Update on development & the future, long blogpost

Hello everyone,

I am glad to officially announce that, after about 60 hours of hard work and bad luck, my PC is now fully upgraded and running like a dream!

A big thank you to all of you supporting Elitemobs who, through your patronage, have allowed me to afford this investment into further, better work!

The following is a moment of introspection / retrospection about the development of EliteMobs since January and plans, both short and long-term. Feel free to skip it if that does not interest you. It has been a very long time since I’ve taken some time to analyze the state of my projects, and I think this is a great time to do so.

Work on the webapp isn’t going great. I love working on Elitemobs, and I love working on video game development in general. I have a hard time working on websites / webapps, and that has translated into a very slow and torturous development cycle.

I have spent a long time thinking about my shortcomings lately. There are many projects I have set aside for a future date which I believe would be very popular, even more popular than Elitemobs. I have ambitions (i.e., making videogames) which I have not really been able to work on, because I keep focusing on just one thing – Elitemobs, or the webapp in the last few weeks.

While being able to hyper focus on a project in a very long term can be beneficial, in more recent times I think this has been to the detriment not only of Elitemobs, but of the quality of my work in general.

As such, moving forward, I will be trying to work on more projects than just Elitemobs. I am starting with updating my long outdated other plugins (that’s right, I made other plugins!). I will also set some time aside to work on new plugins, like BetterStructures, a plugin we brainstormed ages ago and never did anything with.

There are other things I will be working on as well, which I hope you will be able to see very soon.

What does this mean for EliteMobs? You won’t notice much of a change. I have been working on this plugin for 5 years, and I have become very proficient at adding features for it, so you shouldn’t see a massive difference in feature development.

Some of the plugins that I want to develop – such as BetterStructures – will have EliteMobs integration. For reference, BetterStructures is a plugin that adds structures to the default world generation, and in this context some of those structures would have pre-made Elite challenges in them. You can think of them as random Lairs in the world generation.

Other plugins are completely unrelated to EliteMobs, such as the prototype SuperSmashMates minigame plugin I never really released, which is heavily inspired by Super Smash Bros.

Other projects yet have nothing to do with Minecraft, and are standalone projects, such as developing my own videogames.

Obviously, it is not possible to work on everything at the same time. Moving forward, the plan is to do smaller sets of development goals, working on those and then moving to a different project, working on a small set of goals, and then moving back. Doing so should prevent me from burning out on working on a specific feature (like the webapp, or a 50-wave arena) and ending up wasting a lot of time because I can’t bring myself to work on things at an appropriate pace.

Let’s talk about the immediate future. I am going to end the current development cycle of the webapp after the next update you are about to see in the releases channel. The webapp already works well and we are using it to create Primis.

Instead of trying to make all the features the webapp was ever planned to have in one go, I will be adding them slowly and as they become relevant to our needs. This should keep development fast and prevent me from disappearing for months as burn out fighting against html/css/javascript. Hopefully this also means I will keep it updated with new EliteMobs features, which has been an issue with previous iterations of the webapp.

I am about to release the next public version of EliteMobs. This one is mostly a compilation of several dozens of bug fixes, tweaks, and general polish. After that we will be focusing on Primis. Bepis has been working on some amazing locations which I am very much looking forward to sharing with you, and I am looking forward to using the webapp to develop Primis.

Once these tasks are done, I will work through the backlog of things that I always said I was going to work on “later”. I hope you will find these to be as enjoyable as my usual work, or even better.

I want this to be a moment where I shift into a higher gear and start not only working on more things, but also faster and more efficiently. I hope you will come along for the ride and try out the things I work on.

I am resuming development streams. This post is already long enough without me explaining why I stopped streaming, so let’s just say I miss doing it and that’s enough of a reason to start doing it again. You can find me at twitch.tv/magmaguy , if you are interested.

I apologize for how long this blogpost is, and I hope that I don’t sound like I am complaining. I could hardly ask for a better position to be in, working on things I love doing thanks to your support. I simply feel like my work has been slowly stagnating lately, and while I can point my finger at external issues all I want to try to justify it, I don’t think that’s helpful, nor do I believe that this will solve anything.

I don’t want to provide you with the best work I can do, I want to push things harder and provide content I was previously unable to create, and do so continuously. I want to do this not only for people who choose to support my work long-term, but also for myself.

I’d like once again to thank everyone who has chosen to support my projects. I don’t exactly know what I would be doing right now without your support, but I am certain I would not be half as passionate for it as I am for the things I am working on and plan to work on. I sincerely hope that you will enjoy the content I have planned for you.

That’s all for now. If you read it until the end, thanks for reading and feel free to share your thoughts or opinions.

Stay tuned.

- MagmaGuy