New Way to Track Progress (Patreon)

I've been using a mix of posts here and GitLab issues to keep you all abreast of my plans and progress on the game, combined with "State of the Game" posts after each update to track the game's progress. If you've been around for a bit, you'll know I find the metrics I track in those posts to be almost meaningless and I don't think they do a good job of communicating my plans or the game's progress. I also want to get away from using issues on GitLab and move the issue tracker to exclusively be for bugs and suggestions.

The ideal task management and progress tracking system would be something like Trello, a kanban board. GitLab has an implementation of this, but I don't like the limitations and it's tied into the issue system and a bit hard to manage flexibly. As for Trello, it has rules regarding the sort of content that can be put on a public board, and I don't want to go against their terms of use. So I basically made my own shitty version of Trello, which you can take a look at it the link. It's managed by a single data file I can quickly edit to shuffle the cards around. It's not perfect, but it's better than the issues on GitLab and it's on my own website meaning I don't need to worry as much about sensitive content.

It is purely a static web app, meaning there's no server backing it, so it doesn't support anything like comments. However, it's possible I could add comment support someday through something like Disqus if we determine it would be useful. For right now, it's just a simple set of tables for me to communicate what I'm doing with you guys!

Let me give you a little tour.

The top section is for "Active" tasks. These are things I am working on or that I'm planning to work on before the next update. I may not finish all of them, so some may remain in the "doing" category for multiple update cycles.

The categories here are fairly self-explanatory, but what the heck, let's just make sure we're all on the same page.

• Todo: These are tasks I have yet to start working on, but am planning to get to before the next update.
• Doing: Tasks I'm currently working on.
• Done: Tasks I have finished. I will probably clear this list after each update.

The bottom section is for "Inactive" tasks, and has two categories. An inactive task is just one that I planned on doing (so it was in the "todo" or "doing" categories) but for whatever reason it is no longer coming out in the next update.

• On hold: Anything in this category is a longer term goal. Generally, these are still going to happen, just in a future update, and they're not being worked on at the moment.
• Life support: Similar to "on hold" tasks, but they will potentially be removed entirely. Tasks here may make it into a future update, but I'm thinking of abandoning them completely. Actually abandoned tasks will simply be removed from the board completely.

The board already has some of my plans for April and I've moved over the relevant open issues from the issue tracker and closed them on GitLab. I'll no longer be using milestones or the kanban board on the GitLab repo to organize my plans, so everything will be here going forward.

In place of doing our normal "State of the Game" posts after each update, we'll do a post looking at the kanban board and seeing how we did. I think tracking goals is a more sensible approach than tracking metrics, and will give a better sense of the game's progression. These posts may also talk about the goals for the next version as well. These posts will be patron-only going forward, as doing so allows me to talk more openly about the game's sensitive content, as public posts, even though the whole page is labeled as for adults, can't contain explicit content.

We will also be moving to longer development periods, as has been mentioned a few times. That will start after the April update, which will be the last monthly update. I'll be moving to a roughly six-week update schedule. The April update will be released sometime in late April, meaning the next update after that will be in early- or mid-June. Coinciding with these longer update periods, I'm going to start working on mod support, specifically on supporting custom event scenes. I expect that to go into a beta testing phase of some sort by fall.

Anyway, I also want to say thank you and welcome to the new patrons! March has been a good month for us! Your support means a lot to me. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me with any issues, concerns, or suggestions. You can contact me on Patreon via a message, from the contact form on my website, or on Discord (DMs and pings are welcome).