Status Report - February 2025

This post is made to serve as a report of the state of things regarding the team as a whole. We plan on making these every once in a while, whenever we feel is necessary. This one includes an important update regarding the "Lunars" feature, so we ask that you read through it.

Past

Throughout 2024, we've been able to provide themed tournaments at what I believe is an acceptable basis for a non-profit development team like us. Most of them we believe were received well, except for the Summer Tournament, our players didn't seem to like its levels very much (but that's just how said levels were in the original tournament, so it wasn't all our fault).

We managed to get the 'Getting Lucky' and 'Summer Mayhem' updates out, both of which added additional episodes to the game as well as a considerable amount of improvements. Admittedly, a few bugs were introduced in both updates. Most (if not all) of them have been fixed already, but I wanted to note that down regardless as it does impact the player's experience, and I believe it is something that we should work towards preventing. Regardless, both of these updates were fairly well received by the community, and we're grateful for that.

The Halloween Tournament as well as the Winter Tournaments needed a lot more time and attention due to the amount of special features and content that needed to be recreated, and we were already expecting this. We slowly began work on both tournaments in June 2024, though our main focus before November was the Halloween Tournament. Aside from a bug with Hunter's tutorial, I'd say it turned out to be fairly polished. The Winter Tournaments did have a few issues that managed to slip through the release, however.

The New Year Tournament, which featured Tony, took a fairly short amount of time as one of our developers had already worked on him about a year prior. We just needed to fix some issues and give him some adjustments.

Present

We managed to get the 'Double or Nothing' update out a few weeks ago, which was also well received just like the other updates. It included the Tournament Museum, the Abra-ca-bacon episode from Angry Birds Seasons, unused avatar items, and a considerable amount of adjustments and bug fixes. This was our biggest update to date.

Abra-ca-bacon was announced in September 2024, and it unfortunately took longer than expected to release due to the aforementioned tournaments. We started working on the Tournament Museum in December 2024, and we kept working on it up until the update's release date. Despite that, we were able to get the update out with a higher level of polish than usual. The only issue I can recall our players reporting were the star limits in Abra-ca-bacon's levels.

We've also had one default tournament that included levels created by our own level designers, which is something we've been doing every now and then. The full version of RLE (our internal level editor) is yet to be worked on, so our level designers have been relying on RLE- to actually make levels.

There are still a few minor bugs that remain in the game that we have yet to fix.

Future

We would like to spend more time on polishing things up. We want to fix bugs and do some other adjustments to make the overall game experience better. We also want to actually put attention on RLE, which has been facing neglect in the face of the aforementioned content.

As such, we might have to keep you waiting longer for future tournaments and especially Bonus Levels episodes. That being said, we shouldn't have much trouble re-running tournaments from now on. We're finally done with the troublesome ones (Halloween and Winter), the later ones won't need as much effort thanks to the existing archival efforts of the overall Angry Birds community.

In the face of all of this, we've made the difficult decision to scrap the "Lunars" feature altogether. While it was never formally announced, only having a "Coming Soon" icon in the shop, we still talked about our plans for it in our Discord server. Canceling it was not an easy decision, but it is a must if we want to work on the aforementioned things. We know these might sound like disappointing news, and we're very sorry for that. You may claim the non-expiring code OURAPOLOGY.

This is a bit of a lesson to us to not announce things so early. Granted, our usual standard practice already is to wait until our in-progress content is nearing completion before it's actually announced, but that was not the case with Lunars and Abra-ca-bacon.

Closing

From now on, we will focus more on polishing the game up and getting RLE ready to use. Themed tournaments will still come (we have one ready for this month, can you guess which one it is?), but Bonus Levels content will have to be further delayed.

Please note that RLE is meant to be an internal tool for us. As such, there are no guarantees that we will release it publicly. That being said, it is something that we might consider in the future, as we've already released its lesser counterpart publicly.

We would like to remind you that we are a non-profit group of people. We don't gain any money off Angry Birds Refresh. In fact, we're actually losing money, since we need to pay for our domain + servers. The point is, we have our own responsibilities, our efforts as a team are something we do in our free time.

Lastly, thank you for the support you've given us over the past year. It really means a lot to us to have a community of players as supportive as you all are.