Development update #17 (Patreon)

Whoops, I totally forgot about this yesterday. Luckily, I'm currently waiting on a fairly long animation to record, so I'll do it now. (The animation itself isn't that long, maybe 5 seconds. I'm just recording it at 20% speed so that node constraints can keep up. Hopefully that makes sense to a few of you.)

Anyway, not much has changed in terms of actual development, there's more done now than there was 2 weeks ago, as you might expect. One kinda fun change is that this week, aside from the Monday when I was doing a bunch of extra IRL work in order to prepare for this, I have the rest of this week off. So I'm spending it basically in crunch mode, in an attempt to get the game complete this month. I don't know if I'm going to succeed, but I'm trying to. I won't release it if it's not ready, so I can't promise it will be this month. But I'm trying. Everyone here knows why I don't like making estimates.

One other change is I had a thought about the future of the project. Obviously, 5-6 month waits between updates is no fun for anyone, myself included, as I wanna see how people react to what I've been working on. Because of this, I'm changing how the releases work a bit following the release of 0.22.

Future updates will be smaller. 0.22 is only a single day, but there's a lot in that day, due to all the branching. (I haven't compressed it yet, but it's currently close to 10GB. Don't worry, I'm gonna be dealing with that.)
I generally want to avoid releasing 10 minute updates, so I'm not going that extreme but maybe 40 minute snippets, that may be just part of a day, and may not have content for some routes. Then, once an update comes out that completes all content for a day, I'll make that clear in the version number. This way, people who would prefer to play one big update rather than lots of little ones can just watch out for those updates, and anyone who wants to play the content as soon as it's ready/released can do that. The actual time taken to make the game won't change, you'll just have the option of more frequent access to what's already completed.

I'm not going to pretend this is for any reason other than trying to increase the exposure the game gets. More frequent updates means a project gets featured more frequently on the various sites that host it, meaning more eyes on the game, and more potential support. I feel it's either this, or cutting back on scope, and this seems like a much more attractive option to me. I still want to be happy with what I've made, so cutting the scope isn't something I want to do when there are other options.

This also means I'll be changing how the version numbers work. They'll mostly stay the same with my dumb system, but it'll be adapted to the following.

W.X.Y.Z   (Currently it's just W.X)

W = Major version. This is basically gonna be 0 until version 1.0.
X = Release version. This is basically what it sounds like, it'll usually be a single in game day, and is what the 22 in 0.22 or 21 in 0.21 are generally.
Y = Update number. This is identifies which update in that version this is. So 0.23 could be a single day made up of 3 updates, so you'd get 0.23.1, 0.23.2 and 0.23.3 and together they form that whole release.
Z = Patch number. This will usually be omitted. It's reserved just for if I need to do a bugfix or something.

So yeah, following 0.22, the next release will be 0.23.1 and then 0.23.2 and then so on, however many times it takes to complete the next day. Then that last one gets stamped with "0.23.4 (Day X complete)" or something, and then we start again on the next in game day with 0.24.1. It won't always be a single in game day, I'm just using that as a baseline at the moment for "A chunk of content". If a day doesn't have much going on in it, the update may be 2 or 3 days instead. Basically, if the X number is different, there should be a hefty difference in the amount of content.

Hopefully this makes sense. Better than Day 3 v0.114.009a pre-alpha patreon FINAL FINAL.docx or whatever.

That's about it for the moment. I plan the changelogs to be quite detailed, so players should be able to read them to work out whether an update is worth playing for them based on the choices they've made in the game, but I guess we'll see how it turns out. For now, back to 0.22 making for me.