Starting today, ΔV: Rings of Saturn is entering the feature freeze stage of the development process. What does that mean for you?
In the past year, you experienced a steady torrent of releases, all of them including new, exciting features, most often ones that were not really planned. While this kind of development process is really enjoyable both for me, getting excited to add the next shiny thing, and you, getting to play with new toys, it did push away the planned 1.0 release date by months. Feature freeze is a protocol designed to bring order to that process. It means that new features will not be considered for the 1.0 release anymore. In feature freeze, I focus solely on adding things that are already planned and fixing any bugs that come out.
1.0 is an important milestone in any software development, but it doesn’t mark the end of progress. It’s only meant to signify a version that we feel is complete enough for the general audience - and we feel we are really close to that point.
Here is what is going to happen next:
- I will focus on finishing up all the features listed on our roadmap and cleaning up any bugs that come out.
- Any new features will go to the 2.0 list.
- The game will enter the 1.0 stage while still being technically in Early Access. This will last for about two weeks to a month. This way, all of you who supported my development in EA will be able to play the complete product first, and I will have time to finish any formalities required for the release.
- We go to a full release.
- After about two weeks of anticipated post-release frenzy, enhancements and new features will resume; you will still get regular experimental and stable releases, just with numbers starting with 1.
We are entering the feature freeze stage today. If you feel that our current roadmap misses something absolutely essential for 1.0, this is a good time to advocate that, either on forums or on the game Discord.