It's time for another dev blog.
The most important thing right at the beginning: My(cHaOsFaTz) health is fine again. So we can work again at full speed on the planned update.
Of course, there is a lot of work to be done before we can make the update available to you.
But before we go into more detail about the upcoming update, we want to talk about the topic of communication.
Communication and tasks
During my absence we noticed that there was a lack of communication. You had the information that I was ill, but no further details about what that meant for the development.
So no information about what the rest of the team has done or achieved during this time. Before we can go into that, we want to briefly explain to you what the responsibilities in the team are.
We have often received questions such as "What is the rest of the team doing?", "What is the status of the update?", "Why haven't the others continued working on the update?" and a few more questions related to these topics. Therefore, here is a brief list of the distribution of tasks that are directly related to the development of the game.
The development team consists of four people:
- There is me as the project manager and main developer.
- Another developer
- A 3D designer
- A level designer
This should make it clear that everyone has their own special area of responsibility. And if one of them is absent - due to illness or other incidents - then not everyone in the team can take over the tasks of the others, because special knowledge and skills are necessary for each area.
Another important thing that has been said far too seldom, and which we also want to clarify again today, concerns the working time or rather the possibility to work on the project.
All the people involved work on the project out of passion for the idea of the game, and the potential they see in the idea.
However, as the project leader and main developer in the development team, I am the only person who has the opportunity to work on the project full time. The other three team members each have a different main job and then work on the project in their remaining free time.
Perhaps this circumstance was not yet known to one or the other. Maybe this makes it a bit more understandable why the progress in recent times could not be as great due to my absence as it would have been if the whole team had been able to work on the project full time.
Where do we go from here and what will change?
As mentioned above, we are currently working on the next update. Our focus for this update is on the basic functionality and the most serious bugs. All other planned new functions and features will therefore be put on hold for the next update, because for us the most important thing is to clean up the existing content, which still has major errors in some places.
Due to the illness and the resulting delay, there will unfortunately also be no Christmas event in the game this year.
The next update is planned for this winter, but we can't give you an exact date yet, as there are still many open tasks to be completed.
As soon as we have released the next update, we will be able to work on adding more planned functions and features.
How is the progress since the last update?
Since a lot of time has passed since the last update, we want to show you what has been done or completed so far.
The changelog, which is not yet published, refers to the changes to the "stable" version on Steam, and not to the "experimental" version, as this already contains a large part of these updates.
The list is already very long and can already be viewed at: https://pastebin.com/sm28NgVq . However, changes are still possible.
What we want to show with this is that we have not been idle during all this time, but that there has already been a lot of progress.
Livestreams
What might also interest some players is how the livestreams on Twitch will continue. I have also thought about this with the team.
As of now, the plan is as follows: The livestreams will be divided into categories, firstly "developer streams" and secondly "news and talk".
The "developer streams" will probably take place on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, but there is no fixed time yet.
The "News and Talk" stream will take place every Friday at 7 pm.
So there should be something for everyone. In addition, the announcements for the livestreams will be communicated on all social networks.
Finally
We hope that we could answer some open questions and improve the communication between players and team in the future.
We wish you a nice rest of the weekend and stay healthy.