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There is a tough decision I have to make currently sitting on my plate, and I want your guy's input before I make it, because you're all the ones being effected by it! During the development of InDev 13 I've come to realize something; Making the game backwards compatible with old InDev builds is a pain, and very time consuming.
Making sure people keep their user generated content is extremely important to me, I remember many times in my gaming life that I've lost all my hard work. A save file for Baldur's Gate, a cool Quake II skin, a Starcraft map, a mod for a Duke Nukem, even some Minecraft worlds I've lost over the years. I hate to lose things I've worked so hard on, and I would hate it even more to force others to lose things too.
Well because of that, I decided I would dedicate a lot of my time in Retro-Pixel Castle's development making sure the game was always as backwards compatible as I could possibly make it so you guys would lose as little content as possible. The problem is I've come to realize during my work on InDev 13 that maybe that's not the best idea this early in development. I am spending quite a lot of time every update making sure content from previous InDev versions still work because while we're in InDev, I make many fundamental changes to the core code. If I could recover the time spent focusing on making the game backwards compatible, I could get RPC released much earlier.
I have no problem making the game backwards compatible, but I think for the greater good of development I shouldn't worry about it until we reach late alpha, or beta. But since this is something important to you guys, I'm putting it up for a vote!
Option 1: Don't worry about backwards compatibility during InDev and Alpha, unless it's something simple to add.
Pro:
- Faster development, thus more content and a earlier release date.
Con:
- All save files, custom maps, and other content could break between updates. (Although I will avoid this as much as possible, and will write converters if it isn't too time consuming.)
Option 2: Try everything in my power to make the game as backwards compatible as possible, even if the game takes longer to develop.
Pro:
- You guys will (most of the time) get to keep your save games, and your custom maps with a few rare exceptions.
Cons:
- Development time may be much longer. Could even tack on months of additional dev time, because I have to carefully code things keeping old content in mind, and will sometimes have to code custom content converters (Like the map converter that is currently bundled in InDev 13 Unstable 1).
- Sometimes development may seem "messy" as I have to bandaid in ways to convert content. The map converter is a good example of this, because it's already needing tweaked for the upcoming Unstable 2 release.
- At least during InDev, sometimes your content may have to be broken anyway.
So please, give me your input on this and vote in the poll.