Dev Tracker

It's a letter we haven't used before. :)

We have an update for everyone today, not only on the progress of Ancient Auraboriculture Observations, but the state of Flight Rising lore and worldbuilding in general.

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Flight Rising Lore, Past to Current

We are in the process of rebuilding how we plan, develop, and execute our lore.

Going all the way back to when we first launched Flight Rising in 2013, we’ve been mindful about how we grow our team. Expanding too fast without enough financial runway can quickly kill a business. This led to the members of our small team taking on multiple responsibilities, even multiple disciplines/departments. For the past 11 years, many members of our team have had to triage bugs, tasks, live operations incidents, and creative writing/editing in addition to plates that were already plenty full with work of our respective disciplines. Every member of our team wears multiple hats, so to speak.

This first impacted lore negatively during Bounty of the Elements in 2018. There were many, many moving and connected parts, stories were being drafted on the fly, and some hadn’t even been started at launch. It was simply too much work for the small number of people involved. To get ten stories (all of which are now the foundation for the future of our worldbuilding) signed off on and released, our writing team quickly expanded from one or two people to include myself and SuburbanSamurai.

After Bounty of the Elements released, we realized there was going to be a very, very long lag time between the opening arc in 2018 and when you would finally be able to engage with the story in Adventure Mode. Ancient dragon releases provided us with an opportunity to continue to give you some lore and insight into the world of Sornieth while you waited. These would be (mostly) self-contained short stories with potential to possibly lay down the groundwork for future quests in Adventure Mode.

Over time, the outlines the team created grew increasingly detailed and ambitious, while the requirements of a 3 to 5 page document stayed in place. Part of meeting those length restrictions involved heavy reliance on the breed articles to fill in dragon characteristics, history, and even context relevant to some of the stories. We wrongly assumed this would be sufficient context for the stories. This assumption left many players in a position where those who only read the story were left with many questions. As a result, most stories underwent wide, sweeping cuts or changes, they lost context, and created clunky transitions and confusion. Many of our more recently released stories changed shape significantly in the editing process, and in the case of the Auraboa lore, many scenes/ideas never even made it to the draft submitted for editing.

And this brings us back to the “many hats” issue. Until recently, lore was fit in around our multiple job duties. Increased release pacing while supporting regular content updates, feature development needs, and the needs of a growing community led us straight into what we can only describe as crunch creep. The short turn-arounds meant that many stories never had time to really bake: they were brainstormed, outlined, drafted, underwent an edit pass, signed off on, and then published in rapid succession. After the Aether release, we realized we were effectively and unintentionally crunching ourselves to get the short stories out. We started course-correcting as best we could under the circumstances. Everything came to a head with the Auraboa lore, where in our attempt to avoid harmful cultural tropes and stereotypes, we—as one player accurately described it on social media—ran face first into them.

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Ancient Auraboriculture Observations Update

We knew going in that having a dragon breed be in a position where they always existed but were never interacted with, that it would be frighteningly easy to fall into certain harmful and even outright racist stereotypes. Our intent from the start was to have the Auraboa be on the same level playing field with the rest of the Nature dragons. Their distance and separation was by their own choice, and any interactions only happened with Auraboa autonomy and consent. We had multiple meetings about this concern in advance and always approached these dragons and this story from that perspective. Inspiration was drawn from the Star Trek episode ‘Darmok’ and the movie ‘Arrival’. Where we failed to put two and two together was the Auraboa design in combination with the shortcomings of the story.

The above is not to say that our original intent absolves us of our responsibility to correct this problem, because it doesn’t absolve us. We also don’t expect this information to change how the story read to you at the time of release. We are providing you with additional insight—an explanation—so that you may have a fuller picture. Our commitment to divorcing our lore from and avoiding the harmful cultural and colonial stereotypes that often pervades fantasy and science-fiction remains a top priority for us.

Where are we with Ancient Auraboriculture Observations?

We met with the professional writer we mentioned in an earlier update after they had an opportunity to review the short story. We discussed our goals, where older or newly added areas may not be working or serving the story as well, and the writer has now performed their own finesse pass on the story. This iteration is currently undergoing review with the Lore team. Once completed, the writer will go back through the story and polish it up for publication.

We know you’re wondering why this process has taken as long as it has. The Auraboa short story was prioritized immediately after we received your feedback in November, wherein we threw everything but the kitchen sink into the draft—what we didn’t include originally but wanted to and additional context based on your feedback. After the sensitivity read, we went back and more or less tossed the kitchen sink in for good measure. From there, we needed to pause as a team and breathe. We could rush out the story (again), or we could do it right. Our goal was to regroup after the 2023 holiday season and, well, that brings us right back to the larger issue of the many hats we wear and balance every day. This also brings us to how we’re moving forward with Flight Rising’s lore.

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Flight Rising Lore Going Forward

We’ve made the decision to launch our next Ancient breed (on April 17, 2024) without an accompanying short story.

While we haven’t made any concrete decisions on other types of follow-up world-building content for the upcoming breed, it will probably look different than we’re all used to.

To address, correct, and prevent what we’ve described above going forward, we’re in the process of rebuilding our entire approach and workflow for tracking, managing, and developing the lore and world of Flight Rising. A few changes we can tell you about now are that we are moving away from reliance on the breed article for any necessary context or history and from hard page limits restricting how future stories develop and flow. We’re also prioritizing the Auraboa short story as the first project in our new workflow.

Thank you for reading, thank you for being a part of Flight Rising, and thank you for your patience while we work to improve our internal processes. We hope to have an exciting announcement out for you soon on additional improvements in a future front page update!

Hello @Cinnibari! Your thread title was edited to bring it in line with our rules about Forum Etiquette. Thank you!

Hmm. *checks notes* According to our legal dragons—ah—team, Flight Rising is a browser based video game and website. In other words, Flight Rising is not a social media platform. I hope this helps! Thank you!

New genes, scenes, and familiars!

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Boulder and Myrid
Boulder and Myrid are now appearing on Banescale, Gaoler, and Veilspun dragons! The ancient versions of these genes can be traded for by visiting Glass and Gloss.

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Coliseum Scenes
The Forgotten Cave venue in the Coliseum has gained a new scene for your dragons to collect and apply! Traversing the challenges of the Forgotten Cave may provide your dragons with this scene as a rare drop from this point forward.

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Fiona's Friends
Fiona has managed to acquire more familiars that she could use a hand in caring for. Those who manage to accomplish her feats may be worthy candidates!

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Wavecrest Saturnalia Contest
The eleventh annual Wavecrest Saturnalia will begin on April 21, 2024, and we're running a skin and accent contest in celebration! Click here for more information!

Please check the known issues and working-as-intended sections before making a report!

This thread is to track any gene errors that occur with the with the Boulder and Myrid genes released as part of the Forgotten Scenes and Genes update. This thread is for the newly released Boulder and Myrid genes only (Banescale, Gaoler, Veilspun), and does not encompass previously released genes.

In this thread, players may report any errors they encounter with the new genes. These can be technical errors, or consistency issues. This thread is intended to focus on these potential errors so that they can be addressed swiftly





Please report any errors you encounter and we will do our best to correct them in a timely manner. This thread will close out 45 days after release, on May 25th, 2024. After this time, players may report technical issues with these and other gene errors in the Modern Gene Error Backlog Thread, or the Ancient Gene Error Backlog Thread, but further consistency issues will not be accepted for review and will be considered working as intended.

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Note that it may take a short while for the site's internal image cache to reflect the corrected image assets.

Corrected Issues

Known Issues

Investigating (Not sure if issue or not)

Working as intended

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I will be deleting reports that are not relevant to the Boulder and Myrid gene expansion new release, reports that have been corrected, reports are not considered an issue, duplicate reports, and discussion or chatter as I encounter/investigate them to keep the thread current with gene reports only.


This thread is accepting reports on the following genes only:

The following corrections went in tonight:

• S: Paint - (All Undertide) The colored portions were missing from the ear fins of the dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Spire - (All Undertide) The pointy diamond pattern should have been in the arc of the head fins. Consistency error. Fixed.
• P: Jaguar - (All Undertide) The spot density and sizing on Undertide was less varied and less dense than with modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Rosette - (All Undertide) The spot density and sizing on Undertide was less varied and less dense than with modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• P: Petals - (All Undertide) The gradient coverage needed to be expanded and marking width made thicker. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Butterfly - (All Undertide) The gradient coverage needed to be expanded and marking width made thicker. Consistency error. Fixed.
• P: Tapir - (All Undertide) The stripes were thinner than those on modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Striation - (All Undertide) The stripes were thinner than those on modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• P: Metallic - (All Undertide) The deep shadow alternate hue reflection needed to be slightly reduced. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Alloy - (All Undertide) The deep shadow alternate hue reflection needed to be slightly reduced. Consistency error. Fixed.
• T: Contour - The markings needed to be thickened. Consistency error. Fixed.
• T: Branches - (M Undertide) The perspective on the far horn did not match then angle of the dragon's head. Technical issue. Fixed.
• P: Flaunt - (All Undertide) The gradients and belly fades were adjusted for consistency. Consistency issue. Fixed.
• S: Flair - (All Undertide) The gradients and belly fades were adjusted for consistency. Consistency issue. Fixed.
• T: Topcoat - (Undertide F, H) The accent color on the wing arm was added to match the M pose and Auraboa. Technical error. Fixed.
• T: Firefly - (All Undertide) The glow around the fireflies was intensified. Consistency error. Fixed.
• T: Blossom - (Undertide M) There was color bleed on two flowers in the Undertide M pose upper wing. Technical error. Fixed.

The shop is open for 3 days during April Fool's. While it's not possible to get the items outside of the capsules right now, we did want to announce in advance that they would be returning so players knew how they would be acquired in the future and whether or not they would retire.

The item tooltips for the fade and dark vials have been updated to say that they are natural eye types, but it may take up to an hour for the site's internal cache to catch up!

Dragons are seeing Sornieth with new eyes!

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Marva's Gifts
Marva has played her tricks yet again! Our team was able to locate the original elemental flags and return them to their rightful place of honor beneath your avatars. The flight forums had to be scrubbed clean of her vandalism, which took a full day to sort out! The scoundrel!

We want to notify players the the capsules Marva distributed through Galore appear to have finally stabilized, and will open to reveal the items below. In addition, these items will return for sale next year as we attempt to apprehend Marva at her stall in The Grand Exchange. Vial of button sight was included in all capsules, and is an unnatural eye type that can only be applied, and will not be hatched.

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New Natural Eye Types
Dark and Faded are two new eye types that dragons now have a rare chance to receive upon hatchling! Want to apply the new eyes to an existing dragon? The following vials now have a chance to stock in the treasure marketplace.

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Wavecrest Saturnalia Contest
The eleventh annual Wavecrest Saturnalia will begin on April 21, 2024, and we're running a skin and accent contest in celebration! Click here for more information!

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Additional Updates

• We will be performing scheduled maintenance from 06:00 - 07:00 Server Time on Friday, April 5. During this period Flight Rising will be unavailable.
• A reminder that the Undertide Gene Expansion error thread will be closing to consistency reports on April 7th.

It's an error. Undel is working on fixing this as I type

Oops! That's because the dragons without eyes applied usually have empty sockets. We'll get something in there to fill out the missing eye.

@RipPip, the site was in maintenance at the time you opened the capsule. It appears that the capsule was opened before the contents were fully loaded in. Please send us a message through Contact Us for help. Thank you!

Friday's scheduled maintenance is backend work, not an update.

Hey.

I hear you, all of you.

Right now everything in our world feels unstable, unsure, and utterly outside of our control. And you're not wrong to feel that way. It's very, very human to project or redirect that energy onto areas or spaces you feel you have a voice in or more control over—aka, agency. When we do that though, we can start to feed our very valid, very reasonable anxieties and concerns with borrowed trouble or worries. If we aren't careful, if we aren't mindful, it can consume us.

No one can tell the future; we can only focus on that which is within our control. While it wouldn't be appropriate or professional for us to post about or discuss finances, what I can tell you is that we ourselves are mindful of the areas that can kill businesses, like growing a team too fast and without consideration for sustainable runway.

Where can you contribute to Flight Rising's continued future? What is under your control?

Ads and gem purchases keep the lights on and our employees paid. If you're able to turn on ads on, we appreciate it. Should you come across a bad ad, follow the instructions here on how to report bad ads. If you have disposable income to spend on entertainment, you can buy gems from us on our Purchase Gems page.

I'm locking this thread now, before it spirals. Thank you for sharing your feedback and your concerns. We appreciate you.

It's after 06:00 server time on April 2nd, sooooo it's time to lock this thread.

10/10, well done, @KamiRain and everyone here who showed their support!

@KamiRain, I've long appreciated this particular form of art.

@KamiRain, while typically this should be moved to the Guides forum, given the duration of the event and your dedication to Marva, we can make an exception for today. That said, your title was edited to bring it in line with Forum Etiquette. Thank you!

Thank you for the report @Ais.

Have you turned off April Fools' under account settings?
https://flightrising.com/main.php?p=settings

Thank you for the report everyone. The bug is now fixed!

Marva has been known to prank both the players AND developers every year. She got us again!

It's a bug. We're on it. Thank you!

And a ping for your new URL in Bug Reports! @Gubyub

The following Rules & Policies updates were updated and originally announced on February 22, 2024:

• Religious Images & Iconography
• AI Images, Writing, Videos
• Cross-Site Trading
• Do not broadcast, advertise, or otherwise highlight or call attention to your age.

Hello @LothaireArt, this is a question for Support. You can submit a query through Contact Us. When you do, be sure to use the email address registered to your Flight Rising account. Thank you!

The following corrections have gone in:

The following corrections have gone in tonight:

• P: Fern - (All Undertide) The snout fade was missing on this gene. Technical error. Fixed.
• P: Ground - (All Undertide) The second layer of shadow should have shown both the cracks and the dimensionality of the dragon. Technical error. Fixed.
• P: Jupiter - (Undertide M, F) The stripes were less dense and gradients had less stripe coverage than with modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S Eye Spots - (All Undertide) The head frills were missing the markings that most breeds with facial crests or frills have. Consistency error. Fixed.
• S: Fissure - (All Undertide) The second layer of shadow should have shown both the cracks and the dimensionality of the dragon. Technical error. Fixed.
• S: Saturn - (Undertide M, F) The stripes were less dense and gradients had less stripe coverage than with modern dragons. Consistency error. Fixed.
• T: Scales - (F Undertide) The scales on the left side of the belly did not match the length of those on the right. Technical error. Fixed.
• T: Spines - (F Undertide) The spines along the tail peeking out between the fins were following the side and not the spine. Fixed.

The following corrections have gone in:

• Primary Orb (All this release) - The belly layer was left in by accident. Orb was never intended to have the main belly color present. This is considered an error. Corrected.
• Secondary Weaver (Fae F) - There are stray brush strokes on the very tips of the wings were not filled in. Corrected.

The following items have had apostrophes added to their names. In our legacy code, apostrophes were not handled well, but this is no longer an issue.

Modern dragons begin displaying an ancient twist! What was old is new again!

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Orb and Weaver
Once only seen on select ancient dragons, Orb and Weaver are now appearing on modern breeds and many other ancients. This primary and secondary gene can be created in Baldwin's Bubbling Brew by alchemists level 26 and above. The ancient versions of these genes can be traded for by visiting Glass and Gloss.

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Spring has Sprung!

The seasons have changed, and Sage's Seasonal Sundries is now stocking items celebrating spring!

Please check the known issues and working-as-intended sections before making a report!

This thread is to track any gene errors that occur with the Orb and Weaver Gene Expansion. This thread is for the newly released Orb and Weaver genes only, and does not encompass previously released genes.

In this thread, players may report any errors they encounter with the new genes. These can be technical errors, or consistency issues. This thread is intended to focus on these potential errors so that they can be addressed swiftly





Please report any errors you encounter and we will do our best to correct them in a timely manner. This thread will close out 45 days after release, on May 7th, 2024. After this time, players may report technical issues with these and other gene errors in the Modern Gene Error Backlog Thread, or the Ancient Gene Error Backlog Thread, but further consistency issues will not be accepted for review and will be considered working as intended.

---

Note that it may take a short while for the site's internal image cache to reflect the corrected image assets.

Corrected Issues

Known Issues

Investigating (Not sure if issue or not)

Working as intended

---

I will be deleting reports that are not relevant to the Orb and Weaver gene expansion new release, reports that have been corrected, reports are not considered an issue, duplicate reports, and discussion or chatter as I encounter/investigate them to keep the thread current with gene reports only.


This thread is accepting reports on the following genes only: