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Department Updates - October
Feature
Edited by Silquer
Academics - Arena Halls, 12 Hours of Classes, Class Design Projects
The big project from the Academics department this month was our Arena Halls! This was a large-scale project the Arena team has worked on for many months along with the build team, with the build and outline for this hub starting back in November 2024. The Arena team worked hard to create training not only in duelling, but has also expanded the ability for players to train in other arena game modes, including seasonal.
On the Class Design side, we've been working to bring back some old interactive classes which were created and lost! We're excited to see these taught again. The team has also worked on a new Unmagical Studies interactive class, so keep an eye out for that! Additionally, we’re working on a number of classes. Some of these are themed around our upcoming Winter Waltz and the winter holidays. We're also looking to tie up a number of long-term projects that the team has been working on, including a magical cuisine upgrade!
The big update for the Academics team is our Halloween-themed 12 Hours of Classes held on October 25th! There are plenty of classes and an extremely busy day for the team here. There's also a new Class Design interactive class debuting in this set of classes, and Arena events are hosted in these 12 hours too!
For a very small update, we are currently looking into improving spectator viewing platforms in both our arenas and Academics classrooms!
CM - Expeditions
Our big October project has been working on our A Murderous Meal expedition, which was just announced earlier this week and will be hosted this week! This is our first project with a bigger Curator team, and we're stoked for players to see it and investigate the storyline behind a murder mystery.
We’re currently working on two different expeditions. One is Winter Waltz themed, and the other is planned for 2026. We're excited about how we can incorporate parts of our successful past expeditions into our next two. These projects are both in the early stages of planning before we move to setting up tech and eventually testing.
Another sadder update is that our Scribe team unfortunately closed up doors this last month. The team has worked tirelessly on the wiki for years, and created hundreds of pages and thousands of edits. However, the wiki was no easy feat to keep updated, and we have now prioritised having this wiki updated by players.
Media - Store Releases, Competitions, Models, and Other Art!
We started October with the Autumn Store Releases. This featured the Pet Hedgehog, The Flame Staff, The Phoenix Staff, The Rose Wand, and the Headphones Bundle. It also came with plenty of reduced prices!
The Artworkers worked on new models for store releases and the Winter Waltz event, including some popular items in new colours!
The Store team is working on the November Store Releases! This will be quite a purple-themed release, perfect for any purple lovers out there! Without spoiling the surprise, we can also tell that we are thrilled to utilise something from 1.18 for it! Worth noting is that this release will be delayed until later in November due to the 1.18 maintenance.
We also rotated one of our In-Game Store displays earlier this month to showcase our seasonal winter items. Be sure to check them out by talking to Lucia Lowe in the Miscellaneous Shop at the back!
The WizNetworker team is discussing some exciting competitions for the near future. We recommend you keep an eye out for them and hope you will enjoy them once they are out!
The Arithmancer team has also been hard at work this month with making plenty of graphics and renders for the store, 1.18 server upgrade, and social media posts. They are also working on skins for the Winter Waltz event.
The Daily Diviner has been hard at work creating the monthly issue and revamping the Feature column.
Game Design - Halloween Event, Future Events, New Systems
The Game Design team recently released the Halloween Event. This event was solo led by SynonymsForSky who has provided some insight on the design process:
When creating this year's Halloween event, I wanted to create an event that brought the community together with one common end goal that everyone could work towards together. I've realized that the community is what keeps players coming back to Potterworld day after day, event after event - not so much the content itself but doing things with your friends. I also wanted to take inspiration from last year's Phantomphobia dungeon which was a major success and somehow incorporate that into the main content of the event. At first, when coming up with the actual concept of Halloween, it was rough and the idea was extremely jagged. I knew what I wanted to do, but not exactly how to execute it in a way to facilitate positive community engagement.
Parts of me looked at this year's Spring event and how much of a success that was, bringing the community together, while also considering the lessons we learned from Spring as well. I figured that I wanted to recreate that sense of community without the aspect of competition, which is how I decided to create a community based event where every aspect of the ghost hunting contributed to the end goal of unlocking the rewards. I figured this way it would encourage players to work together, solve riddles, hunt ghosts, and unlock rewards together as friends rather than competitors.
A lot went into the thought process of creating it to come together as one cohesive piece. I used the ghosts you can capture from Phantomphobia as the ghosts on the world, and with the helpful suggestions from Engel and Harrison throughout testing we worked together to make an amazing event that I hope everyone can experience. It definitely wasn't easy, but it was worth it in the end. I hope you all enjoyed this year's Halloween event!
We are also continuing the tradition of working on events and are focused on the next Winter Waltz!Otherwise, our focus this month has been the revamp of the "leveling system" with the introduction of the new Spell Book Progression System. This will introduce a new way to progress through the school years and arrive at Graduate!
We have also been working on revamping the FYE to accommodate the changes to the leveling system, teaching how to use the new Spell Book and how to progress using Spell Points.
There will be a new Prestige system that will incentivize players that hit max progression with unique and special rewards!
Technology & Development - Grounds Keepers and Developers
This month the Grounds Keepers worked on testing the Halloween Event, Arena Halls Revamp and latest Expedition. This was a busy month for us as we also had several other requests to work on, let alone these huge ones! We wanted to discuss what we got up to whilst testing these requests, and some of the fun bugs we came across!
M_Engel prepared the following summary of how the GK team tests a typical request:
Firstly, we receive a request from another department (it can be Game Designers, Academics, or Community Management). Then, after reading the description and what should be tested, a Sr+ Grounds Keeper will send out the details and make sure it runs smoothly for all the Grounds Keepers to test.
We usually test each piece of content several times, one round, we do accordingly to what they do with the quest, then play with the inventory full, and look for typos. Afterwards, we think outside the box while the team in charge fixes the bug we found, and we verify.
It is always funny finding bugs that, after buying an item, we can get it several times, as well, when teleporting to a place and teleporting out on the next second.
Additionally, it is no secret that we are also currently “all systems go” in preparation for the 1.18 update. Over the last few weeks we have been working with various departments to prepare Potterworld for 1.18. This includes working with Droobledore and AbstractMagi to prepare our resource pack for both versions 1.18 and 1.21.8, as even between these two versions, a lot of pack internals have changed! We have also been assisting the Build team on doing general repairs to the live world to fix any of the broken blog issues that we have previously mentioned! Finally from the development perspective, we have been busy establishing numerous to-do lists, checklists, and migration scripts that we will need to run next weekend once Potterworld enters maintenance mode to ensure everything transitions as smoothly as possible to 1.18.We recommend reading our latest Blog Posts, 1.18 announcement post, and following the #maintenance channel on our Discord for the latest updates!
These are all the updates the departments shared for October. Thank you for reading, and look forward to next month’s updates!
