first of all, thank you for the amazing doodle challenge submissions! <3 we love every single one, some of you are insanely creative.

since we are just dropping things as they happen now instead of waiting for a monthly recap, I already have three quick updates for the funcorner!

first, i overhauled the countdowns. there is an overview for all countdowns now, and you can toggle specific holidays on or off. you can also hover over certain countdown cards to see the meteorological and astronomical season days.

second, to make drawing a little bit easier, I replaced the brush size buttons for the weekly doodle challenge with a size slider and also added a stabilizer feature.

third, the emojify minigame has way more words now. there are almost 300 unique levels for both english and german, which should be plenty to waste some time. knowing me, I will probably add more anyway. <3

I was actually planning to take a break after the new funcorner went live, especially since the heatwave is taking a break too. but instead, I started planning the tutorial site refresh.

I originally just wanted a simple theme toggle as always, but then I got this idea to link the theme to fictional weather instead. like, "sometimes there would be rain in the background." everyone would see the same weather conditions, and this is where it escalated with too many "what if"s, like, "a visual forecast would be cool", "what if this would be based on seasons? lower chance for rain in summer, higher chance in autumn, snow only during winter", and "what if this was realistic, so after rain there could be sun and a low chance for a rainbow?"

I literally spent hours coding realistic forecasts and transitions before pausing and thinking... wait, is this even cool or just annoying?

the exact same thing happened when I tried overhauling the daily fortune cookie. what started as "maybe instead of a cookie, it could be a tree you water daily" spiraled into "what if there are different tree personalities, and the daily wisdom changes depending on who you talk to?" which then turned into a full garden system with random personality seed packages, soil plots, shop upgrades, dynamic personality dialogue branches, daily watering streaks, friend links, and random events. the thought of watering a grumpy little tree just to get insulted daily sounds hilarious to me, but it got way too complex, so the cookie is dead for now. maybe another day. but greatly simplified, for sure. unless...

poor danny always has to endure me hyping up these massive, accidental projects just for me to go "nevermind, I deleted it" two hours later, lmao. and it's been like that for the 16 years we've known each other.

anyway, I literally just wanted to mention three quick updates and here we are with a whole textwall as always.

until next time <3