Apology, Explanation, and Future Plans

Hey everyone, this is Agang.

We’ve just gone through a pretty rough update cycle. After we released v11, remaking the game with the Godot 4 engine suddenly became a priority on our schedule, which made us change our original plan greatly. We had to develop v12 with Godot 3.5 as usual while simultaneously working on a Godot 4 remake version. This massively increased our workload, kept us under great stress, and made us make a hasty attempt, which was to finish the Godot 4 remake version within the v12 update cycle. That attempt didn’t work out, and the v12 release was pushed back by about 10 days. I sincerely apologize for that.

Now, I’ll explain our decisions and share our update plans along with some changes:

Why do we have to remake the game with Godot 4?

After releasing v11, I received a lot of complaints about having to start the game over from scratch, so I decided to do another run-through myself on both PC and Android, trying to figure out what bothered people the most. I’ve played the game dozens of times on PC since I needed to test the game, but I hadn’t really done a full playthrough on Android before. After I finally did that, I realized just how awful the gameplay experience is on Android. My entire playthrough was filled with all kinds of lags and response delays. These optimization issues need to be fixed. Android players deserve a smooth experience too.

But we soon realized that there was no way we could resolve these issues while using Godot 3.5 (the current engine version for the game). Godot 3.5 doesn’t support multi-threaded loading on Android, and using single-threaded loading means the game will lag at nearly every point where it needs to load files. We can try fix it by making specific optimizations for the Android version on each of those points, but that’s like trying to remove every tumor in the body of a stage-four cancer patient through surgery — yeah, that hopeless.

Or we could just give this dying patient a new body — using the Godot 4 engine to remake the game. Godot 4 was released last year and supports multi-threaded loading. It is a much easier and better option.

Why did we rush to try finish the Godot 4 version game in v12?

In short, Godot 4 and Godot 3.5 are essentially two different engines, so remaking the game is not as simple as just updating the engine version and dropping in our project files. But I’m not saying it is hard; in fact, it is not hard at all. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have nearly finished the Godot 4 version of v12 during the last update cycle.

What I’m emphasizing here is its instability. We’ve never used Godot 4 before, so we can’t predict how many bugs the first Godot 4 version of PHOENIXES will have, or even how many people won’t be able to launch it on their devices at all. So, theoretically, the less we rework, the more stable the game might be. If we wait until v13 or later for this, the amount of content we’ll need to rework will increase, which will further weaken the stability of the initial version and exponentially raise the amount of extra work for us.

Upcoming schedule

Turns out that trying to finish the Godot 4 game in v12 was a reckless and foolish decision. I don’t know what we were thinking. It clearly requires more time. As it stands, ideally, we’ll finish the Godot 4 game in v13 and release a “what-if” chapter made with Godot 4 beforehand to test the stability on a smaller scale. And if we need more time to work on the engine, we’ll do it in the v14 update cycle instead.

So our current schedule is:

 - A VIRTUES what-if chapter (Godot4)

 - v13 (Godot4)

 - v14 (Godot4)

Or

 - v13 (Godot3.5)

 - A VIRTUES what-if chapter (Godot4)

 - v14 (Godot4)

About the Update Cycle

The last two updates each took us 3 months to complete, and some people are asking if that will become the norm. Well, we’re trying to prevent that from happening. However, as you can see, we’re making huge changes to the game. For us, v11, v12, v13, and possibly v14 are all going to be packed with a massive workload. If this lengthens the development time a bit, we are sorry for that. Thanks for your understanding.

About Information Sharing

Our information-sharing process clearly needs improvement. As I mentioned earlier this year, we were unlikely able to release an update every two months anymore. However, until now, we were still following the old habit of posting as if we were still sticking to a two-month cycle. This outdated habit has led to some confusion: every time I make a “Final Peeks” post, the actual release date of the update often takes another two weeks or more (v12, for example, took a month). This has clearly led to some misunderstandings because no one would expect to wait another full month after seeing a post titled “Final Peeks.”

So starting with this update cycle, there will no longer be a "Final Peeks" post. Instead, when we reach the final stage of development (about two weeks to a month before the update), I’ll let everyone know, and then every 3-4 days, I’ll make new short posts with new images and the latest progress.