Or at least coding. Although several unforeseen delays have made the release date slip well past what I had hoped for in the last post.

This time I'll refrain from posting another release date, rest assured however that we are working on the new site and the new Picma as fast as we can and that it will be well worth the wait!

Heya!

It's been a while since we last updated, but in truth it's also been a while since we had news and/or plans that we could safely disclose.

These last few months of running the site have been rather hectic, with issues appearing out of nowhere mostly due to the sheer scale to which it rapidly grew. This, coupled with the amount of puzzles submitted and our difficulties in processing them in a reasonable timeframe, meant that at the very least one could say things have not been running as smoothly as we wished.

Spring is coming and it's time to start anew. As such, we are in the process of recoding the entire site from scratch (don't worry, your data is safe, we're just rebuilding the framework that interacts with it), using the lessons learned in the process of managing the current version.

Along with the new site, we're also "finishing" a new version of Picma! While we don't consider this yet to be Picma 2, it certainly solves several issues that a few of you rightly noted as in need of correction.

Ideally, both of these should be launched in about one month but please don't bring out the torches and pitchforks if it takes a bit longer. ;)

Thank you for your support, encouragement and patience!

As some may have noticed the site was down for a few hours today while we attempted to solve the issues with puzzle scores. Sadly we will need more time to fully correct the problem and replicate the data (we now have more than 250,000 scores!). Therefore we will have more downtime this week, we aim to bring the site offline only during the hours of less usage.

Thank you for your patience!

Some of you, particularly if you have many completed puzzles, may be experiencing some issues regarding incorrect puzzle stats. In some cases this extends to a few of the previously completed puzzles appearing as question marks.

We have been for some time attempting to solve these issues without any downtime but ultimately that will not be possible. The website will be down for maintenance for a few hours on Monday and possibly Thursday as we make the necessary changes in order to solve these problems.

Thank you for your support!

Keeping the tradition of the last five years, the folks at Jay is Games are holding their sixth "Best of Casual Gameplay" and have nominated Picma as one of the best puzzle games of 2009.

Your support would be greatly appreciated!

You can vote for Picma (and play a few other rather nice puzzle games) at Jay is Games - Best of Casual Gameplay. You will find Picma near the end of the page and you can vote once per day.

On a related note, we will shortly be posting a detailed list of features we are planning to implement in the new version of Picma we are developing.