DD 0.41.0 release addendum

That is it, we did it. It is now the first time we release directly.

For me it was a necessary step, but for Jan it was clearly a very stressful one.

Since the benefits are indeed not obvious, he asked me to explain why we did it.

Public releases are a means to better and faster bugfixing.

Firstly because it expands the player base of the latest version. That means more people able to catch bugs and more bug reports as well as more obscure bugs reported.

I wouldn’t be able to debug as fast as I currently do if the game wasn’t leaked on sharing sites I monitor.

Reporting bugs is in itself supporting the game.

So when people gave me good reports and I was unable to send them the fixes I made in the hour.

To post a new update I had to wait for Jan to come online and upload the build. That because Patreon doesn’t allow to have multiple accounts posting on one campaign.

When the bugs are minor and don’t stop the progression, it is mostly fine but when they are game breaking well that is frustrating.

Also, we don’t advertise, so the leaked game is what gets people’s attention. And sharing site working with leaked version are not reliable at keeping their version up to date. And bugged version linger on them way too much (even after the early access times out), and that is detrimental for us.

So to recapitulate :

• Most of the bug report comes from sharing sites.
• Sharing sites are not reactive enough for bugfixing phases (the week after release)
• So it slows down bug fixing effort
• And it gives a worse idea of the game than it should

From this observation enters the updater.

The updater will obviously allow you to keep the game updated (duh’), but more importantly allow to me to push the fixes as soon as ready.

And that means very, very fast, iteration if needed.

We asked you in the August poll about making public release in order to allow for an auto update and here are the answers :

Now, even if I stated earlier the currently leaked version were instrumental during debugging, there is also a technical reason why we need public release for the updater to work.

The updater needs to pull the files from a pretty mundane server. It is very simple to do it if we don’t try to restrain access to those files, pretty much a copy paste.

But while it is certainly possible to manage those access to only allow you patrons to access the latest files it would be quite a sizable amount of work for a web developer. And I am not.

It would take me much, much more work than to someone specialized.

Not worth putting time in that given the poll answers.

But we didn’t want to only give you that “bad” news. So I made sure to add support for upscaled images and make an upscaled image pack that will only be released to patrons.

-Vaasref