Entering the City

Hello!

Recently I thought that maybe my way of fixing bugs every month when also releasing content may not be the most efficient. I update Unity's version every month because I'm worried some of the bugs people may encounter (and I'm confident I fixed) could be influenced by the engine's code.

About a year and a few months ago, there was a bug that could cause BSODs and "not responding" timeouts on the game. I stubbornly refused to update the engine, thought it's for sure something I did wrong. Spent 2 weeks just on that issue, reading assembly code, there was really no resolution… until I decided to update Unity and that bugs never happened again.

So here's what I'd like to do. At the moment I release new content every month, this will continue to be the case. What will change however is that the builds will seem more "early access" than they used to. I will continue fixing critical bugs, but I will not perform m(any) improvements to the game.

By June or July I want us to reach the Night Club content, which is where most of the current story's ending will happen. Once that happens and the new gameplay flow will begin to increase through the ranks of the Night Club and get closer to the Night King (the bad boss), the game will undergo a "feature lock" (and an engine version lock).

At that moment, more attention will be paid to bugs & improvements while also steadily adding content to the Night Club's floors/ranks and that's how I plan to prepare the game for the Steam release.

The Steam release will be Early Access at first, then after a few months of steady content addition the Gaia part of the game (and 1.0) can be considered finished.

On Steam bugs can really cause big issues because people will leave bad reviews and that will lead to bad outcomes, so that's why I'm aiming to finish everything content/flow wise sooner than expected, then take the time to make sure the Night Club itself doesn't feel "rushed" while also improving on earlier aspects of the game and hopefully eliminate all issues.

This turned out longer than expected, but I believe it's important for me to share this with you as during the bugfixing/improvements time period (1-2 months after reaching the night club) there'll still be a few scenes added here and there, but nothing that advances the story's ending much. I will very much appreciate any bug reports & feedback during that time period.

That's all. Thank you for reading this.

On Monday I'll announce how the release for the April build will go.