Happy Friday!
Also, happy lack of jetlag :D I am a much more awake Sloth this week, and there's a lot to talk about, but also there's a few things I need to hold back on for just a tad bit longer 😭
Feedback Pack - Preview Branch
This has been going VERY well! Thank you to everyone who has joined us in this branch. Your feedback, and excitement, have been amazing!
Since we released into Preview, the update has had 3 updates of its own! This includes bug fixes, but also a few new features, and some new content. Look! We can't help ourselves :)
I'll have an exact release date for you next Friday (the 13th!!! 👻). We (by we, I mean Emily) is looking at putting together a series of hints and tips that should help you get the most out of this update.
Crossover Update (Major update 2)
With the Feedback update starting to wrap up nicely, next week we'll be moving the Art and Design team on to this so we can start getting full details mapped out.
I'm excited for this one and cannot wait to talk more about it! We'll be working on some details and hopefully next month we'll have a 'proper' announcement coming out.
Future - Minor Updates + Major Update 3
We had a small burst of discussion this week about future updates; as well as starting to formulate some ideas around what we want to do for minor updates, we've started thinking about the next layer of feedback we've seen and using it to help form Major Update 3.
Next week (likely mid to late next week) we are going to start mapping out what the rest of this year looks like for us and get an idea of what our release schedule will look like.
Our main goals working towards the end of the year are as follows:
- Get the team some much needed holidays very soon
- Get the team a nice break over Christmas
- Focus on the next two major updates
- Changing focus of what minor updates provide (bug fixes always sit outside of this)
because....
Start Planning Online Multiplayer
We know many of you have been waiting for this feature! We've been hoping to start scheduling out time to start looking into this.
We still have a couple more major updates this year for you, however, we are trying to plan ahead enough that our programming team can work through the features for the rest of the year earlier. That way, as the content team works on these, code will have time to start investigating what online co-op will mean for Go-Go Town!
We are keen to dive into this, however, we need to make sure code has time to focus on online, thus (as noted above) the minor updates may be more content focused, than feature focused in the future.
Multiplayer is still very much a 'next year' feature. However, we wanted to make sure we talk about our plans to start on it. We know it's an important feature to many players in our community.
There's a lot this week so I'm going to summarise:
Player Feedback Updates is HUGE. There's so much going on in this update. There's still time if you want to join us in the Preview Branch to get a sneak peek of what's happening. Otherwise, hold tight and I'll have a release date and full details for you next week.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2195120/view/4355629296424398812
The Sloths will start taking some holidays and recharging batteries.
Groundwork for Major Update 2 is kicking off next week. Planning for Update 3 is kicking off next week.
In the next few weeks code team will start assigning time to Online Multiplayer.
Promised you this week would be a big one :)
-Cheryl