Surprise Big Update!

Death, taxes, and MonBre development. Against all odds and better judgement, here I am again.

So here's the story. OpenAI's Codex is a new remote tool for AI code development. I had to move MonBre off our old code host anyway, so I brought it over to Github and linked everything up. MonBre internally is an incredible mess. Almost every important file was directly on the root of the project: javascript, php, many assets. So I told it to fix it up.

It did so in one take -- and I was quite amused. I told it to do something else, then something else, and so on until I brought MonBre into my editor and kept working, and finally ended up at this update. Was this a distraction? Sure. A fun and satisfying distraction that I only slightly regret and may want to revisit in the later part of this year.

I want to say one thing. Looking at this now, I no longer dislike MonBre. I don't like it quite yet, and it has its flaws away from the technical aspect, but it feels good to not dislike my first game anymore.

**PATCH NOTES**
PvE has seen some huge improvements.

* Entirely refreshed interface. Better spacing, reactivity, the page now no longer

* Explore page: performance improved, can additionally use WASD to move and it no longer pops up a box for Explore Options, but rather opens the options within the frame.

* Style improvements around the site, notably our new buttons.

* Age-old bugs fixed: when a monster dies, you'll no longer carry over the skills of that monster when we display your newly switched-in monster. Healing items now *actually work* in battle. Simply refreshing the combat page will not auto-choose a standard attack!

* Played through the tutorial on a new account and spruced things up, removed stupid crap like the explore tutorial because the game should be self-explanatory and no one likes impediments!

* Internally: structures have improved and become a lot more sane for when I want to jump in again. A few files were split for visual aid support and I unified them, so let me know if any visually impaired users cannot play as they once did.

Here are some expectations for future updates. No ETA. Could be Fall, Christmas, could be 2026, who knows!

UPDATE 2: single-page loading on explore, going from a 5x5 (25 tile) to 6x6 (36 tile) map, modern styling throughout exploration and the site in general. Make exploration and combat use the monster's real HP rather than pointlessly tracking it in two spots.

UPDATE 3: redesign city page with new icons and draw the most important stuff to attention (we have a whole ToDo list function!), add iconography in battles, more mob art and removing any possible copyright-infringing media.

UPDATE 4: Finish the game...! Beat Mokal and become Okapi! Potentially offer paypal integration for a one-time account upgrade, polish whatever I can, list MonBre on various listing sites.

Bonus: recently, my mom found my old notebooks from middle school (circa 2001) and sent them to me. They included designs from a game I was calling Geomonsters, and some will look quite familiar to you.

https://tinyurl.com/bdcdpvet

Surprise again, a friend of mine has taken the MonBre helm and decided to code some stuff. Firstly enjoy, MOBILE SUPPORT! Wow! You can comfortably play MonBre on your phone now.

https://brennan.day/adding-thousands-of-lines-to-your-codebase-isnt-impress
ive-its-actually-bad/

I remember this game fondly, but I kept running into problems when trying to play after you AI-ified it.

Hello Meppe, I've read the article and I see you followed the advice from the writer and shared the article -- there is also a good chance you wrote a comment on the article, and if so, I'm not sure what could possibly break about our buttons, but you'll be pleased to know that after almost 20 years of web dev, writing linear-gradient was well within my capability and I was the one who designed our new buttons.

That said, the update in this post was mostly vibecoded: I told it what to do, at best skimmed over the resulting code, tested it myself, and put it live. There were some bugs that resulted from actually losing lines, not adding them to the project: unifying the three separate battle scripts I had into one, pve.php. The benefits of the effort far outweigh some one-off bugs in what is already a buggy game, and more bugs were fixed than created.

Now we have my friend vibecoding MonBre and, with the exclusion of the mobile layout project, I look over every line because that's now two potential points of failure. If you're experiencing any bugs, you can post them here or in the bug forum, or even on the Discord, which I'll link to the main page and in the footer.

Not sure if you look at this but my guild has been stuck raiding since...whenever the last raid on the news page was, it seems to be in a loop where every tick it adds simulation credits to my guild but doesn't let me keep raiding. I'm only sending monsters to work now so that I can grind up srp to one day beat Garr Slayer in PVP, and then I will have considered the game beaten for myself, until some other ambitious person comes along or new content is created. Crazy to think that I was playing this at age 12, and i'm almost 30 now.

Hey there Killer Killer, it is indeed quite remarkable that you still play but I'm happy to keep providing MonBre for you. :} I just fixed the problem with raids, thank you.

As an aside, I want to acknowledge that the game is currently a bit AI slop-y right now. I am fully aware of this. Since my 07/31 post, my friend has been absolutely cranking out improvements to every part of MonBre. I want to iterate (manually) on some styling improvements that should have the game feeling very good within the next few weeks.

I usually "take off" holiday time at the end of the year. That is when I would like to add more content to MonBre. That's right... the final city and god battle.

Makes sense and thanks for getting that fixed. Sadly I now have 2.2 million simulation credits, and it's really hard to spend them. Before the improvements were made, I had set up a script to continuously go to the link to buy Hidalgo's broom so that I could grind up as many of those as possible, then another one to transmute all the brooms to grind up SRP, but now I get an "invalid session token" error when trying to do the mass buying.

Scripting is technically illegal but I'm more interested in solving the problem: would you like a way to mass buy and convert these items?

yes, that would be useful, and additionally the items only go up to raid 15 so you could have make the last 5 items. Actually the scarcest resource on the game at the high end is SRP, as mob kill xp runs out at c power 160 or so. Though making more mobs will push that out further if you decide to design the final areas of the game.