SnD Games Weekly: Security Measures, Pokemon Researcher, and CUTD Map Abilities!

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Hello world! Welcome to another week of Sam and Dan game goodness. Originally we had planned for a big event for this week but we couldn't get all the details sorted out, so it will have to wait until next time. So what is the big event about? Well, basically we will be needing you guys to help us keep developing Ptd2 and Cutd. You can think of it like a kickstarter except it's not really about one project but about the whole company. We are working out some cool prizes for those of you who wish to help us out. Like I said before we won't be starting it this week but I wanted to give you guys the heads up of what is coming.

Security Measures
Many of you have noticed that there are a lot of hacked pokemon flying around in the trading center. This week I will spend a good amount of time beefing up the security among other things. So that one person that keeps spamming my twitter can finally relax for a chance.

Update on Security Measures:
There is a lot of misinformation going around (especially on YouTube videos) about what happened and how it happened. So I'm here to tell you what happened, and how it happened straight from the source.

First I patched up the game so certain hacks would no longer work. Some hackers will complain about this but really they can only blame themselves for this. If they were to hack for their own personal collection and just stay quiet about it then I wouldn't even notice and would leave them alone. But... they decided to start putting up illegal trades and tried to scam other players. That is not acceptable so I had to step in and add more security.

After I did this it was time to remove any illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't catch in the game yet like Ho-oh for example) from any account that had them. I had a list of all the illegal pokemon and I had the id of who the original owner was (the person who captured/created this pokemon) and who the current owner was (the person who had the pokemon in their account).  Usually for the person who currently had the pokemon I simply removed the pokemon from their account. If the person had multiple illegal pokemon even if he didn't create them I would remove more valuables. You really should know better than to hold multiple illegal pokemon, period.

People who created multiple illegal pokemon also had valuables taken. Creating illegal pokemon is not acceptable either. If you created so many illegals and you tried trading other people for them trying to scam them your account was completely reset.

The next step was removing any pokemon that had illegal shiny values. For example shadow totodile or shiny vanillite. I followed the same rules as illegal. The more you had the more you lost. Most people only owned 1 and all I did was remove it and move along.

The last check was for shiny starters or shiny zorua that the original owner had not paid for.

Okay so that was the process, I went and checked each account by hand. This wasn't an automatic thing where bam a bunch of random accounts were deleted. If you lost a lot of things the things you lost were hacked and I couldn't allow them to stay in the system. If you buy a stolen good and the police finds out about it, they won't put you in jail but they will take away the stolen merchandise. 

As far as how many accounts were affected by this less than 200 accounts were affected by this. This is out of millions of accounts that exist. So less 1% of all account lost something. Don't for a second think that thousands and thousands of account were affected. Trust me I did this by hand and thousands would have taken me weeks to do. Also like i mentioned before most people only lost 1-2 pokemon and less than 20 actually got their account reset.

Well I hope that cleared some things up for you guys. Thanks for understanding, it was actually pretty sad for me when I have to delete pokemon like that... it definitely took a lot of my motivation out from this week.   

Getting it done
So I've been piling up a bunch of new features and things that I've been wanting to add and it is finally time to get them done. This week I will focus on the things that were left behind from last week without adding too much to it.

Pokemon Researcher
While making the behaviors for the different wild pokemon I started to test them and I was having a lot of fun just watching what they did. So I thought that it would be pretty fun to have a mode that you could just spawn some pokemon and watch them interact with each other and with you. You can't capture them or battle. You just get to play around and see if anything fun happens. This mode is really easy to add since all the work for it is pretty much done. Just have to make some menus, which I hate >.<

Mystery Gift
The poll this week will start with asking for what type you want to see this week and then it will move to a list of possible candidates. Let's figure this out together!
 

Weekly Progress

My Status: Working on blog!
Alpha v1.25 Progress List:
Note: The list below is for v1.25 when it is released.

• Security Stuff (100%) 
• Can no longer log into story mode with an illegal pokemon (pokemon that you can't obtain yet) (100%)
• Can no longer save an illegal pokemon (100%)
• Removing current illegal pokemon (100%)
• Removing hacked shiny starters and shiny zorua and their evolutions (100%)
• Add New Pokemon to the Trading Center (100%)  
• Make all Golett's Genderless (100%) - Might have to cut out a few body parts, ouch!
• Properly align some pokemon when they are following behind you (100%) 
• Better Map UI (100%) - Similar to the Battle UI, it shows time of day and your current money amount.
• Pokedex (0%)
• Saving Pokemon's party and storage position (0%)
• Daily Challenges (0%)
• Day of the Week Spooky Event (0%)
• 1v1 Mode Changes (0%) - As described on the previous blog.
• Sponsor Version of the game (0%)
• Add a confirmation popup to the back button on story mode if you haven't saved (0%)
• Release Pokemon (0%) - Note: You can already release them in the Pokemon Center if you don't want to wait for this to be done.
• Pokemon Researcher  (0%)
• Add list in the FAQ page on where to find pokemon and at what time, similar to the PTD1 list (0%) 
• Fixed bug with the attack Uproar not waking up pokemon in battle (0%)
• Add a graphic for removing a pokemon from the field (0%) - To better tell what is going on when fighting and NPC trainer.
• Add new Level Item interface graphics for the ui (0%)  
• Added which pokemon you will be battling in the next battle in 1v1 mode (0%) 
• Make pressing Enter to trigger a lot of the menu buttons (0%) Pressing enter to log in instead of clicking on it.
• Check the Forgot Password pages for any errors (0%) 
• Top Searchers/Top Request/Latest Trades (0%)

Creature Universe: Map Abilities
Ptd2 introduced the concept of the map. Creature Universe TD will take it even farther with map abilities. An example of this is very early in Pillar Island, the grass start zone, you will be given some bug bombs to throw at some bugs to clear them out. I made an awesome concept sketch to illustrate this example.

Bug Bomb takes out bugs, one of the map abilities you will get

 So instead of only walking around you will be able to equip items to do different actions. Your creatures don't get left out on the action. Each family of creatures will have their own ability that they can use in the map for different effects. In this example the Grass Starter which is still unnamed has a tongue ability that lets him eat certain bugs. You will be able to switch place with your creature so that you can control it while your trainer avatar follows it. Here is another amazing concept sketch that I made to illustrate this example.

Grass starter using his map ability on a bug creature

  In CUTD your character will perform more functions than the characters have ever had in ptd and ptd2. That's all I have for you this week, keep checking back to see how we are progressing. As always let me know what you think! Sam out.

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