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Posted by Zee / Saturday April 13 2024

★ ENAMEL PINS HAPPENING! 2024 ★

🪱 FINALLY!!! MAKING!!!
🪱 ENAMEL PINS FOR FRANTIC FANFIC!!!

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⭐ BUT which characters will become pins?!
⭐ that's for YOU to decide!!
VOTE HERE!
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✅ YOU CAN ALSO PILE EXTRA VOTES ON OUR TIKTOK HERE!
✅ ONLY COMMENTS COUNT FROM UNIQUE ACCOUNTS, "LIKES" DON'T ADD MORE VOTES.
✅ SHARE THE VIDEO WITH FRIENDS (AND COMMENT!) TO GUARANTEE YOUR FAVE CHARACTER GETS PICKED AS A PIN!
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🍅 we are DEFINITELY making a wormman 🪱 pin and a buffpire pin, as those two characters are our unofficial mascots. but for the rest... PLEASE VOTE!! 🥰
🍅 the character drawings will be altered and cleaned up slightly for the enamel pin process - but we want to keep the sketchy style as much as possible 🩷!
🍅 we're looking to do 6 character pins for the kickstarter with the possibility of doing 10 total (using stretch goals!) + bonus stickers if it goes well!

GOOD LUCK & thanks for playing!
- zee and michael
Happy New Year
Posted by Zee / Jan 2023

★ OMG AN UPDATE! ★

Hiya!! Zee here, omg the last update we did was in Feb last year. Needless to say, Michael and I got EXTREMELY BUSY IN 2022 WITH OTHER PROJECTS! We made it a goal over the winter holiday to push some changes that needed to happen and overall just do a bit of a cleanup on the site.

★ NEW! BUG REPORT BUTTON! ★

We added a super easy way to report any bugs. You need to be logged in to report the bug. Click on the "REPORT A BUG" button to check it out!

★ WHAT TOOK YA SO LONG? ★

Michael fixed some bugs, I went over the site and tried to make it as readable as possible, we removed some buttons that didn't really make any sense and we deleted public lobbies. Why delete public lobbies? Because we didn't want to make a separate chat client for the game, and without that people have told us using public lobbies is really difficult and frustrating. So instead of having a bad experience for people using PL, we decided to get rid of it completely. You can still make use of our Discord to find people to play with if you are over 18.
Also! A big milestone for us as 2022 closed out: we hit 200 supporters! Thank you so much!
Happy New Year! Until next time!
Zee and Michael
Be My Valentine... <3
Posted by Zee / Feb 09 2022

★ SUPPORTER AVATARS ★

We've given all supporters some alternate avatars! They're in greyscale as a tribute to Japanese manga. There's seven in total, with alternates for Buffpire, Ghost, Kitsune, Potato, Reapr, Skellybts and Wormman! We hope you enjoy them in addition to Plat, your prompt packs, themes, no ads on the site and the zine :>.

★ SITE CLEANUP ★

We're still in the middle of some site cleanup, we want to make things easy to read. So we're doing some font changes across several pages.

★ AUDIENCE FIX ★

Viewers weren't able to join the audience past the lobby screen. We've made it so they can join at any time until the voting period! At that point the game locks because it would be unfair to join later on.

★ CHARACTER MATURITY RATING ★

On recommendation from a group of players playing Self Insert mode, we have added the option to specify that individual characters can be flagged with All Ages on the character writing screen.
Example: If a player had their name added automatically with Self Insert but they were uncomfortable with being written about in mature situations (violence, harsh language, etc.) in a game marked as Mature by the VIP, they can use this option to guide other players in their writing.
When the player selects "All Ages" for the character, (let's say the character's name is "Steve") that character is now bound to an All Ages maturity rating. If "Steve" was shuffled to another player and the player wanted to use "Steve", the story would be locked to "All Ages" automatically, no matter the maturity rating selected by the other characters in the story.
This setting does not show up in All Ages games because by default all characters should be written at an All Ages level.

★ BUG FIXES ★

The forced prompts weren't visible on the reading screen. Oops! We've added those now. So now you can have a reason why your part was so messy. Of course. It was the prompt! It's always the prompt.
Reacts weren't showing during stories. Fixed!
People could react and vote for their own parts or stories. Again. Oh boy... Michael has fixed that again.
The room code didn't stay hidden after hiding it, that's not great for streamers! We fixed it.

★ THAT'S ALL FOR NOW ★

Enjoy the latest update!! We've been working hard on a grant proposal so hopefully that all goes well. Don't forget to join the Discord if you're over 18 or follow us on TIKTOK for more updates :D!
The Frantic Fanfic Team
Happy New Year
Posted by Zee / Sunday January 9 2022

★ ACCOUNTS ★

You can login to Frantic Fanfic with Twitter/Discord now.
A few reasons for this:
  • We needed a way to give supporters of the game a secure way to access additional features.
  • We wanted to give users the ability to track how many stories they’ve written and maybe other fun stats later.
  • We want to be able to prevent trolling in public lobbies in the future.
With logging in you can rank up as you write! There’s 6 ranks in total and the more stories you're a part of, the higher your rank goes.

★ GIVING COOL STUFF TO SUPPORTERS OF FRANTIC FANFIC ★

Have we told y’all how much we love people who support our game? Because this update is mostly for them. Yes, Frantic Fanfic is still free to play! But the people who kicked us some bucks to our Ko-fi or bought a zine or some merch… YEAH! This update is 90% about you! You didn’t have to. But you did. And we really appreciate that. Here’s how you get the cool stuff!
Upgrade your account to "Supporter" status if you supported us in 2021:
  1. Login to franticfanfic.com with your Discord or Twitter.
  2. Send an email to [email protected] with the title "Supporter Account", using the email address that you sent a Ko-fi with/bought merch with and include:
    • The Discord name or Twitter name you signed into the site with.
    • How you supported (ko-fi, merch, zine) so we can cross-check!
We’ll set your account to the Supporter status as fast as we can :)
To upgrade to Supporter status in 2022: Log in on the "Profile" page. Navigate to the "Become a Supporter" page. Click on the “Become a Supporter” button. Pay $4.99 CDN. Refresh the page! Your account will now have Supporter status and all the additional features.

So here’s the cool stuff!

★ ★PROMPT PACKS★ ★

Supporters of Frantic Fanfic can use all the prompt packs! We came up with hundreds of new prompts and organized them by category so you can add or subtract categories at will. We also added a bunch to the basic prompt pack with this update too, there's over 400 basic prompts now! So everybody gets something.

★ THEMES ★

People said they wanted more site themes because the bubblegum pink colour hurt their eyes. Understandable! The first theme (noir) is free. Winter is Michael’s favourite. I like the 90s theme but my eyes are already fried hahaha.

★ ZINE ★

Digital version of all 82 pages of the zine on site! A record of why and how this game came to be with some cute comics and supporting art from us! BTW you can still buy the physical copy of the zine if you want, it’s signed by both of us!

★ AVATARS ★

The special avatar PLAT is unlocked for supporters and more alternate costume avatars will be rolled out with the next updates. Zee is doing a series of 5 or 6 avatars inspired by shoujo manga tropes that she hopes y’all will like! They’ll be available as they’re finished up.

★ NO ADS ★

An ad-free experience for the signed-in supporter user.

★ OTHER CHANGES - FORCED PROMPTS ★

We added forced/optional prompts as a setting. Forced prompts displays a word or phrase that you have to incorporate in your part or overall story. If forced is selected, it gets rid of the "NEED A PROMPT?" optional prompt button. This was previously only available in solo play but we've brought it to the party modes!

★ OTHER CHANGES - EASIER READING ★

We tried to make things easier to read with this update. Specifically the Settings screen which I was having a hard time looking at and the Game Mode screen. We're also experimenting with Comic Sans replacing FixedSys in areas with a lot of text. Hope it helps!

★ EMAILS ABOUT GAME CHANGES ★

We’ve gotten a few emails about how to update the game for the better! We LOVE all the feedback we get. And it’s super valuable! But please do keep in mind we’re two people working on this game in our spare time and when we work to update the game we have an upside down pyramid of work.
A Rank: Is everything working correctly? NO? Fix it fix it fix it fix it!!!
B Rank: Are we updating something that doesn’t make sense currently?
C Rank: Are we adding features / play modes that we deem are important and are currently on our roadmap?
D Rank: Everything else.
We spend a lot of time (more than people would guess) in those top two ranks. iOS 15… that threw a big ol’ wrench in our Christmas holiday plans BUT we do have a lot of new things we want to do with the game still. So for example, an idea to put italics and bolding in the writing section is AWESOME, and we would love to do that, but we scoped it out and it would take a lot of time that we have currently allotted to other things that we want to do, like making a brand new game mode about original character creation.
So yes we want to do it, no we’re not sure if or when we can get to it. Sometimes we get excited about things and say “omg yesss we gotta do that” and then it’s much harder than expected or other things take up way more time. Then there’s also dinner and taking the dog out… y’know, life stuff. BUT the more feedback we get, the more weight we have to those specific things. So don’t stop sending them in! (...Other than fully translating the game because we have no plans to do that within the next few years unless we're suddenly millionaires due to how much the game changes and we don’t know different languages ourselves so it would be really, really hard to do.)

★ ALSO… WE'RE WORKING ON IT ★

We’re going to update public lobbies to be better. We’re not sure exactly how yet, but it’ll be better in the future. It’s high on our priority list! Drop us a line on our Discord if you have ideas because we’re still determining the best way to do it.
We’re working on a feature where you can save stories to your account but it’s not fleshed out yet. Unsure if we’ll release it but it’s a cool idea.

★ AND… WE DECIDED TO NOT CHANGE THE REACT STRUCTURE YET ★

We’re trying to make the react section more balanced but can’t figure out a way to make voting for other stories more desirable. The main problem is if someone is aiming to win, they’ll vote as little as possible. We had the idea to balance voting based on points given to one player (say they have 10,000 points total to give away) and they only clicked 10 times, each vote would be worth 1000 points. How reacts work right now is each click of a react is 100 points and each part can have 700 total. This seems well and good but we’re having some difficulty explaining that and displaying it in a super simple way that isn't a pie chart. And also, if someone was going to cheese the system here they could just give each player the same amount of points nullifying their points given. We don’t want to commit to change anything until we know for sure it’s worth changing.
This game really isn’t about the points, it’s about the silly things you write! But we do recognize that THE BEST STORY should win. If you have any ideas about this, we’re all ears! We want to steer away from any “negative” point structure or dislikes as that’s jerky and not fun. But yeah, the best way to determine if the best story wins! That’s what we’re looking for.

★ BUG FIXES ★

Michael was hard at work fixing a bunch of bugs over the break. In particular he fixed an annoying one where if you were kicked from the game (due to being disconnected before the game started for any reason) it didn’t show that and it just showed negative time like you were in the shadow realm or something. Nah he fixed that. And the whole iOS thing. And cutting off words in the middle of the title. Good job Michael!

★ THAT’S ALL ★

Woah, big update! Hope y’all have a great 2022. Email us and let us know if there are any bugs as always, with a huge update like this there's bound to be something that slips through.
Zee and Michael
Merry Christmas
Posted by Zee / Friday Dec 24 2021

★ Happy holidays to all! ★

We're pushing a stability update that should fix some bugs users were experiencing. As usual if you see anything that looks wonky, email us at [email protected].

If you've enjoyed our game, make sure you tell your friends about all the weird fandom crack way-better-than-a-random-generator fanfic you've made on our site! That would be the best Christmas present to the dev team :). That or turning off adblock lol, gotta pay the bills ya know.

Oh, and follow us on TikTok!

★ OMG made|nous feature! ★

Wow!!! We were featured on Made|Nous as a great Canadian game! Thank you so much for the nomination and writeup, Indigo! We're right beside FarCry 6 in the reccs LOL nice.

★ We're still working on that big update! ★

It's not done yet haha. but we're workin on it! New, useful features like the ability to log in and track how many stories you've written and the long-awaited points system update!

We're also giving supporters of Frantic Fanfic some in-game gifts for being awesome people. The game will always be free to play, but supporters will get cosmetic and game-changing options like... new game theme colours, additional prompt packs, alternate character icons. Everyone who has already supported us on KO-FI will get one supporter badge free. If you want to get ahead of that...Ko-Fi

But that's the next update.
Thanks so much for playing!
The Frantic Fanfic Dev Team.
(Michael and Zee!)