Ueda

That'll be a long time from now. After Mist

Hi Ninjas, First of all, Happy New Year! To all the new members in the community, welcome to the forums and I hope to see you in-game soon. As you guys may have noticed, I haven't been around for awhile. I got busy with other projects and sort of lost the time to work on Nin Online. I'd like to apologize for the slow down and the eventually closure of the Open Alpha. It was never intended to go down, but due to the lack of manpower we had to. On the bright side, I've been starting to get more done, so I'd like to share with you the progress on the Sand Village and the plains and fields around it. Here are peeks at the vast amount of maps coming along with the Sand Village! The Kazekage's Office The Sand Village Academy Court Yard This is basically the equivalent of the Leaf Village's starting classroom. Entrance to the Desert Warzone Desert Warzone This is a huge map where anything goes. You can see it littered with past battles. With weapons fragments and signs of death. Sand Village Cemetary When there is a war.. there is casualties afterall. The Sand Village Hospital The exterior and interior of the hospital! Streets of the Sand Village The Village is so large and packed with detailed little areas like this. It's a bit hard to realize how much the release of the Sand village with change the game. Simply put, we will finally have reasons to PvP, we will have an on-going competition between ninjas of both villages, and finally politics and Kages will matter. I'm sorry this is taking such a long time to get done. As you all know, I really care a lot about the little details that go into making this world believable, immersive and fun to explore. I try to stay close to the source material, while also taking into consideration how it will affect the game play and take my time on introducing new areas. In the grand scheme of things, I hope that Nin Online will be a game to stand the test of time as the best Naruto Inspired MMORPG in terms of immersion. I hope everyone is as excited as I am! Regards, Rory

British English at it's finest

Yes eventually Nil. We can have maps as big as we like. But that's on the expense of the server and loading times. Thanks everyone else for the good comments.

Hi Ninjas, While the programmers have been hard at work fixing server issues, I've been working on new areas leading into the Sand Village. This may or may not interest you, but it's tough balancing the positions and distances of villages to certain key areas while retaining the layout of the world we all know and love. I've over worked my brain time and again to try to get it right. So this is roughly how the path from the Forests where the Scout team of Samurais currently is until the Sand Village is going to be, some of which are already mapped out! Takumi Village is going to be a trading village, mainly specializing in weapons. So weapons ninjas and sword wielders will be in for a treat here! I've also spent some time to redraw the server images! That's all for my quick dev log. I hope you guys don't mind that it's even more drafty and less professional than usual. Development logs are supposed to be how I can share my progress with you guys quickly and get feedback sometimes. Regards, Rory

https://www.ovh.co.uk/dedicated_servers/game/ That's the server we bought. Also, my programmers are barely sleeping, spending every moment awake trying to solve issues on the server, while I create more content for the next patch, all voluntarily with no benefits. Regards, Rory

We're not about to teach you how to exploit my game.

Strength is for Weapon damage

Dear Ninja, It is my honor to announce that as scheduled, the open alpha will go Live. The closed alpha went down a few days earlier than expected because we decided to move to a dedicated server, whereas we were using a VPS before. Our hope is to provide our players with the best experience possible, even if it costs more than what we expect to get back. Our love and passion for the community has only continued to grow in the past months of planning for the launch, because of all your support! If you haven't already seen the download links on the forum, here you go! Download We have a great line up of events going on in the next few weeks as it's nearing the holiday season. So let's enjoy the end of 2015 together in the world we all worked so hard to create together! See you at the Launch Party! Regards, Hokage Rory

Who needs sleep when you can be in a virtual sauna with a bunch of people you've never met!

Depends, what do you identify as. A guy stuck in a girl's body or a girl stuck in a guy's body?

Dear Ninjas, As you may know, Open Alpha is happening in 3 days time. When the server opens we're going to have an hour long Sauna Party to celebrate the start of the game as a service. If you still don't know what this means, you can read about it here. The Open Alpha launch will take place on the 20th October, 5pm PST. The party will take place an hour after the server goes live, at 6pm PST. Dress code: Naked House rules: Be in the respective gender baths. Most of the Nin Online team will be present and we'll try our best to answer your questions and hold some meaningful discussions, so don't miss it! Here are directions to the Leaf Village Sauna with the first Shakugan no Shana opening in the background, for all our new players. See you at the Leaf Village Sauna. Regards,

Thanks for the effort You might want to teach them to use Gyazo.

it's alright. He's right, it's all in the original post.

Aww, it's okay I'll be online more on the weekend too!

It will be available later today around 4pm PST!

A lot of work has been put into this coming alpha and a lot more is to come. thanks for the support!

Glad to see so many are just as excited as I am.

Dear Ninja, It is my pleasure to announce that we are finally moving into closed alpha stage starting tomorrow (14 Oct) at 5:00pm PST (Pacific Standard Time). Final Alpha? What does this mean? Because we are soon to reach a point in development where we are confident to start running the game as a service, we are going to keep the alpha online indefinitely for players to play. During this time, we will unveil new content constantly and introduce a cycle of monthly events that will keep the game world exciting and happening! This may take some time. As you know, Nin Online is heavily based on RP and RP Events, while being a PvP combat game, we've spent the past year or so building up the PvP environment with combat that is fast-paced yet tactical, and diverse in choices for fighting styles, but the RP events and systems will take awhile to work out as a community! The phases of the final alpha Firstly, we will will conduct a closed alpha from the 14 October to the 18 October. During which we will tackle any remaining bugs inhibiting players from enjoying the game. We will be thankful to all participants who help us find bugs and help us balance the game's combat and leveling pace. This phase will be available for all Early Access, Silver Ninja and Gold Ninja. The server will then be taken down for a few days and re-opened fully as the Open Alpha phase, in which anyone can participate. Open Alpha expectations First Hokage will be Rory. There will be a Chunnin Exams held a few weeks post Launch (Open Alpha). When we transition into Beta there may be a wipe. We will try to launch our cosmetics shop feature sometime in Open Alpha. Level cap is 30, jutsus are spread out into their rightful balance. Lots of new features since the last test. Shifts in game design has left certain features untouched (Missions are disabled and will only be reintroduced later as a minor feature instead of being the main game play progression). 1st Chunnin Exams The first Chunnin Exams is ready to go. Since there are no Jounins nor Chunins to lead teams, players may form teams of 3 ninjas on their own. In order to be eligible, all ninjas in the team must be Level 30 and be Genin rank, there will also be a Ryo fee per team. Registration will be done through the forum. There will be 4 stages in-game - Theory Exam, Forest of Death, Preliminaries and Finals. More detailed will be announced soon. All illegible ninjas should stay tuned for the Closed Alpha client in the restricted forum! The client will be out an hour or so before the server goes live for the early access, silver and gold ninjas. Regards, Rory

I'm just as thankful to Seth for keeping everything going while I'm gone.

Dear Ninjas,It's been 1 year and 10 months since enlisted into the Singapore Army for conscription. During these 2 years, there has been many periods of time where I simply could not find any time to work on Nin Online. The game's development was certainly anything but slow for an independent game of this scale, but yet it was nothing compared to the first 6 months of development which was prior to me enlisting into the army.During these past months, the game has been largely ran by my co-creator, Seth. Who has done a great job in keeping the team organized, keeping the game going and programming the game alongside Abhi.A lot of improvements to the game's development has been going on in the background since about a month ago when my Army duties basically ended. But we haven't been posting too many updates. So what will happen now that I'm back full-time? I will be dedicating all my time to creating content and managing the project.Whack aka. Eddie (Co-founder of Nin Online) is back on the team and working on programming.More Development logs, more Live streaming and more player interaction from me.We'll be pushing out the next test ASAP, and thanks to our work over the past month or so, you will love this test. TRUST ME.I'm not going to spoil anything on the new features in the engine and the progress of content here. But stay-tuned for the coming development logs from me!Regards,Rory

Nin Online is lucky to have talented people like you put in hard work to make this game great I hope everyone enjoyed Shikate's first development log and look forward to using these Jutsus in-game.

When I suspected the theme could be an issue, I ran speed tests multiple times. It's exactly the same.