Yer Hotel :: News and Announcements (new threads)

Oops

muszek — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 11:06:14 +0000

We've been down for an unbelievably long time (something around 36 hours). The company that hosts our server has been hacked. The incident was really serious, an estimated 100000 sites were taken down. You can read more in The Register or in this enormous forum thread at webhostingtalk.com.

I've routed the domain to our development server to at least show some status page, but as soon as I've done this, the host has taken down even untouched servers just to make sure hackers won't strike again before security issues are resolved.

We're good for now.

Marketing, dry guests, more visits

muszek — Tue, 19 May 2009 09:20:26 +0000

The next set of updates is here! Here they come, in no particular order.

Bonuses

Bonuses influence your marketing impact (read below) and number of visits you can make. They're awarded for different achievements within the game (such as collecting flags). Read the updated manual for more info.

Dry guests and marketing department

Every city gets a certain number of dry (artificial, non-human) guests which are distributed among its hotels. Whoever has a higher "marketing impact" gets more visitors. You build your marketing impact by investing cash (virtual of course, we're not planning to charge anybody for anything :) ) in advertising and getting bonuses for doing stuff within the game. Again, read the manual if you wanna know more.

Only "active users" can get dry guests. Some people create a hotel and never come back - we just want to avoid them messing the fun for others. Users become active once they collect 10 flags, have played for at least 3 days and have built a third floor.

Marketing impact is calculated once per day (somewhere around 4 AM UTC) - you first dry guests should arrive around that time (more or less 16 hours from now).

"Manager visits" counted differently.

Heck, I never know how to call them. You know, those visits that you can make (as opposed to those that other people make in your hotel). Let's call them "manager visits" from now on. Here are the new rules:

Instead of being able to visits 3 hotels within the last 6 hours, you can now get a new visit every X minutes. The minimal number is 10 per day, but can be risen once you earn bonuses (can't remember exactly, but current max is somewhere around 27 per day).
Visits are accumulated. The max number you can get equals the number you can get within 24 hours. So if you can get 17 visits, once you reach those 17, you won't get any new ones until you use up some of them.

Dozens of small fixes

Many, many small changes, most of them below the hood (such as speed optimizations). Too many and too trivial to list them all here.

The code is somewhere in between the next major update (don't ask for a date...), which will include new facilities (restaurants, fitness clubs, etc.), employees and different kinds of guests (some prefer swimming pools, other libraries and the last kind is the sane one and likes to visit pubs).

Bankruptcy

(note: this paragraph has been added @19:45 CET, after the original post has been made). We see Yer Hotel as a game for casual gamers - something that shouldn't be taken too seriosly. Tomek has just written a code that lets you go bankrupt. Your cash is set to 300 and all of your hotels are reset to what they were when you first created them. To do so, go to my account and look for the magic button. It's only visible to people with very low bank balance.

Few thoughts after the reset

muszek — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 15:30:17 +0000

The recent changes included one thing - we wanted to exclude automated entries into hotels. To do that, we implemented a brain-dead simple captcha - anonymous users need to click on a "visit" button. Some of you rely on automated traffic to fill your huge hotels and that made you upset. My advice to you - scale down your operations a bit, so you'll be able to fill your buildings. All these visits were made either by bots or people who didn't even look at the page for a second. Sorry, but that's something other people consider as cheating.

We want to address your worries and roll out a part of the second version of the game earlier than we were planning to. Hopefully it's going to happen in the next few days. In short: every city will get a pool of "dry" (artificial) guests. You'll invest a certain amount of money into your marketing department. The level of investment will determine how many of these artificial guests you'll get. The code still requires some polishing - it will take some time.

Lastly, some of you complained about losing money during a reset (everyone's budget was set on 300 euros, as some of you complained about getting in a unmanageable debt). I'm sorry guys, it's a beta release and such things will happen. Right now we have over 3000 hotels and we can't manually take care of every one of them. What's most important to us at the moment is a speedy development - we want to roll new, exciting features as soon as possible.

The First Armageddon

muszek — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:50:31 +0000

The reset script has been executed. Everyone lost their hotels beyond the first one. Also, everyone's cash has been set to 300. Hit the "reply" button to rant about it :)

Multi-hotel support

muszek — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 20:38:37 +0000

Over the past two weeks we've been working on multi-user support. Parts of it have already been there (those of you who hack the system and build new hotels noticed that), parts needed to be done. Anyways, it's all here. There's been many changes, here are the most important ones:
* you can build new hotels (this time honestly :) )
* the bug that allowed to create new hotels for free has been closed
* you can "redesign" each hotel
* on a finances page, you can see stats separately for each hotel

Let's see how the new code performs for a few days and then we'll make a reset.

Minor improvements on the way

muszek — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 11:59:02 +0000

When we started working on the second version of the game, Yer Hotel didn't have much traffic... just few friends and us. It's gotten some attention since and we should take a break from developing new features and bring improvements to the old code base.

I've quickly hacked a way for you to delete comments in your own guestbooks. Here are things that we're gonna work on in the next few days/weeks:

* You'll be able to flag guestbook and forum posts as offensive. Mods (us at the moment) will review reported posts and delete them if necessary. We don't have any rules of behavior yet, common sense applies.
* RSS feeds with new threads and posts on forums (two feeds for each forum).
* You'll be able to build new hotels. Fixing the bug that allows you to build new hotels for free is trivial (one line of code) - we haven't done it yet cause it would make things unfair for those that haven't used that bug yet. Instead, we need to adapt the whole code base for new hotels (there are parts of code that don't take it very well), make the interface for building new hotels and close that bug. We'll probably "reset" the game as well, leaving everybody with a single hotel. Feel free to complain about it in this thread :). I, for one, think that starting over is fun :).

Few months later...

muszek — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:49:18 +0000

I haven't written anything for quite some time, so long that I needed Elfrida Snook and Nicholas B-Scott to ask me what's going on. Here it goes.

We're working on the next "version" of the game. It takes so long partly because it's a pretty big release, partly because we kinda had a lot on our plate thise past few months. I got married, moved to another country, decorated a new apartment and now my wife and I are about to move over to it. Tomek, the other dev, always has something good to do, too :).

And now a bit about what we you might expect. First of all, there will be 3 different kinds of guests - "party animals", "health freaks" and "nerds" (got better names? we're listening!). Each kind of guests prefers a different set of facilities within the hotel. That's right - you'll be able to build restaurant, swimming pools, shops, conferencing rooms, pubs, etc. Guests will visit these while staying at your hotel.

The third major component is staff - someone needs to clean up rooms, server food at your restaurants and beer in the pub. Workers will have their own set of skills and if everything goes as planned, we'll have hotels fighting for the best ones.

Also, we saw the need to introduce artificially created guests. We call them "dry" guests (as opposed to "wet" - alive ones). Every day, certain number of dry guests visits each city. Every hotel has its own marketing department. You'll hotel will get a bigger or smaller part of them, depending on how much you invest in advertising and how good your marketing guy is.

And now the disappointing part - I won't tell you when we'll release it. I stop trying to make any predictions long before we started creating Yer Hotel. It's done when it's done. I'd say we might be half way there, but don't try to extrapolate anything out of it.

Removing floors

muszek — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:46:23 +0000

As requested by numerous users, removing floors has been implemented. This should save you some cash in case you've had too much fun while building.

Stats on user profiles

muszek — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 01:15:39 +0000

Tired with designing the next incarnation of Yer Hotel I missed coding... so I messed a bit with user profiles. There are some new statistics on users - most notably, you can see how many times a user visited your hotels and vice-versa.

Back to thinking about restaurants, saunas, pubs and cleaning staff :)

Holidays

muszek — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:10:55 +0000

Sometime around last thursday I wrote a post about myself leaving for vacations and somehow I managed to not post it... call me computer-illiterate :)

Anyways, I'm recharging my batteries till mid next week - I should be back around Wednesday. See you then!