The 1.4 update and the April Fools joke news

Our plans was to release 1.4 this week, and we aimed fairly high. The stats and achievements that are coming is a pretty comprehensive change, affecting almost all areas of the game (except for world rendering!). During the Thursday morning meeting, we discussed doing the release that day, and because stats wasn’t done yet, we decided to just hide it all from the player and release the update.

While working on testing and cleaning up for the release, someone pointed out that Friday was April 1st, so I immediately shone up and requested - nay, DEMANDED - we should include the April Fools joke. Every map chunk generated on April 1st has a small chance of generating a glowing indestructible chest. When the player tries to open it, a window pops up telling the player he needs a “Steve Co” brand key to unlock it. Clicking a button takes the player to this page (the floating “april fools” text wasn’t there.. And if you’re reading this blog post in the future, it’s probably been removed altogether).

This is meant to be a playful jab at the Mann Co Store in Team Fortress 2.

Valve is my favorite game development studio on Earth, but it seems like they can’t take a joke, as they immediately put their best witchdoctors to work, and sent horrible hexes my way. My throat exploded into a quagmire of pain, my brain started trying to escape from my head, and disturbingly large quantities of sticky goo began to make its way out of my face.

So this is my warning:

DO NOT JOKE ABOUT VALVE

(Development blog link)