Minor Release Schedule Update Going Forward (Patreon)

So with another month of release experience under my bag, I have found a couple of points to improve the release trains. First of all

Weekly Prerelease will release 1 hour earlier at 22:22 UTC.

I wanted to have enough buffer time to last minute fix issues. But it looks like my worries here were a bit overblown and my time management on friday is doing fine enough to finish several hours before the prerelease time.

And since I can't have a peace of mind until I download the prerelease build and play a bit around with it, I can't go to bed and instead just spend my time waiting in anxiety. For these reasons I will be moving up the release time by 1 hour to 22:22 UTC. This way I should have plenty of time in case I need to emergency fix something, but also can go timely to bed without worrying about the release somehow being broken.

The second part concerns upcoming patch releases.

There will be more minor patch releases in the future.

I wanted to not have too many releases, so in the past month, when I made a patch release I basically just made the prerelease public containing both content updates + balancing and bugfix releases.

This had a lot of troubles since I didn't want to release the in-development features to the wider public and as such making a patch release after 1-2 weeks of a public release became really difficult. That's why in all previous versions you will find that there is usually a x.y.1 release but not a x.y.2 release.

Starting with 0.5.0 this will change. Or at least I will try changing from here. I got a lot of good feedback and bugreports. And I feel that I am wasting my player's time by exposing them to a buggy product. Therefore, I have changed my development process to be split into two development lines:

• (1) The content and feature line
• (2) The bugfix and balancing line

What this means for you is basically just that on friday's, if there were any bugs or balancing fixes during the week, there will be a minor patch release somewhen before the daily build (that is before 20:20 UTC). 

This patch release will only contain (2).

Then the daily and the prerelease will be built with (1) + (2).

This way I hope to get bugfixes and balancing changes out ASAP and provide a better playing experience for everybody. And I also hope that this way I can reduce the amount of feedback that I already know about, and increase the feedback on new unknown issues in the game, raising overall quality.

That being said, due to the way RPGMaker works and is not 100% compatible with the version control system I use (GIT), I expect that it will get me some time to get this right.