Cryptite and I would like to start out by saying a big thanks to those who helped us make the Yuletide questline possible. While both of us put an enormous amount of time into it, we cannot pull off stuff like this alone. Everyone put a ton of work into it, amounting to hundreds and hundreds of hours. As a result, we want to give everyone credit for their role in this awesome questline.
Contributors
McDanky
Despite these two not currently being part of the dev team, they chipped in when called upon to help us out with skins. So big thanks to:
FoxyBearGames
Timeline/What happened
Nether's Eve wrapped up at the start of November so we were only able to really get going with the Yuletide quest at the end of November and as always with this time of year, a lot of people are away from home for large parts of the month/spending time with family. As a result, we were under a lot of time pressure to make it happen. In the end, we managed to pack the Yuletide questline with over 40 quests and 10 instances!
There were an enormous number of new quest features we added this time around, some of which are the most complex/problematic ones we plan on adding to the questing system. This is what largely contributed to the bugs
on launch, although we did manage to wipe all the major ones out within a day or two. I think overall we were slightly over-ambitious with how much we wanted to do with the quest in size, scale and features. Having said that, long term it really benefits the questing system as a whole. Even if it meant some very long nights in December. As I said before, hundreds and hundreds of hours were put into the quest as a whole, and I would estimate just in the last week before launch a combined total of a good hundred hours went into testing. This part of the process is often the least fun and most tedious. Despite finding the bugs being very time consuming, fixing them was often the bottleneck in development 
. Before pushing it to live we were able to run through it problem-free, but inevitably there were things we didn't catch, which were exposed when we had large numbers of players doing the quest. Going forward we're going to look into the possibility of putting together a small group of players whose sole job is to find bugs and break things. However, we are under no illusions that this will prevent all bugs finding their way onto the server as mass testing will always bring up new issues.
All in all though, we are very pleased with how Yuletide turned out despite the bumpy launch.
Stats and Results!
Feedback
We've had loads of great feedback from you guys from the forums, discord and the google sheet that has been floating around discord servers. We always welcome more though, so if you haven't given us your thoughts on the quest yet or want to say more, this forum thread is a great place to do it. We'll try to adjust future quests to some of the feedback that we have taken on board. Worth noting though, there has been a fair bit of contradiction with some of the feedback as a lot of things are subjective. As a result, we will try our best to gauge what the general consensus is, but things like difficulty level tend to be the thing that splits the community the most.
What's Next?
We hope Yuletide has shown the sort of content we are able to make and this is just the start. We've added a ton of new features to quests during Yuletide development which are now permanent features of the questing system. Not all of these are available to players, such as instances, but our dev team does have access to utilise the more complex tools like this. The biggest current preparations beyond some Conquest Updates for February are preparing for Loka's 10-Year Anniversary coming in mid-February. Beyond that, the next major PvE project will be working on permanent questlines. These will take some time to develop so there may be a few smaller quests we add in the meantime.
Help Us Create Content!
We're always looking to do more, so if you like what we do and want to help out, throw in an application here. You don't have to be the most talented person in the world, just hard-working and passionate. We are trying to grow the dev team for a very large and ambitious future project so whether you're interested in making skins, building, writing dialogue etc. we could use your help. If you're motivated enough you can learn to do anything! Before Minecraft was released Cryptite couldn't code in Java (the language Minecraft is coded in) and most of the best builders started out making cube houses before they honed their skills. So don't be afraid to apply, just because you don't think you are currently skilled enough.
Contributors
McDanky
- Made the skins of Gamel, Garama Assistant, Karl, Kalros Assistant, Jasper.
- Built Puzzle Room 2.
- Built the Snowball Sniper (target practice) arena.
- Wrote half of the quest dialogue.
- Helped build tents.
- Built the boat race track. (An incredibly large and impressive build)
- Built Jaspers Snowglobe.
- Helped build tents.
- Helped bug test the quest.
- Built the maze.
- Helped build wabbit wacking arena.
- Spent a huge amount of time heavily bug testing the quest.
- Helped out a ton with an array of miscellaneous tasks.
- Implemented the questline in-game.
- Built the Sumo Ring.
- Helped build tents.
- Helped build the sunk ship.
- Helped build wabbit wacking arena.
- Helped bug test the quest.
- Built puzzle room 1 & 3.
- Built all redstone mechanisms.
- Built the sunk ship.
- Made the Rabbit & Rabbit Hunter mythic mobs.
- Made the Jasper snowball fight mythic mob.
- Made the Sumo mythic mobs.
- Helped bug test the quest.
- Built puzzle room 4.
- Built Jaspers house.
- Made the 3 pets rewarded at the end of the quest.
Despite these two not currently being part of the dev team, they chipped in when called upon to help us out with skins. So big thanks to:
FoxyBearGames
- Made the skins of Max Slider and Henry Derran.
- Made the skins of Asila and Ascalon Assistant.
Timeline/What happened
Nether's Eve wrapped up at the start of November so we were only able to really get going with the Yuletide quest at the end of November and as always with this time of year, a lot of people are away from home for large parts of the month/spending time with family. As a result, we were under a lot of time pressure to make it happen. In the end, we managed to pack the Yuletide questline with over 40 quests and 10 instances!
There were an enormous number of new quest features we added this time around, some of which are the most complex/problematic ones we plan on adding to the questing system. This is what largely contributed to the bugs
on launch, although we did manage to wipe all the major ones out within a day or two. I think overall we were slightly over-ambitious with how much we wanted to do with the quest in size, scale and features. Having said that, long term it really benefits the questing system as a whole. Even if it meant some very long nights in December. As I said before, hundreds and hundreds of hours were put into the quest as a whole, and I would estimate just in the last week before launch a combined total of a good hundred hours went into testing. This part of the process is often the least fun and most tedious. Despite finding the bugs being very time consuming, fixing them was often the bottleneck in development . Before pushing it to live we were able to run through it problem-free, but inevitably there were things we didn't catch, which were exposed when we had large numbers of players doing the quest. Going forward we're going to look into the possibility of putting together a small group of players whose sole job is to find bugs and break things. However, we are under no illusions that this will prevent all bugs finding their way onto the server as mass testing will always bring up new issues.All in all though, we are very pleased with how Yuletide turned out despite the bumpy launch.
Stats and Results!
- Nabsin won the boat race 1 lap time trial with an incredible time of 2:20.54 earning the title Zoomer!
View his run here.
(Ice Underpass: 22.24, Hairpin Caverns: 29.29, Branching Tunnels: 23.05, Glacial Straight: 12.84, Candy Cane Way: 53.09)
- kiadmowi pipped Nabsin to the crown of the 3 lap race on the last day with a time of 7:06:23 earning the title Zoomer!
(Lap 1: 2:21.48, Lap 2: 2:21.29, Lap 3: 2:23.45)
- Just 10 players managed to record a time under 2:30, which earned them Max Slider's Box of Speed.
- The 1 lap time trial was started a whopping 12,466 times, yet only 946 full laps were completed. That's just 7.5% of all laps started.
- Overall a quarter of all of these attempts was made by Nabsin. He started that quest 3608 times. What a mad lad! Even madder when you consider he only completed 67 full laps, less than 2% of his attempts.
- Gamel beat 44 Lokans in the semifinal of the Sumo event including tqmen and heydood!
When it came to the final Karl knocked 69 players off.
- Karl won the semifinal of snowball sniper 156 times, yet Asila only won the final just 88 times.
- Asila was victorious in the semifinal of Wabbit Wacking 44 times and Gamel won twice that (88) in the final.
- Players lost the Final of The Great Boat Race 453 times. Surprisingly this was less than the number who didn't complete the 1 lap warm-up fast enough, which was 602.
- There was a fairly even split between the pets that were chosen as a reward. Karl the Kalrosian was just the favourite with 36% of players picking him. Gamel the Garaman had 34% and Asila the Ascalonian had 30% of the picks.
Feedback
We've had loads of great feedback from you guys from the forums, discord and the google sheet that has been floating around discord servers. We always welcome more though, so if you haven't given us your thoughts on the quest yet or want to say more, this forum thread is a great place to do it. We'll try to adjust future quests to some of the feedback that we have taken on board. Worth noting though, there has been a fair bit of contradiction with some of the feedback as a lot of things are subjective. As a result, we will try our best to gauge what the general consensus is, but things like difficulty level tend to be the thing that splits the community the most.
What's Next?
We hope Yuletide has shown the sort of content we are able to make and this is just the start. We've added a ton of new features to quests during Yuletide development which are now permanent features of the questing system. Not all of these are available to players, such as instances, but our dev team does have access to utilise the more complex tools like this. The biggest current preparations beyond some Conquest Updates for February are preparing for Loka's 10-Year Anniversary coming in mid-February. Beyond that, the next major PvE project will be working on permanent questlines. These will take some time to develop so there may be a few smaller quests we add in the meantime.
Help Us Create Content!
We're always looking to do more, so if you like what we do and want to help out, throw in an application here. You don't have to be the most talented person in the world, just hard-working and passionate. We are trying to grow the dev team for a very large and ambitious future project so whether you're interested in making skins, building, writing dialogue etc. we could use your help. If you're motivated enough you can learn to do anything! Before Minecraft was released Cryptite couldn't code in Java (the language Minecraft is coded in) and most of the best builders started out making cube houses before they honed their skills. So don't be afraid to apply, just because you don't think you are currently skilled enough.
