Hello all, here’s a (relatively) brief 2021 recap and summary of 2022 goals.
Recap
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2021’s player activity held steady across the game, Discord, and the forums. 2020 was a rough year, but in 2021 we stabilized. Our numbers are still very much down generally, but we are on a slight upswing compared to this time last year.
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Early in 2021 we ran into some serious performance issues with the site, and unfortunately more than one crash. Shortly afterward, I switched my focus entirely to performance improvements and rolled out some optimizations to our infrastructure. I’m happy to say that we haven’t had a crash since.
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Despite the wins above, 2021 was still full of struggles across the board. Although I am happy with some things I was able to accomplish for IC, I nonetheless failed to meet several of my goals for last year. This was largely a result of me trying to do too many things, spreading myself too thin, and overall lacking a coherent vision and sense of direction.
With that in mind, I am focusing on 3 very specific goals that I aim to hit for 2022:
Goals
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Our #1 priority above all else is giving players full control over every aspect of their experience, including and especially the round setups. I am in the middle of some “open heart surgery” on this part of the game code that is progressing well. I am very optimistic and excited about this.
The goal here is for the game to run 100% without any manual oversight.
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A second big plan for the year is (re)splitting the tick. We had some success with this before with the hyper server (15 min ticks) and chaos server (1 min ticks) but the implementation did not scale well and I eventually had to shut them down. The plan this time around is to overhaul the tick script so that we can implement this in conjunction with the new round setup code mentioned in #1 above.
The goal here is to once again offer options for different time commitments, so that we can cater to a wider and more diverse group of players.
As side note, a separate but related personal goal of mine is to stream myself playing IC on my Twitch channel. The split tick must be done for this to happen, so that IC can become more spectator friendly.
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The last big plan for the year is to finish the site redesign. A lot of work has been done here but it has been sidetracked by the round setup work, which has become the more urgent need. After #1 and #2 above are completed, I plan to shift my focus to finishing the redesign so that playing the game doesn’t feel so cumbersome.
The goal here is to have a website that is modern, easy to use, and that leaves players feeling less frustrated and more satisfied.
These aren’t the only things to come for this year. There will be other work ongoing as there always is, but the points above are the high-level things I see as most critical and that I will do my best to stay focused on.
These things represent an overall vision for a modern IC; one that runs more efficiently, appeals to more players, and is more user friendly.
Thank you all for another great year. There’s lots more I would love to talk about but in the spirit of talking less and doing more, I’ll go ahead and get back to work. 