More anniversary stuff! Although the chocolate candies are gone, the Valentine's event will continue through Sunday. And while it seems pretty hard to win the Valentines prize, I have definitely made it easier with some 'helper' code to improve the odds of winning and the increased prize of $500 sure is nice... we have already given away several thousand brew dollars in prizes and that aint't chump change. So keep going for those keys!

Now on to the new goodies for the week!

New smilies

Check out all of the available emoticons at this post smilies. Remember that the majority of these smilies work by typing their name between 2 colons like this... :hungry: =

...oh, and there is one more. It's not listed, its a special smilie for one of our most dedicated players who has been requesting it for some time now (you know who you are ;). For everyone else I am sure that they will reveal it to you.... keep your eyes peeled.

Personalized banners

Special thanks to Scartron for suggesting that I make banners available for players to copy and use on other websites. Personalized banners are here!

The images above are customized for your brewery and all of your labels and ready for you to use. I have included a few of Scartron's banners here as an example. Here's what this means... you now have access to the code that lets you take these images away from TBG and show them off on your own web pages, inside forum signatures, or on your comments and posts at other social and brewing related websites. The data is updated about once every 24 hours so once installed they will always keep up and change with your progress in the game. To access the banners look for a new button on your My Page tab.

Now the bad news, I have (or had) a functioning BBCode parser for comments posted on this site and it worked fine on the old server. I guess it broke when we moved to this server and I didn't notice it because it wasn't used. Bottom line is that these banners (the BBCode version) temporarily do not yet work on this website. There is some kind of conflict with this server's security features. I've already spent too many hours futsing with it. So here's the deal... I am going to stay focused on the rest of the anniversary event goodies for now and return to fix this in March. I have tested these banners on a couple of other sites and forums and they work great! so its just us. So feel free to use them elsewhere and look for a note in March when I have solved the local issues.

Facebook and Twitter pages!

It's about time! We now have 'official' pages at ThatBreweryGame on Twitter and ThatBreweryGame on Facebook. I noticed that when the brewing network announces our activities on their social networking pages we often double the number of visitors to the game for a short time. It's time for us to return the favor. If you are active Facebook or Twitter users then please 'like' us, 'Tweet', and spread the word! Thanks.

Finally... I spent a good part of this week assembling the information for about 24 new beer styles for the game. I can't guarantee that all of these styles will make the cut and I confess that some of them are harder to 'teach' the brewing engine than I expected. I guess that I have already included the 'easier' styles and the new ones require much more refined recipe creation to get them right. I will keep plugging away until I can get the quality scores stabilized for these new brews. Because of the challenges in programming these items will not appear in game until later in the month. Thanks for your patience!

-Robc