Streamlining the dungeon update cycle

Hello everyone,

Long post ahead, conclusion at the end!

Recently Nightbreak (my new game studio!) began trying onboard more people to speed up the release and update of all our releases. Bepis, Dalio and FrostCone are, at least for the time being, continuously helping with releases and updates.

This increased team size allows me to do things a bit differently without taking development time away from other projects.

One of the key things I want to change is the way we release content and how we update that content. Thus far, dungeon updates and fixes have been rare, with most dungeons seeing about 2-3 updates in total.

However, I am aware that several issues have been reported for various dungeons, issues which for the most part require minor tweaks.

Furthermore, for the adventures we work on over the span of months such as Primis or The Oasis, we have historically called each release a "chapter", and each release brought hundreds (or thousands, yikes) of new mobs, enormous new regions & more.

While I like the concept of releasing this content in chapters, it has become clear that doing things this way also causes a lot of problems. Trying to make massive updates means we are extremely slow in responding to map bugs, as it takes weeks of work to make this kind of content. An estimated 30-50% of people get confused about the "chapter" nomenclature and ask if/where they can download the previous chapters. There is also a serious issue with feature creep, as the next Primis “chapter” is already well over 4x the size it was originally meant to be.

For these reasons, I believe that some changes are in order.

Conclusion:

Moving forward, instead of providing insanely large updates to the dungeons, dungeon releases will be kept to a more manageable scope. Instead of aiming for a massive dungeon release per month, we will try to do smaller releases on a weekly basis, sometimes of a single dungeon, sometimes fixing or updating/improving previous dungeons.

Chapters will be renamed to the more traditional “version”. Dungeons in development (Primis) will use version 0.X, and fully released dungeons will use version 1.X. If a dungeon gets a significant remake, like The Oasis is about to get, it will be renamed to version 2.X, 3.X and so on.

This will also allow us to more accurately document the changes done to the dungeons, something that is important for those seeking to customize and translate the content.

Once the new translation system is in place, dungeon updates / reinstalls should also no longer delete translated configurations, which I believe every non-English server will appreciate.

While I think this would be a good idea, I would love to hear your feedback. For that reason, I have created a poll so you can share your opinion on this change in release pace.

If a substantial amount of people wishes to keep on seeing massive once a month updates instead of smaller once a week updates, I will respect that and revert this decision. I do want to make it clear that smaller updates do not mean less content. Regardless of how we do things, we will be producing more and better content over the same amount of time as we get more help with the projects.

Looking forward to hearing your feedback,

- MagmaGuy