Fer.al Dragons + The Beta Font Quest Continues

Hey Jammers! So a couple days ago, I got an email notice from Fer.al:

This was probably the first actual email update they ever sent out, if you don't count the original beta-testing form.

I was hoping it was gonna be an announcement about Fer.al finally going out of beta, but I guess all good things take time, because it was just a notice that they will be accepting a new wave of players into the closed beta:

If you signed up for beta so many months ago but were never sent an invite, this could be a lucky sign!

Though, I have a funny feeling I won't be accepted. Why? Well ya see, I have two email addresses that forward email to each other's inboxes, and I may have accidentally input an email address into the beta form that was originally sent to my other email address. 

It's a small thing, so maybe they'll ignore it, but maybe they won't ^_^;

However, this email notice was not just about the new wave of closed beta invites... it revealed something new, too!

This is a screenshot from the new-and-improved Fer.al homepage. Along with the well-known kitsune and senri, it seems Fer.al players may be able to play as dragons as well!!!

This made me very excited because when I originally heard that Fer.al featured mythical creatures, I wasn't imagining dragons; they completely slipped my mind. BUT NOW... I am super excited to play as a dragon.

According to the Fer.al wiki, this is some leaked concept art for the dragon:

Super cool and sleek :0

You know, I wonder how far Fer.al will take its array of mythical creatures. 

Will they also tap into urban legends as well as ancient ones? Will we be able to play as bigfoot!?!?! That is the question we should all be asking.

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The next section of this post is all about my obsession with figuring out the name of a particular font Animal Jam used in beta testing. It sounds boring, but if the idea of seeing me go full detective mode sounds amusing, read on! X)


So, you might possibly remember around August, when I was being productive trying to redesign my blog's header:

It is almost done, I just want to add on some leafy accents to it to make it feel complete. I've sketched them out, planned to trace them digitally... and I'll do that... eventually :P

The reason why it's taken a million years for me to make progress with this is that I view my blog's layout like an art project; a visual tribute to my favorite artistic aspects of Jamaa as it's changed over the years. I wanna get to the point where just looking at my blog will make me (and you too, hopefully!) instantly happy and peaceful. 

So naturally, I was very very very particular about everything in this new header, especially the font. I gotta be honest with you– I'm tired of TikiIsland (the font in my current header right now).

You may have noticed that this font I chose for the "ANIMAL JAM" text in my new header is not TikiIsland. So what is it?

The truth is, I have no idea.

In case you forgot, or if you're new here... I actually drew that "ANIMAL JAM" text by hand based on a mystery font that was all over the beta Animal Jam homepage. I know; I still can't believe I had the patience for that. 

Here are examples of that mystery font:

In late August, I looked everywhere trying to find this font. I used font identifying tools, looked at the beta site's page source code... but no luck. I eventually came to the conclusion that this font is impossible to find because it was made specifically for Animal Jam to use.

That's what I thought... until a few days ago.

So, I was bored and decided to look up some old kids shows from the Discovery Kids channel that I used to watch when I was little. I found one called "Truth Or Scare," and to be honest I didn't remember it at all... but they used this mystery font EVERYWHERE in their show! If you look closely, you can tell.

And that show was produced a long long time ago, around 2002... so this font was definitely not made specifically for Animal Jam. Therefore, it should somehow be publicly available.

Still, beyond that it did not give me any new leads. It's not as if TV shows ever put the name of the font they use in the credits.

However, it gave me a new drive to figure out this font, and I spent hours and hours doing the following:

– Using the Wayback Machine to look at the beta site and go into its page source to see if the font name is recorded somewhere in the code. (Don't worry, it's all legal– just good ol' fashioned Inspect Element on Google Chrome.)

...and the result of that? Nothing, because all uses of the mystery font were in images, not in highlightable text.

 – Uploading image examples of the mystery font to font identifiers like FontSquirrel and WhatTheFont.

...and the result of that? Nothing. No matter how clean those images were, no matter which ones I used, none of the fonts it matched to them were even remotely similar.

– Looking up things like "tiki font" or "chunky font" or any other words that might describe the mystery font on font databases and Google Images. 

...and the result of that? Nothing, unless you count my mini discovery of a font that I recognized that was probably in an old Jam-a-Gram:

However, I tried to look at old Jam a Grams to see if I could find the one with this font, and I couldn't... which is weird cuz this font looks super familiar.

I looked everywhere, all through the biggest font databases... and I ended up with nothing.

I still have two last bits of hope: 

1. Maybe, someone at AJHQ will know what the heck the mystery font is and tell me the name. Honestly, I've become so obsessed with it that I might just pay real money for it if that's what I have to do.

2. If that fails, and I feel like it might... I will just straight up recreate the entire font for myself just so I can use it a few times on my blog. It's making me lose my gosh dang mind

Until then... this font will haunt my dreams.

                                                

Well, not all was for nothing. While I was looking around in the page source for the beta site, I found this really lovely background image that I think I haven't seen before!

It's ominous in a peaceful sort of way. I think it would be a wonderful background for me to use on my blog sometimes (maybe for Night of the Phantoms?), and I bet you can use it as a desktop image if you want!

The original file for it is big enough for that, but maybe it'll get compressed if I upload it to this blog... hopefully not.

I hope you enjoyed this earlier-than-normal post! See you in Jamaa, and remember to be kind to yourself and others~

~DoomyPanda

Ideas for the Terrain Bundle!

Hey Jammers! Yesterday was the update, and in typical DoomyPanda fashion I will skip all the parts that I think are uninteresting and focus solely on what I think is the star of this biweekly update: the terrain item bundle!

On this blog, I used to occasionally mention "building block items"--- smaller (usually nonmember) items that you can put together into bigger things. I used to refer to Ice Blocks as building block items:

Remember these cube-y things? They haven't been in stores since 2013, but people don't seem to think about them as very rare.

However, the following new items are WAY more useful as building block items:

Whoa. Lots of items, right? And in my opinion, the best part is that a good fraction of them are nonmember!

Which is why this post will feature some ideas for how to use these items to decorate a den! All are nonmember, of course. I'm a nonmember. :P

First up, ways to use the stone pieces:

You can make a half-circle to sit against a wall to provide a base to a special item you want to draw attention to. Another example:

Kinda looks like the base of a fireplace. Fancy! :0

Let's think about how to use a full stone circle:

So admittedly, I think the Stone Circle from Return of The Phantoms looks more unified than the terrain bundle stone circle.

I think a half-circle looks fine, but maybe not the full one. 

There are also stone rectangles, and so if you really tried hard you could try to make a nonmember stone floor. Not saying it'll look as good as if you used the adventure prize Stone Circles, but you can try.

Moving on... the grass tiles!

I was hoping I could use the solid colored Grass Tiles to make a green nonmember rug, but this ultimately looks more like someone spilled their kale smoothie on the ground.

Hmm... Let me try again:

Hmm. I guess you can have a little indoor green area? 

Well, there goes my whole 24 diamond budget for this post. I hope you all enjoyed!


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Before I go, remember to keep your compassion, even in difficult times like right now. Be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.

That is all.

Jam on!

Fer.al Coming in March? + Discovery About AJ Updates

Hey Jammers! Yesterday was the AJ update, so I'm back here to update you all on the update X)

Truth be told, there isn't much on AJ to update you on! As it seems Wildworks is dedicating most of its effort into getting Fer.al off the ground, the trend of uneventful updates continues. However, I have new information about that trend in this post. Read on to find out...

Speaking of Fer.al, they seem to have updated their homepage to look more awesome:

You can't tell from this image, but the background is animated with tiny floating orbs, like above the Mira statue. It's really calming to look at, you should go check it out :3

Another piece of Fer.al news that might make you even more excited: it may finally be available for everyone to play as soon as this March!!!

I had just gone to the Feral Wiki to see if I could learn anything there, and I guess I did! Even if Fer.al doesn't actually release this coming month, it's great that we now have a general sense of when it's coming. 

That section of text on the Feral Wiki sourced the transcript (I think) of the original conference where Fer.al was unveiled as a concept, and this is where my next discovery comes from, because I didn't have access that full article until now.

For those who forgot (or don't know) that conference was a kind of Q and A panel for game developers, so Wildworks' CEO Clark Stacey was interviewed on the inner workings of Animal Jam. 

The following passage reveals an important part of those inner workings that I think a lot of people missed:

(As always, click the passage to read the whole thing)

To summarize, when Wildworks first started working on Fer.al, they shifted some of the update responsibilities to outside studios. Meaning, a lot of the new items and animals we've had since then were designed by people other than Wildworks.

That could definitely explain the strange look of a lot of the new stuff that came out these past few years–

*shudder*

–along with the reluctance of AJ to make anything drastically new happen (like new adventures, new animals not based on pre-existing ones, or events like the solar eclipse or when Club Geoz was destroyed in late 2017).

I'm hoping that once Fer.al is off the ground, it won't be a game that requires updates as constant/regular as AJ or AJPW, so Wildworks would be able to shift a little more of its core team back to work on Animal Jam. 

That doesn't mean I'm not excited for Fer.al, though! I'm super excited. It'll give me some new, different things to post about, and a whole new virtual world to explore (though Jamaa will always be my second home). I'm not really a gamer beyond Animal Jam, so this will be even more new for me!

A sidenote: that little Fer.al character above is more than just an image I used to divide up the text, it's an example of the contributions of the core Wildworks team– I'm pretty sure all of the Fer.al characters were designed by Taylor Maw, who has been the head artist of AJ since the beginning (although their style has changed considerably since then!)

*the above link is a link to their art Instagram

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I can't believe what I thought would be a short update post turned into that! I haven't even begun talking about the update yet xD

The most notable part of the update (or arguably, the only notable part) is the Leap Year Party's grand re-appearance after four years!

I really love the Leap Year Party. Mostly because there are frogs everywhere :') beautiful little amphibians <3

I especially love the art style of the AJ pet frogs. One day I should learn how to draw them, and then maybe make a tutorial for this blog. What would you think of that? AJ drawing tutorials? Not that I'm the best at drawing in the AJ-style; it would be a learning experience for me, too xD

The Leap Year Party, as with the last two times, takes place in one of my favorite dens: the treehouse. Of course, it's decorated and altered like it was in the 2016 Leap Year– and teeming with froggy friends 

YEEHAW

The first stop most people are taking is the den shop. Last year's frog items are here again (which is annoying some people), as well as new bunny items (another animal who leaps!)

I gotta say, I'm not really a big fan of any of these items (though the rabbit burrow is nice). This also reminded me of how terrifying the frog chair on the second page is. Yeesh... doesn't do frogs any justice. Or bunnies, for that matter. :\

Moving onto the second shopfront...

Again, pretty meh items. But again, this is also explained by the core Wildworks team expending most of their work trying to get Fer.al off the ground. We won't have meh items and updates forever, so I'm not complaining.

EDIT: Almost forgot this, but the Item Claw is right by the clothing shop:

I think that this is the only place you can find the Item Claw anymore, seeing as the Trading Party stopped showing up a couple years ago (which I'm still annoyed about)

However, there is one other good thing about the Leap Year Party. The thing aside from the frogs that I have yearned for for 4 whole years...

The Slide.

It's not a Leap Year Party without at least one run on the slide :)

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I hoped you enjoyed this post! I think it's been my longest in a while. I guess I just got into the zone :P

See you in Jamaa, and have as awesome a day as you can!