In 2022, Merfolk's Lullaby saw significant growth with the launch of our YouTube channel and Twitter page, as well as on our website and Discord server. From January to December 2022, daily unique visitors increased from an average of 1,500 to an average of 2,500. To our surprise, the Mystery Board repeatedly became the most popular tool on a daily basis, surpassing our weather forecasts and Trade Routes tracker. On December 1st 2021, we released the Accounts feature and were thrilled to see over 16,000 of you register and join our Merfolk's Lullaby community in 2022. The increased traffic caused frequent outages, particularly during peak times, as our servers and app were not designed to handle such high usage. Throughout the year, constant efforts were made behind the scene to improve the performance and scalability of the app and servers, and to increase the number of servers located closer to our users around the world. These efforts unfortunately caused delays on some projects, but we would like to provide updates on what to expect from us in early 2023 and later in the year.
Cinematic Adventures
In 2022, we produced four successful cinematic adventures in Sea of Thieves, despite the challenges of limited access to custom servers and a two-week filming window for each. We also filmed The Sirens' Prize and The Herald of the Flame adventures, but have not yet released their short films. The Sirens' Prize posed a particularly challenging problem due to the images we shot of the shrines not up to the impressive ten-minute long voice over. After various attempts at addressing this issue by staying true to the Adventure, we will be attempting a different approach by filming new footage to depict what is being narrated in the Priest's journals. These images will not be directly from the adventure itself, but we hope that they will help bring this cinematic to life. We will be conducting new filming sessions within our Actors Program in the coming weeks to capture these new scenes and complete the editing. This cinematic will feature an introduction sequence that we can't wait for you to see! After that, the editing process for The Herald of the Flame should go smoothly.
Lore Timeline
Yes, we are significantly behind on our Timeline events and are in the process of drafting summaries of what happened in the Sea of Thieves. Currently, the following events are either missing or incomplete: Murder Mystery, A Hunter’s Cry, The Sirens’ Prize, The Herald of the Flame, Return of the Damned, The Rogue’s Legacy, Battle for the Sea of Thieves, Heart of Fire novel, The Servant’s Tale. You can expect to see new entries about these events in the coming weeks as we work on them.
2022 Awards Ceremony
We are currently planning to hold the 2022 Awards Ceremony in the second half of January. We are still in the process of scripting and preparing for the event. We will be holding several filming sessions as part of our Actors Program in the coming days, make sure to join them to help us build the celebrations. Be sure to cast your votes to make your voices heard, and stay tuned for more details about the ceremony.
What’s next?
There is still much work to be done on the website, and several areas are planned for improvement. Technical Tests will be conducted through our Testers Programme throughout the year to enhance the capabilities of the app and its tools, such as the map and weather forecasts. The storm tracker has been somewhat behind recently, but thank you for all your reports as they are incredibly helpful in preparing the next version. New tools are also on the horizon and we are eagerly anticipating their release once this major work is completed.
Efforts have also begun to expand the game companion capabilities of Merfolk's Lullaby to other platforms, such as Discord.
We are excited to announce that we are gradually expanding our team at Merfolk's Lullaby! We are looking for motivated and talented individuals to join us in our mission to provide the best tools and resources for our community. If you are passionate about our projects we encourage you to apply now!
We want to express our gratitude for your continued support of our projects. It brings us great joy to see our tools assist you in your adventures, keep you informed about what's happening in the Sea of Thieves, and provide opportunities for fun with the community through our events and games.
Here is to 2023 !
