The holidays are coming, which means that it’s time to unwrap some presents!

The first one is Achievements! They were already available for some time to our iOS players, but starting today they will be everywhere – iOS, Android, on the Web and even on our Facebook app. Some of them were already awarded while others will be unlocked over time, so make sure to check out your hero’s personal page once in a while. Achievements vary in difficulty and rank so there’s going to be something interesting even for seasoned players.

Some tech news: recently, both our iOS and Android apps have been updated with lots of new goodness (Facebook friend invites, achievements, pull-to-refresh, swipes, etc). In the meantime, the superhero page now preserves the Remote Control state between page refreshes, which can be useful in duels.

Meanwhile, some new fancy stuff has been discovered by Godville’s scientists. New activatable artifacts can smelt golden bricks, kill monsters, friend other heroes and even accumulate charges. Even Godville invites can now be activated, so you won’t have to worry about heroes selling them. And the holiday spirit has lured hordes of Santa Claws and other fabled creatures to enrich the surroundings with their presents and gifts, so watch over your heroes, as they may find lots of interesting things!

Happy holidays!

For the first time ever, a special holiday offer – get twice as many charges for the same price!

This offer is valid until 28/11 11:59PM (PST). Hurry up, and don’t forget that you can also gift charges to your friends!

Happy Thanksgiving!

As many of you have noticed, the Ideabox has gone through some changes over the last couple of weeks as we have introduced “dupe” and “flag” buttons, to provide authors with better feedback.

That was just the beginning. Today we’re adding a brand new feature to the Ideabox – the Enhancement Room. It is a special place for proven Godville community members to tweak and enhance the most promising content submissions that have passed through the first round of voting. Hopefully, further careful reviews and the ability to tweak ideas into a ready-to-add form will shorten the review queue and speed up the whole process for both players and authors!

An exhaustive description of the new feature can be found here. Hopefully, this update will bring more awesome content into the game more quickly, to the joy of both players and authors.

After a quite long pause, we’re excited to get back to you with a bunch of good news! Please welcome our brand new feature – friendly, just-for-fun duel fights with friends and their heroes! These new fights take place entirely in the imagination of the heroes, so they won’t leave any trace (no teleportation, health restore, changes in stats, equipment or inventory, no effect on pantheon rankings or desire for in-field skirmishes). To invite a friend for a sparring fight just send him a challenge using your Remote Control (read more in the FAQ). Don’t have enough friends to check out this awesome new feature? Well, everyone has just received 5 invites, so go ahead and challenge a friend to a duel!

The new dueling feature is already available on the superhero page and in the recently updated iOS and Android (update to Amazon AppStore is still going through the review process) apps. In order to reduce confusion and let everyone know that the old hero page is not the best way to go, today the old page got its final feature – a deprecation banner and an updated link in the top menu. Fear not, the page should work just as it worked before, but it’s unlikely to receive any of the new features (e.g. Third Eye or Challenge Friend).

In other news, there were lots of small, yet important changes made over the last couple of weeks that we wanted to let you know about:

• the game has just been updated with a lot of new content
• monster death rattles are now much more diverse
• “earthly news” submissions have been moved into their own section in the ideabox
• all personal pages have gained a bunch of godwiki links
• to make duel endings more straightforward, the tie outcome for both arena and skirmish duels has been changed, so that it will no longer affect the win/loss ratio and gladiatorship pantheon position
• it’s now possible to buy charges for other players in the browser version of the game.

Lots of you may have experienced problems when checking your heroes yesterday, as GV servers were not available or were returning error messages. First of all, we’re sorry that happened, and we want to let you know about the situation and what we plan to do in order to prevent it from happening again.

Our hosting provider informed us that due to some excavation work, a fiber optic cable that connects our datacenter (and 4 others) to the Internet had been cut, which caused everything to work really really slowly or sometimes not work at all. We tried to mitigate the issue by tuning up the servers, but that wasn’t enough to work around the underlying connectivity issue completely. After approximately 8 hours, the underlying connectivity issue was fixed by our hosting provider, which resolved the issues in accessing our servers.

Unfortunately it’s almost impossible to manually restore or rollback all the bad things that happened to your heroes while they were wandering around without supervision from their gods, but here’s what we’re going to do to prevent it in the future:

• tune up timeouts in our mobile apps to better handle situations like this
• fix some newly found bugs in our Android app related to error messages when servers are not available (some of them were already fixed in v2.5 available in Android Market, but this version is still going through the Amazon Appstore review process and not yet available to those who downloaded the app from the Amazon Appstore)
• provision for additional server capacity to handle even more requests

Here are some tips for our players:

• follow us on twitter @godvillegame to get the latest updates, especially at times when our site is not accessible
• if you’re using our Android app and for some reason you were logged out of your account, but had never set a password: please try to login with your godname and an empty password
• be aware that due to Amazon’s review process, app updates to Amazon Appstore are very likely to reach you several weeks later than the same update in Android Market

UPD

During yesterday’s non-stop endless patching & tuning session, we accidentally messed up one of the servers, which eventually backfired causing some of the accessibility issues observed today. As of now, this problem is resolved and everything should work fine. And to prevent this happening again, we promise to try get some sleep and be more careful even when our inbox is flooding and things are on fire.

If you don’t use twitter, here is the good old-fashioned RSS feed for blog posts.

Since the beginning of time, all heroes carried around strange chronicles on their personal page. They were reluctant to fill them in, preferring to leave this task to their gods. Other gods were able to vote for the writings, using star ratings at the bottom of the page, but it wasn’t clear why they should. Let’s finally make some sense of it all by opening up the Pantheon of Storytellers – a place to discover the best chronicles of Godville.

More good news for our honored temple owners: in their yearning for golden bricks, heroes will once again obtain them as rewards for completing quests, winning in arena duels, etc. But since the temple is finished, bricks will go directly into the hero’s inventory as very expensive items, making them even richer, which could be especially useful for reviving a pet or converting the gold coins into experience.

And lastly, our Android app (update to Amazon AppStore is pending) has recently been updated to support the Third Eye and Facebook authentication. If you haven’t got it yet, now it’s a good time to do so!

From the early days of Godville, the diary of a hero was limited to just 10 entries, making everything else that happens to the hero a mystery to his god. However, evolution has given gods The Third Eye – a new divine ability to see and capture the most important events in the hero’s life, even if they were hours or days ago. The Eye opens starting from 5% of temple completion (yep, only fifty bricks), and expands its range further as the hero keeps progressing with temple building.

The important events can be viewed under the ”!” sign on the superhero page and our mobile apps will also start displaying them after one of the upcoming updates.

Lastly, searches on forums just got a little bit better. Now you can add some specifiers to your query (e.g. +, – or ””) and hopefully, get better results. Make sure to give it a try next time you need to find something on the forums.

Today we’re back with another batch of good news: in response to many requests, both our Android app (in Android Market or Amazon AppStore) and iOS apps have been updated to include a new “Nightly” theme, that should be especially useful in dim light conditions. Make sure to check it out by updating the app to the latest version and turning on the new theme on the Menu->Profile screen.

Another newsworthy change: starting today, heroes are less likely to understand a mid-duel god voice that requires them to do multiple different things at once (e.g. heal and attack at the same time). Hopefully, this will make god voices more interesting, so please account for this change in your dueling strategy.

Finally, the game world has just received yet another content update. We hope that you and your champion will like it!

Thank you all for your feedback on the preview version of Godville app for the Android. We’ve smashed a couple of bugs, and finally uploaded our renewed app to the Android Market! (the update will also get into Amazon Appstore as soon as it gets through Amazon review process) As always, your ideas, suggestions and comments are welcome here.

Meanwhile, as a part of our continuing efforts to process ideabox submissions, we went through ALL the ideas in the monsters and artifacts sections (special thanks to Wishie for helping us out), adding hundreds of new items into the game. Hopefuly, one day we’ll be able to get back to you with more exciting news from this front.

Today is a special day. One year ago Godville opened its doors. Back in those days it was quite a small and barely populated place. Polytheism was only yet to shine, monsters were scarce and heroes could hardly say more than a couple of canned phrases. Fortunately, thanks to the growing divine population and rising diversity, Godville gradually got bigger, better and much more awesome in many ways.

What is a birthday with no presents? Frankly, we don’t want to know, so here is our special anniversary game update:

1. Recently Godville got its official Facebook app. Those of you who want to access their heroes right in their favorite social network should be especially pleased.
2. To reduce the number of typos and occasional guild duplicates, from now on there will be two different god voices to create a new guild and to join an existing one (kudos to Syrocko and Gordianus for this idea). We’ve also added new extra honorable guild ranks, so check up on your hero, maybe he just got promoted.
3. Our Android app got a highly anticipated overhaul, featuring lots of internal changes, a much better look and a couple of cool new features. We’re eager to hear your feedback, so grab a special preview-version here and let us know what you think!
4. And last, but certainly not least – starting today, everybody will be getting a free accumulator charge on each level up. And to make it even better – all active gods were just granted with some free accumulator charges (according to the level of your hero) and friend invites. Go give your hero some sparks and have some fun today!

Thanks to everyone for being with us! Happy birthday, Godville!