Adjusting v3.3 Release Plans | Patreon Weekly #334

Hey Patrons! In this weekly I’m going to go over some changes I’m making to how I’ll be releasing the upcoming city quest. There’s also an audio Q&A this week, you can find timestamps for all the questions below.

Some of you might remember that the caves quest was released fairly incrementally. I first created a ‘tester area’ that players could muck around in as a patch for v2.1. v2.2 had a long beta that initially just expanded that area and didn’t even start with a playable quest. The first variant of the quest came a month into v2.2’s beta, and then the second variant came in v2.3.

While I don’t plan to copy this exactly, I think a more incremental approach is best here too, rather than trying to release the whole thing in one huge v3.3 release. A big part of this decision is also that some users have started reporting a fairly serious bug that I don’t want to wait months to release a fix for.

The bug is a race condition that results in a complete game freeze when brutes die over time while thrown weapons are stuck to them. I’ll spare you the full tech details, but a race condition essentially means that the bug is dependent on two sequences of code happening to execute in a certain order relative to each other, This is often dependent on a particular processor, which means most users never see this bug, but for some it happens every time!

So, my current plan is to adjust v3.3 to be a much smaller update that includes lots of small tweaks and fixes that I’ve already done, as well as an incomplete skeleton for the new city quest. This will be similar to the ‘tester’ area that was released in patches for v2.1.

If I do this right it won’t substantially delay the eventual full release of the city quest, and it does mean that v3.3 can release relatively soon, probably around mid November, instead of almost certainly releasing in 2026.

Audio Timestamps

This month there were 12 questions from 6 different Patrons.

• 0:09 "If this hasn't been asked before (which it probably has and i didnt see), how many more classes and/or subclasses and/or abilities do you plan on making overall for the game?" - Slenderazi

• 0:53 "favorite wii game? also favorite zelda game or era?" - DaltonGoesFast

• 2:41 "With absolutely no context at all, the colour green, or the number 3?" - Chewyou

• 3:01 "Why can't we have nice things?" - Chewyou

• 4:25 "how does augment of evasion work with glyph of stone? is it better to augment for defense or evasion if there's a stone glyph on your armor?" - DaltonGoesFast

• 6:26 "What do you recommend we do about about the upgrading android apk "security" changes?" - Zrp200

• 11:12 "i finally move my knight out of the corner to f7, whats your next move?" – radiantchaos

  

• 11:46 "Who are some of your favorite gaming YouTubers, if any? Do you know about ThorHighHeels, Majuular, or Grimbeard?" - DaltonGoesFast

  EDIT: As an addendum to my answer, I completely forgot Ross Scott, as he's been doing more activism stuff lately (stop killing games). He's absolutely the sort of gaming youtuber you're talking about and I do watch his videos regularly.

• 14:10 "Would you ever consider adding an easy mode, or 'easy challenges' to SPD? Like challenges but in the opposite direction, like extra damage or everything is upgraded. Or even something like wizard mode from Brogue?" - DaltonGoesFast

• 15:37 "What are you gonna be for Halloween? Or what WOULD you be if you dressed up?" - DaltonGoesFast

• 16:50 "What is the meaning of life?" - Slenderazi

• 18:34 "Do you have any other ideas for games that you might make?" - Slenderazi

• 19:31 quick bonus, how I'm doing this month