v0.17 & Onward Dev Poll Results

Between my recently being rather scatterbrained and the client work that recently popped up, development has been a little everywhere. That means most maps are done, but those maps are effectively empty, so there's no test build or patch notes today. So instead, I'm going to talk about the recent development poll and what that means for v0.17 and the foreseeable future.

The poll is very decidedly on the "it'll be done when it's done" option. That means releases may not be exactly monthly, but I'll be doing my best to include all of the optional content that the release is meant to have. Depending on time, that may also include going back and adding in optional content for older parts of the game, like more updates to the love shack or more affection quests.

That isn't guaranteed to happen, though. I do feel all of you are being rather generous with giving me that extra time to make sure updates are complete, and I don't want to abuse that generosity by taking longer than I actually need in order to finish an update.

To use v0.17 as an example, I could probably rush things and minimize the optional content so the update is done by next Friday, but having all of that content relatively untested would mean more bugs, and minimizing the optional content would mean places like Evdokia's Estate have little to nothing to find if you decide to go exploring.

Rather than doing that, the test build and patch notes will come out next Friday, which gives me an extra week to fill out that optional content and give you more to find and do, make the test build more complete, polish, playtest, and hunt bugs.

That does put the release for v0.17 into the first week of October, but since you've told me you're okay with that, I'm going to do my best to make sure you get an amount of content and polish that makes waiting the extra week worthwhile.

I also want to do my best to keep to timely releases for v0.18 and v0.19, them being seasonal updates. v0.18 may end up releasing in November despite being the Haunt update, since the update will include two zones, most of which is going to end up being optional content. v0.19 - this year's Freeze update - should still release before the end of the year since I'll have the extra time in November to develop the update.

With v0.20 and beyond, we'll be fully into Act 3 of the story. This is where the poll results will really apply, because with what I want to do, I have no idea how long it will take to develop as a full update. I may be able to get it done inside of a month, or it may take longer than two months. It's impossible to say at this point, both because I haven't made anything like it before and because it's still at least 3 months into the future. I also want the update to be reasonably weighty from a mechanical perspective, not just from a story perspective.

I'm looking forward to it as much as I am nervous about it, especially since you've given me the time to make sure each update is what it's meant to be.