Release Pacing

As we finish major blocks of content for 0.2.0, our attention turns to the question of how frequently we should release new versions of the game.

It's a trade-off between development speed and community involvement. If we posted yearly, you guys wouldn't get much content and we wouldn't be able to incorporate your feedback. If we posted weekly, development would slow to a crawl and most releases would be buggy and incomplete.

On our end, we have to decide between breadth and depth of content. For example, our original plan for the catgirl quest would have involved several catgirls and a huge number of player choices... but if you only played through once, the update would be over pretty quickly. Rather than spend so much of our development time on one quest, we dedicated some of it toward varied content around camp.

But on the other hand, sometimes we want to include something more work-intensive. For example, one of the scenes we've finished lets Sabia make a choice that can send the scene in different directions, each with its own unique variations. This obviously consumes more time, but we feel adding this kind of variety is worth it.

Frequent releases also mean that it is less likely that past saves will be fully compatible with new versions. Though we hope to do our best to make past saves valid through all versions, this is more difficult in Ren'py, so faster releases means potentially more bugs or required restarts.

Anyway, we're here today to get your input on this issue. We generally feel that releasing roughly monthly is a decent balance, but a section of the plot doesn't always fit into a month of development time. So there are basically two options before us:

1) Rigid Release Schedule: Updates come out at consistent times, but with less content.

2) Flexible Release Schedule: Updates come out with more content, but at less predictable times.

Neither one of those options would be a huge departure from the release schedule we followed for Noxian Nights: we think roughly monthly is a good model. We've made significant progress on the next version and even at the very latest it would still be coming out in July. But we wanted to keep you up to date and to gather opinions so we can shift in the direction that the majority of patrons want.