It was five years ago today that I first started working on WarLight.

WarLight has come a long ways in five years! Over 2.5 million multi-player games have been played and it’s showing no signs of slowing down.

Here you can see a graph of relative traffic to WarLight.net from the last few years:

In the early days, traffic was pretty flat. March of 2010 is when WarLight swapped from Silverlight to Flash and the traffic started steadily growing. The first spike you see in June 2010 is the big Poland spike, when lots of Polish people found the game (mostly through Polish site joemonster.org). The big increase in traffic in October 2011 was due to the release of the stand-alone client that was distributed to Flash gaming sites such as Kongregate and Armor Games. You can also see big dips in traffic every December as people are away for the holidays.

2013 is going to be an important year for WarLight. Stay tuned to the blog for announcements!

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.9! This is primarily an update to the mobile client, but it also includes some small bug fixes and improvements to the website. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

The Help Forum

There’s a new forum called the Help Forum. This is a place for players of all experience levels to ask questions about how WarLight works. If you’ve ever wondered how something works, feel free to drop by and ask! If you’re an expert on WarLight, feel free to drop in and impart your wisdom on others.

Other Website Changes

– Real-time games no longer send e-mails when you surrender, win, are eliminated, or vote to end. They were unnecessary since, unlike in multi-day games, the player was likely already present in the game when these actions took place.
– When chatting, you can sometimes see messages that came in from a turn greater than the one you’re looking at. The client now notices this and automatically refreshes to get the latest turn.
– When creating a multi-day tournament with the word “lobby” in the title, the game now suggests that you should probably use real-time for real-time tournament lobbies.
– Tweaked the refresh times a bit. It’s now faster in real-time games. It’s slower in multi-day games unless they advanced in the last 10-20 minutes so that they can still be played real-time.
– The clock shown for real-time games no longer shows 0 hours since it’s always 0.

Mobile Client Changes

This update to the mobile client adds a lot, so be sure to update to it if you’re one of the beta testers! Android beta-testers can install this via the usual method. Please try out these features and let me know how well they work for you.

– In the settings menu, you can now enable push notifications. When enabled, WarLight will notify you whenever it’s your turn or invited to a multi-day game.
– Added the Open Games page.
– Added the clock for real-time games.
– Added the analyze button for checking kill percentages.
– Added the ability to preview maps. This can be done from a game’s settings, a game’s lobby, or when creating a game.
– Added the ability to view custom scenarios when looking at a game’s settings.
– Added auto-refresh. Pressing the refresh button isn’t as necessary anymore. If you’re concerned about data usage, you can turn it off in the settings.
– Overhauled the look of the settings screen
– When long tapping the map, there’s now a circle that collapses around your finger to help you realize that it’s working. Information was also added to explain what this is, and the tip from the main menu was removed.
– iOS: Added retina iPad icon.

WarLight has just been updated to version 1.15.8! This update brings the mobile client closer to party with the Flash version. As is often the case, some improvements to the website snuck into this update too. This blog post contains a summary of what’s changed.

Change Player’s Color

It is now possible to change the color that you or an opponent appears as on your own screen. To try it out, open a game, click on someone’s name in the lower-right, and select the new “Change Color” button.

Changing a player’s color only affects your own computer; everyone else will still see them as their true color. This is useful for a few situations:

1. If you’re looking at a game where multiple players have very similar colors, you may wish to change one of them to make it easier to tell them apart.
2. If you’re colorblind and the colors chosen aren’t ideal, you can change players to colors that you can see more clearly.
3. If you aren’t playing as the color you wanted to play as due to someone else taking it, and are too stubborn to adapt, you can change yourself back to your desired color.
4. If you’re playing a complex team game, you can change colors on a team to similar shades to help in visualizing what each team owns. If you want, you can even change entire teams to the same color, as WarLight does not prevent you from setting multiple players to the same color.

Changes in color are temporary. If you refresh your browser, all players will revert back to their standard colors.

Other Website Changes

– Re-arranged the player popup a bit when making room for the Change Color button. It’s now easier to read the info box when it has long lines.
– The seasonal ladder now requires 7 games to be completed before getting a rank instead of 5. This will cause the ratings to be less chaotic in the early days of a season.
– Fixed a bug that caused an error if you typed a non-number into the reinforcement card’s progressive multiplier box.

Mobile Client Changes

This update finishes out the ability to create multi-player games from the mobile client! All customization options are now available when creating games. Since this added a lot of UI to the app, it would be great if beta testers can try it out and e-mail if they find any problems.

Android beta-testers can install this via the usual method. If you’re a WarLight member and want to beta-test the iOS version of the game, there’s now a sign-up page located here.

Here’s the full change log for this update:

– Added the ability to customize game settings when creating games.
– Added checkboxes on multi-select screens.
– Template owners are no longer shown when you’re only looking at your own templates since they were redundant.
– Cleaned up the some of the card UI.
– Fixed a bug that occurred if you rotated your device while a game was loading.
– Fixed a bug when creating a game with custom scenarios that caused new players added to a game to not get assigned a slot by default.
– Android: Added space to the bottom of the menu so it looks a bit nicer.
– Android: The software keyboard no longer pops up by default on the game creation screen.
– Android: Fixed a bug that caused the fog texture to not appear after locking and unlocking your device.
– IOS: Retina devices now render the map in full resolution
– IOS: Fixed a bug that made some main menu buttons unclickable on some devices
– IOS: The app works under iOS 5 now. 6 is no longer required.