It’s that time of the lunar calendar again! We’re going to be putting out a major monthly patch in a few days, more info to come toward the end of the week.

As for game development news, this blog post was really tough to write because I haven’t actually been working directly on the game code in probably a couple of months now, barring my brief work enabling a new biome.

#1 Management Tip? Condition.

Most of the work that I’ve been doing has been the rather inglorious work of preparing revenue reports for our financial partner (Canada), preparing for taxes, product management, and other typical things that business owners need to do. Nothing glamorous or interesting as game development blog material.

Between “Early Access” and “Shipped”

One of the things I have been doing for the last few weeks, though, is quantifying the details that separate our game as it exists now from the level of polish people expect from finished games. There’s a gulf between a nearly completed game and a completed game that comes down to all the tiny details that aren’t absolutely necessary for the game to function, but these are the details that remove the necessity for the player to do detective work to play the game. In a truly great game, among a host of other things, the game will gently encourage players to do the things they wanted to do anyway in all the right ways without them having to puzzle out how. This is what we need to do to get from the bare skeleton of a game to that properly fleshed out experience. Getting there is a little weird.

{ read this article }