supported language!
As our Portuguese and Brazilian friends are a playing more and more Pizzuno, I would like to thank you for all the motivation messages about it.
If you have any language suggestion/request please lets us know!
Stay well, stay safe, and have fun playing our game.

v0.6.9 PWA Enabled !

Hello fellow card players!
Today we announce that we enabled the installation of our game as an PWA app.
In order to do so, go to our website's home page and you should see on your device a small notification asking if you want to install our game app!
Happy gaming on whatever device you have!

v0.6.8 MANY bugfixes

​Hello there fellow card players.

Today with v0.68 we are bringing MANY bugfixes both on the client and server of the game.

Please check below the full list:

• Updated the cards colors to match our true inner soul (and to avoid any copyright with any gigantic company)
• Fixed a bug where the user would share the link and the second user trying the link couldn't join the room
• Fixed a bug where the user could draw all the cards from the pile and crashing our servers (ouch)
• Fixed a bug where the user would get stuck in paying +4 debts (that was funny though, but people got mad so we fixed it)
• Improved the performance of the servers so the gameplay is even faster (We didn't even knew that it was physically possible!)
• Fixed a bug where a small duck would appear on the screen

v0.6.7 update

• Improved layout of lobby for smaller devices
• Fixed a bug where the user could input an limitless character name
• Fixed the text size for all devices sizes
• Small performance improvements for the backend connection speed

v0.6.6 Button position fixes

• Fixed a major bug where the users couldn't see or scroll to the button to start the game before the game start
• Fixed a bug where the user would be stuck in a game that already started
• Improved performance speed on old mobile devices

v0.6.5 Bugfixes

• Fixed the joining room quick-redirect bug. Now the user sees a message for 5 seconds before being redirected.
• Adjusted the size of the "winner screen" text, so the user can see the button to play a game again.

v0.6.4 - Launched on the platform Itch.io!

• The Pizzuno project started 3 months ago and today we proudly announce it's launch on the itch.io platform!
• The version 0.64 contains all the bugfixes developed in the last 2 weeks.  Just the right amount of bugfixes to make you enjoy a really nice game with friends online.

PROTOTYPE - v0.6.3 - Launch of Prototype online

After 2 months of development and 4 prototypes made, I'm proud to announce that today I'm making available online for free the final prototype of Pizzuno.

• Added Single player game mode
• Added Multiplayer game mode
• Deployed the finished game framework and engine for both multiplayer and singleplayer game.