Development Update: The aftermath of 0.39 & a discussion on testing, pre-release, and scheduling. (Patreon)

Hello again! It’s yet another one of these walls of text!

There’s a lot to say lately.

First of all, I’d like to thank you all for the great support 0.39 has received. Many of you have (to my appreciative surprise) increased your pledge even though you could still receive the game at your previously lower price. I really did not expect that show of support, and the complete support for our decision has been very comforting. We’ve had a grand total of one person truly complain out of the many thousands of you; we really could not ask for a more understanding community.

On that note, there is a frequent point of confusion about the offer in the monetization post - Please know that said offer is absolutely not temporary. We strive to keep it open permanently. Around ~120 people have taken up said offer since we increased our price, and access has been given to all who have asked.


While 0.39 has been a great success both in terms of user interest, feedback, and numbers, it has also been an unsustainable challenge.

I really need to fix this both for the health of the game and ours. You’ve now seen the scope and effort we’re able to put in a version given more time, but you’ve also seen the bugs upon bugs and problems it could create.

After a short break post-release, we made the decision to focus on that until later in the month. We feel that at this point, you’d rather have a stable product. Today, we released 0.39R3, a set of fixes and adjustments for 0.39 that would typically be reserved for releases shortly after the 10th.

For the last 3 years, I’ve developed this game on a release cycle designed around Patreon.

To be fully transparent, here is how it typically went down:

3rd-9th: Pre-release.

The intent is for pre-release to allow the mass testing of builds that have so many different toggles they are near impossible for us to test properly. Feedback could also be collected on a much wider scale for new systems, that allowed us to address any design mistakes made throughout the cycle.  Sometimes, when things were calm, this is also when the next month’s build would be designed around the immediate needs of the game (and sometimes, my own interests; what I wanted to make next).

This was given a week both to give players enough time to give it a shot, but also to give me (now us) some time to rest if the PR was bug-free. Depending on how well the week went, the number of PR builds could vary between 3 and 10.

This, of course, did not always happen.

10th-12th: Release

The 10th to the 12th would be primarily focused around releasing, marketing, and addressing any immediate huge bugs or issues. Knowing pre-release can be a little buggy, many players would opt to skip pre-release entirely and play this more stable version. This did also mean that we could miss stuff throughout that pre-release week, as the biggest spike of players happened on the 10th.

Generally, this would result in 1-2 extra builds. It has once resulted in 8. That was a very shitty 3 days.

13th-18th: Post-release

The rush is over! Sometimes, I took a couple days break. Most of the time, it would be time to plan and start roughly implementing the next month’s most bug-prone features.

19th-28th

Depending on the month, at this point, there are 13 to 16 days left before the next pre-release. Builds have started being put out to testers and T3 patrons, and if I’m lucky, they find interest in testing the game during these days. These two weeks were the main part of development, this is when stuff would get done.

28th-3rd

It’s the end of the cycle. There is no more time to add major features or make major changes, because there is no more time to have them properly tested and feedbacked by a variety of players... I frequently make them regardless, because I have to, and because things would not get done if I did not take risks.

Pre-release happens again, and it starts over.

While I really want to avoid self-pity here, as I consider myself extremely lucky to have had the outcomes I have, and it is in no way a pitiable life, you may notice a few things:

• Weekends do not exist. I worked every single day I could that did not have external obligations preventing it. Sometimes, I had to take days off for sanity. It mostly worked. I couldn’t afford to sacrifice what could sometimes be a third of actual development days to breaks.
• Two weeks to develop major features is… not many days, to say the least.
• Relying on testers being interested in the game at the right time can easily make late-month development extremely crunch heavy. Getting a really bad bug report on the 30th could force me to work 16 hour days for days on end.
• Any emergencies or unfortunate life realities… did not have time to exist.
  ”Pet sickness, family health issues or loss can't slow me down. There is no time to be taking a break, and I’ll feel worse if a release turns out to be bad because I slowed down.”

It’s… no good.

Having discussed this with other successful devs on the platform, this actually appears to be an extremely common pitfall to fall into, and an inevitable problem to eventually solve. Some things have managed to help treat the symptoms of this, but it overall is simply unsustainable. It’s not just me anymore - I now have more people to consider, with the addition of Vector to the team, and a relationship that started halfway through VS’s development. I cannot inflict that upon them out of fear that it’s a bad financial move to avoid doing so.

We’ve also noticed a decrease in engagement, bug reports and feedback with the builds both during testing (mostly as a result of Vector going from tester to dev), and pre-release.
This is absolutely understandable, as we’re making porn and it’s not very fun to encounter bugs and report them when you’re just trying to do your thing.

We genuinely appreciate all of you who spend time reporting bugs, and especially our player testers who go through quite a bit more jank during development cycles; but it’s clear we need to make some additional changes to address this.

We’re currently training someone local who has done QA work to help us test VS as a full time job. We think having someone local we can interact with IRL, comfortable with the work involved, and yet detached from the ‘’playing’’ aspect of VS will help us find more things that would usually go unreported.

As a result of all of this, while I really expected to not want to commit to this fully…
I think it’s for the best that we move on from our current release cycle.


Adding four more weeks to the cycle means:

- Actual development time per update grows from 10-13 days to 38-41

- This gives us room to keep bug fixing and refining after a release, even adding small content, which we’ve just done with R3.

- We get to design and plan bigger system changes like 0.39 was.

- We (mostly) do not go insane.

This does not mean you’ll get less content.

I am fully aware that it is a pretty typical reality for these kinds of projects to sell you the future while begging for your support.

But if you’ll permit me a moment of very blunt, unprofessional honesty…

We’re self-admitted greedy motherfuckers. 

This game is the leading project in a popular niche that is underserved. We don’t need to sell you the future, we are selling you the present.

There’s pragmatic reasons for us to try hard as fuck, and we have been, and we will. We were crunching adding things to 0.39 until the very last moment we could, because we knew it would provide good results - we think it did.

We’re going to keep staying ahead of competition, we’re going to keep making a game that’s unlike anything else on the market, and we’re going to try real fucking hard to give you experiences you can’t get elsewhere.

Because it’s worth it to create experiences you can visibly see are worthy. We have plans to do exactly that.

We’d never be as successful bullshitting you.
Thanks for your support.