Apple App Store Removal

Hello to the VDR Community!

Hey, everyone! It's Jesse Lax, here again! If you missed our last announcement, I'm creative director for Kwaai Software and the VDR Dev Team.

I wanted to drop in and talk to those of you in our Apple device community. I've recently been informed that we've been removed from the Apple App Store.

Don't panic (like I did)! It's temporary and VDR will still operate fine on your phone. However I would recommend that you don't uninstall it for now or you won't be able to play until we get re-listed. We're working on that as I type. It may take a few days to go through the submission process, so please be patient with us.

How did this happen? For those of you not in the know on the dev side of things, Apple asks its developers to pay a yearly membership fee to make the app available to you on their platform. The fee is not ideal, but no biggie. That's not the issue. 

If you were here for my last announcement, you'll know that we've recently lost a developer. That developer was our Operations Manager... and as you may have guessed from their title, they were the ones who handled nearly all of the business operations. 

You know, things like keeping us up to date when Apple randomly lets us know that there was a "billing issue" and they're going to pull us in five days if we don't race over to their Dev Console and update our information.

Which we didn't do because we didn't get the email in a timely way. 

It's 100% our bad.

But it's our bad with explanation. VDR's coder and I have very little in the way of business experience. Essentially: I'm an artist, he writes code. That's what we're good at! While we definitely do extra things outside of our skillset (I write and do HTML/CSS, for example), running the business end was never one of the things we had to learn. So having to take in these new responsibilities in order to keep things running has been a bit overwhelming for us.

So this is me saying, on behalf of the team, we're sorry. We dropped the ball on that one. We're going to fix it.

I suppose, if I'm being honest, this is also me asking for your forgiveness in advance should we botch anything else—entirely by accident—as we take on everything that comes with Kwaai's operations. Honestly had no idea how busy the business end keeps you! Live and learn, right?

If you're an Android person reading this: yes. Yes, we checked it! We're good on the Play Store!

Next, I've been informed there's a small subset of the community (less than 10 or so players) who are all having a unique issue in being unable to access the game. They're being told that an internet connection is required and can do nothing else. 

Listen, if this is happening to you and you haven't written in to the CSD (you know, where I'm yapping from?), you absolutely need to. If you don't write in we don't understand the scope of our problem.

So if there's way more than roughly 10 of you having this same trouble, we don't know because you haven't told us. Wee need to hear from you! Get those tickets in folks! Whatever your issue. The larger the issue, the faster it gets solved. Not because we're choosey, but because more data is more help. Go data!

Finally, update on the new Crypt Avatars. We're looking at injecting roughly 300 new Avatar art. Those of you who have been writing in to let me know what you'd like to see—your messages were received. Thank you! I'm not sure if you'll be impressed or hate me... but I guess we'll see!

In general, I've spent more time trying to focus on having more of an "Profile Picture" look for this update, so that the art on your profile is more identifiable. That said, plenty of beautiful vampires, action poses, crazy creatures, fun looks, and spooky spectacle to arrive soon. And I have noted your distaste for "background" pictures and "items". Know there's very few of this coming this time.  

Once the avatars are in I'll be working on porting as much of them as I can into Crypt Banners. Because it's nice when things match. Meanwhile I'm still working on getting our official Discord server public—it's complete, but I need to test some things! 

And let's not forget a Prowling Event and customizing your game (Skins?) is still on the table for this year. I'll let you know how that's coming when there's something to say about it.

Thanks for listening, and especially for being with us! Catch you soon.

Happy Hunting,

Jesse Lax

⌘ VDR Dev Team

Kwaai Software LLC