How we go about things, Alpha v2 in May (Hopefully)

Judge Heath here, and this is a little bit of a postmortem and explanation about how we've been going about things so far in the development of the game. I plan on doing a full postmortem at the end of Alpha v1. The future plans for the dev cycle I'll be posting shortly.

Well we are nearing the end of Alpha v1, and with it, the full set of basic functions we've installed into the game. Breeding, Farming, Shops, Dialogue, and such. We're really ready to push forward into the second segment, and with it, the story segments of the game.

Now, a lot of you folks are probably wondering why we seem to sit with our thumbs up our asses, making only incremental changes, with some art assets thrown in, but the meat and bones of the 'game' haven't really changed in over 6 months. The answer to that is both simple and complicated.

What it comes down to is that we can't afford to screw things up majorly. Our biggest set backs over the course of Alpha v1 have both been cases where we had to not just rip out systems and replace them, but rip out systems we had thought were  complete and replace them. We did so because we moved forward too quickly, built on top of flawed code structures too soon, and it was actually easier at that point to rip out and replace than it was to tweak them under the layers of code and features we'd put into place since the initial creation of those systems.

So what happens, usually, is that we take our time, and when we put in a new feature, a lot of our development time is actually devoted to perfecting that feature. Sousing out bugs, tweaking it to fit, etc. Other things get put in as well, but the big big advances, like the breeding system for example, happen months after the last set of major changes. The entire process is more or less spot-welding small errors and mistakes and systems as we go, getting everything as stable as we possibly can, before the next major system goes into place.

You can't imagine how happy we are to finally be getting ourselves ready for Alpha v2, and the implementation of all the systems we need in place. It's a lot of tedious stress getting things ready for the next big deal, and because of our rather slap-dash start, it's only made things harder. We didn't have the time to pull together a good demo or get things nice and pat from the start. In an ideal world, Alpha v1, in it's complete state, would have been what we released on the first day of the Patreon. Now, we can really start working on the story and systems, moving them along even as we implement new features as we go.