Thank you those who joined us in our video chat this weekend. 
We’ll do another one, timing TBD.
Here’s what is planned to be delivered in the next 2 weeks.
1. Updates on the game's progress, so that players are aware of dev activity.
1. Updates on the game’s progress, so that players are aware of dev activity.
This is relatively small, but important. The video call we just had is part of it, as the next one will be. I’m going to keep providing these dev updates in the forum as well.
There is more structure coming to how we plan and communicate this work, starting with this 2-week window. Instead of trying to tackle overwhelming changes, work will be chunked out into reasonable pieces that can be tied to realistic deadlines.
The flipside of this is that many things will actively not be worked on within a given period, so that we can avoid over-committing. This will help retain focus, and will personally help me not burn out.
As an example, this coming 2-week period is almost entirely focused on stabilizing our systems. This is a matter of necessity given how badly server issues effected #andromeda-43. That means no work on game features at least for the next 2 weeks.
To be extra clear, that doesn’t mean we’re saying “no” to requests, it means we’re saying “we have work planned right now but we can adjust the plan in 2 weeks” and work will be done to keep everybody updated.
2. Set up daily backups, so that we have better rollback options after crashes.
2. Set up daily backups, so that we have better rollback options after crashes.
We used to have daily backups but lost them when we transitioned and upgraded last year. Although our new setup is generally far better, not having daily backups is a rough tradeoff and can put us in a bad spot as we recently saw.
We can’t anticipate unexpected crashes, otherwise they wouldn’t be unexpected. However, but we can and should be better equipped to minimize how disruptive they are. Daily backups are an obvious baseline.
3. Set up server monitoring and alerts, so that problems can be identified and resolved before they become critical.
3. Set up server monitoring and alerts, so that problems can be identified and resolved before they become critical.
Daily backups are great, but even better than that is if we never need them.
Some work has already been done here, but obviously not enough. We need better visibility into potential issues so that we can more effectively prevent crashes in general. Although we can’t anticipate unexpected crashes, we can work to make them less likely while also improving our ability to recovery from them.
4. Get development environments to be as close to production as possible, so that development and bug fixes can happen more efficiently and with less risk.
4. Get development environments to be as close to production as possible, so that development and bug fixes can happen more efficiently and with less risk.
Players don’t see this directly, but right now troubleshooting bugs and working on new features is not as easy as it should be due to discrepancies between the development and production versions of the game.
It makes it more difficult to reproduce reported bugs and also presents risk of introducing new bugs that aren’t caught during development.
The end result of this work will be that bugs get fixed faster and new features get released faster. This also will result in new features introducing fewer bugs, which means in the long term maintenance work will become much less expensive, which will allow us to put resources toward actual features.
In short: this will reduce how much time and energy is spent struggling to stay afloat.
The focus for this period is stabilization, not gameplay. Changes to gameplay won’t matter if we continually crash and lose data.
Once things are stable, we can shift back to feature work. I’m very much looking forward to that. 