Note: [Just a quick reminder that anything I share is subject to change during development. I won’t be able to share everything the team is currently working on in this summary, as some of the projects are in very early stages of development and we want to keep some surprises for the community. However, we are aiming to update you on these projects as soon as we can.]​

July Development Summary - Read More Here

What have we been doing during the last 3 months

Guild Update

Moderation and Punishments

Prototype Lobby

Planned and Upcoming Updates

Projects since last Developer Summary

UHC Update and Pregame Improvements

Pit Update 0.3.5

Arcade Update 2

Murder Mystery Updates

Cops and Crims QoL Update

Guild Update

MVP++ Private Games

KOTH Patch

TNT Update

Arcade Update

Duels 1.2 & 1.3

PTL: Capture the Wool + V0.3 Update

Warlords Update

VampireZ Update

Quakecraft Update

Mega Walls Patch

Halloween Event

Moderation and Punishment Rework

TKR Update

Paintball Update

Guild Update

Moderation and Punishment Rework

Prototype

Planned and Upcoming Updates

Housing

Reporting System

Content Jam

Ingame Store

Holiday Content

Updates for Games

Build Battle

Bed Wars

Skywars

UHC

Arcade

Blitz SG

Hello,Welcome back to the November installment of our Development Summaries where we will be sharing insights into our past, current, and future projects.Make sure to click onfor full information. Prepare for a long post.During the last 3 months, we didn’t offer a development summary as we spent a lot of time on team reflection as well as optimizing our work processes. Now, it's time once again to look at what we’ve accomplished and what we are going to work on next.In the last few months we had a lot of updates - just some of them are mentioned in this list:The two projects I want to talk some more about are the Guild Update and the Moderation and Punishment Rework.After a long long time, we finally released the Guild Update and by doing that, we reached one of our bigger milestones. The update brought a lot of positive changes to guilds and added a lot of value for our players. But we are not done with guilds quite yet. Very soon, we will release another small update for guilds as a follow up patch which will include tons of bug fixes and improvements!What you are mostly wondering at this point: Where are the promised Guild fortresses?They are coming, but not this year. Codename has been working on a project to reshape how our housing system operates, so we are able to use the same system for guild fortresses as well.We are still throwing design ideas around and are not quite sure which direction we want to take with fortresses and what interactions we want players to have with them. There are some rough plans on what might be possible and we will test a few things over the course of the next 3 months. So, I can only ask you for a bit more patience while we are working on bringing you the best guild fortresses.I promise, it won’t take us another 2 years for the next guild update ;-)Not too long ago, we released an update to our moderation system as well as our guidelines and systems for punishments of various kind. This rework has been asked for by both the community as well as the staff team to create a better environment on the server for everyone.The idea behind the rework was based on being stricter to repeat offenders while also showing forgiveness to players who went down a bad path and wanted to redeem themselves. By saying “forgiveness,” we are talking about giving players a second chance, not a third. If you want to be part of our community, you will have to play fair and you will have to follow the rules.Forgiveness does not mean that we will be lifting every suspension given previously or that past infractions won’t matter anymore. It means that we are focusing on a players behaviour after their suspension and see if the player has reformed. If we see a change in behaviour that creates a positive member of the community, a future punishment might not be as severe.For our staff team, this has also been a big improvement. Focusing more on the player and the case itself than on investigation of previous infractions and suspension lengths. Now, it just comes down to “Did the player play by the rules or not?” which makes handling reports a bit easier and punishments for infractions more unified.In the past two weeks since its release, the staff has gone through more than 4000 cases alone - I think that’s a fantastic move into the right direction.The original idea was to have the Prototype lobby as a testing environment for new game loops that we thought were interesting enough to try on the network. If the community liked one of those games, we would then spend the additional effort to polish the game and release it on the network under our usual Hypixel quality.This whole process shouldn’t be taking longer than 3 months. At least, that’s what we had planned back then. Because of our own constant strive for quality, the current state of games in Prototype is much more advanced and polished than we would like.Therefore, we will try and go back to the roots of PTL and prototyping games as originally planned. This means future prototype games will be much more down to the core at their beginning to see and find a proper game loop first. Once that is found and the community is happy with it, we will go ahead and add the Hypixel quality polish that you are used.We hope to be able to reduce development time on the first few drafts of prototype games, giving us more flexibility in gameplay development and changing directions, if need be.With the Housing update we rolled two days ago, Codename has reworked the housing backend fully. This will enable us to add features to the housing system that would have never been possible with the old system. We will also need to remove houses from the network that weren’t visited in the past 6 months to free up space for upcoming changes.While this update won’t add anything new for players, it is a first and huge step towards a Housing 2.0 with the possibility of many improvements.After our Moderation and Punishment rework, the next step in moderation tools is the reporting system. This system will make it easier for players to report rule-breaking behaviour ingame as well as offer some self-moderation tools.The reporting system will integrate chat reports and Watchdog reports into one single system, making it much easier and faster for our moderation team to action player reports. Players won’t need to create forum reports or support tickets anymore which should make it much more comfortable for everyone.This was an outstanding promise to our team internally, which we finally get to do - the Content Jam. The Content Jam is an internal event where the whole team will be working on their own projects for a whole week.The team will propose projects to work on, decide for themselves on what will be done, and then try and get it done within one week. This can be anything from programs to help internal process, features for the network, or new games. Whatever the team creates within that week, I’m sure you might see at least one of the projects on the network sometime soon.This will be fun as hell!Another feature for the network we are going to work on soon is the Ingame Store. Throughout the years, we’ve gathered quite a bit of feedback from players about the store and the purchasing process. One of the most common complaints was that players were forced to go through the whole purchasing processes every time they want to buy just one little thing. It can be a frustrating and tedious thing to do, so we finally put it on our to-do list for the upcoming sprint.While we haven’t decided on all the details of the Ingame Store yet, we will most likely remove most content from our current store to present it on the Network in some form.For players, this should feel much more comfortable to get something for themselves or a friend without having to exit the game and go through a website.We will post more about the Ingame Store when we have a more detailed and focused plan to present to you.With the holiday season coming closer and closer, we are also putting a lot of effort into this year’s holiday content. We will bring you tons of cool things to do so you won’t be bored during your holiday break. Cosmetics, Quests, Achievements as well as Holiday Themed Maps and Games - I’m certain Minikloon will not disappoint once again.Last but not least, I also want to make you aware of the games that we will be working on till end of the year. While we might not get all updates out this year, we will do our best to get as many as we can. The following games are planned to receive an update in some shape or form:To not spoil all of it right away, I won’t go into the details of the updates themselves, but I’m certain you will enjoy them. And while we are aware of the “Not another Bed Wars Update” meme, we need to be realistic here - the last update was in June (so 5 months ago) and just added some Achievements - an update is long overdue.We have shelved Bed Wars for a bit and focused on some older game modes to add some more content for the small communities these games had. Based on the reactions here in the forums, these updates were very welcome and well received, which obviously made us quite happy.While we would love to give every game the same amount of time and effort, our resources are limited and realistically, we cannot support a game with 50 players the same as one with 5,000. Therefore, we will have to put more focus on the more popular games on the network going forward. This does not mean that we are going to completely ignore all other games but updates might be more spread out for them.Last but not least, a little sneak peak of what is about to come very very soon:Thank you for reading!