Devlog #4: a red moon and a mailbox

What happened

Noctivore is a text RPG for your phone. You hunt, fight, level up, gear up and explore, and there's an arena where you duel other hunters' builds. It runs in the browser at noctivore.app.

Five updates since the last devlog:

• The Blood Moon, a Halloween week that's on right now
• Midnight Matinee, a seasonal twelfth game on the arcade shelf
• A page for every hunter in the Arena
• An inbox, and letters between hunters
• A welcome letter for every new hunter

The Blood Moon

The moon over Noctivore turned red at midnight, your own local midnight wherever you are, and it stays red through Sunday 1 November. Then it sets by itself. It comes back every Halloween.

For the week, any hunt can meet the Hollow Harvester instead of the prey you expected. The screen flashes red and you choose: flee or attack.

The Harvester is fair at every level because it's a copy of you. It takes your own strength, defence and health, gear included, and comes out between 10% weaker and 10% stronger. You strike first, and it can't dodge or crit. In simulation that's about two wins in three at every level, whether you're bare-handed or in your best kit.

It starts rare and gets hungrier by the hour, so the kills spread across the week instead of all landing on night one. From 18:00 on the last Sunday it's waiting in every hunt.

Slay it once and you get:

• The Last Harvest, a trophy only this week can earn
• Gold worth three boss kills and xp worth ten, at your level
• A portrait of your hunter, drawn by hand in the game's style and sent by email by 8 November

That last one isn't something the game can do, so I do it.

Midnight Matinee

The arcade shelf has eleven small games played for a high score. For Halloween week there's a twelfth on top. A line from a horror film flickers on a picture-house screen and you pick the film from four ticket stubs. Thirteen reels a night. A quicker answer scores more, and a streak multiplies it up to ×3. A perfect night is 6,400.

The wrong answers are always films from around the same years, so the release date won't give it away. Like every game on the shelf, it pays nothing in the RPG. Only the high score counts, and yours stays on record after the moon sets.

A page for every hunter

Tap a name in the Arena and you get their page: portrait, stats, the gear they're wearing, and how your recent duels against each other went. If you can't fight them right now, the page says why, whether you're too wounded or too far apart in level, instead of just hiding the button.

Letters

The Arena has an inbox now. Registered hunters can write to anyone on the ladder: up to ten letters a day, and no more than three of those to any one hunter. Letters are plain text, a little bold and italic but no links, so a letter can't send anyone anywhere.

Two choices I spent the most time on:

• Blocking is silent. If you block someone, their letters stop arriving and the sender still sees "sent". Telling them would give a harasser exactly what they want to know.
• Reporting shows you what it sends. The report screen shows the exact text, letter included, and you send it from your own email. Nothing leaves your phone until you do.

A welcome letter

Today every existing hunter, 52 accounts, got a letter explaining how the night works: energy, healing between fights, what a blackout costs, feeding, travel and gear. Most new players decide in their first few minutes whether to stay, so new hunters now get the same letter as soon as their first save lands.

What I learned

The obvious way to send that letter was to have the database write it whenever a new save appears. I nearly did.

Every night a backup job copies the database, restores the copy into a scratch database and checks that everything came back. Restoring means putting every save back, one by one. With that rule in place, every save put back would have written a fresh welcome letter, so the copy would hold more letters than the original and the backup would fail every night. The backup itself would be fine. Only the check would break.

So the game asks for the letter itself, once, after a hunter's first save. A restore never asks.

Anything set to run "whenever a row appears" also runs when you restore a backup. Check what your restore actually does before you add one.

Your turn

If you meet the Harvester this week, tell me whether you fought or fled, and what your best Midnight Matinee score is. And if a letter from another hunter made you laugh, I'd like to hear about it. Tell me in the comments.

— D4rkF1r3fly