Hey fam!
Hope all is well with you amazing folks.
Just wanted to let everyone know that I won't be putting out any updates today. I'm currently working on a ton of stuff still and am nowhere near having a ready build.
This brings me to the topic of release schedules for builds and such. Up until now, I've generally tried to put out a new build each week with the alternating cadence of one week production, one week beta. I'm going to switch this to monthly themed production builds. Why the switch? Well, I'm finding it very difficult to complete bigger tasks within the two week window. I find I hurriedly put a feature in and push to the beta branch only to break things or to find out the feature was poorly designed. As well, I tend to lean towards working on smaller features out of fear of not being able to finish it within that time-frame. Aside from just being stressful, this often results in me having to scrap my weekend to put out hotfixes and, frankly, it's starting to burn me out.
So, with the new release schedule, it would look something like this:
-A new month begins (let's use September as the example) and I begin work on a themed feature set for that month.
-Week 1 and 2 of Sept. - focus on design, discussion with the community, and implementation of the feature set.
-Week 3 - Make changes and add content (by content I mean smaller things like items, props, art, etc - nothing huge) based on feedback, find bugs, focus on tuning.
-Week 4 - Nothing new is added to the build. Focus is 100% on bug fixes.
-Push new changes to production build on the first Thursday (so, I can potentially put out hotfixes on Friday if they are needed) of the next Month (October in this case).
I will likely put out beta builds at an irregular cadence based on this new schedule. It will depend on the feature being added and when it's ready for public playtests. So, there could very well still be weekly builds, but there's no guarantee.
Regarding themed builds, I'm also going to put together a roadmap for development, highlighting what each month will focus on. I'll post an announcement for this when it's ready.
Thanks and have a great weekend!
Waylon