First of all, I am extremely grateful to have such awesome supporters. YOU are making this and everything that comes after it possible! We will continue to make Cogmind one of the best roguelikes ever created.
Launch has gone quite well considering it was a soft launch with no press support. Still a long way to compensating for the game's full past and future budget, but certainly good enough for now. I'm so glad we've finally got this show on the road and that everyone is enjoying it
. (I collected some quotes in the first days after launch, which you can read
here.)
Now to the business of development...
We have a long-term plan guided by the
roadmap, but I should offer some direction as to where things stand and what will happen over the next few weeks.
As of today, days after launch, I'm
still not caught up on essential launch-related tasks. I haven't even finished the original list of secondary launch announcements I wanted to make on the web! That and other things have been repeatedly put off for more pressing issues like handling orders (some customers need help, and I'm new to the system) and technical support (mostly limited to a few specific issues).
Post-release management has been a ton of work. I've slept about 5 hrs/day for the last week to try to get more done, but there's only one of me vs. a lot of things to be done. I'm not complaining--I love having lots to do--but I've never been so busy in my life and the load is somewhat unexpected. My expectations were maybe a couple days of non-stop busyness, not trying to play catch up for an entire week and still remaining far behind the entire time!
So in the near-term...
- This weekend I may try to take a very short break (half a day?) so I don't like, die soon
- Once all the announcements and launch stuff is done (few more days?), I'll be working on a bug fix release that addresses any easily adjustable little things that players have brought up, as well as a few crash bugs. (This release will also include a major change to the level generation--stairways to unavailable branches will be completely removed for now.)
- After the bug fixes, I'll start work on Alpha 2, which will try to incorporate some basic UI features that have been requested. Which ones will depend on how easily each one can be achieved in a short time--more involved features will wait until Alpha 3. I don't want Alpha 2 to be delayed long because:
- If everything seems to be working smoothly enough, with Alpha 2 I'd like to run an official tournament for all of you special early supporters. Our very first tournament, with prizes even!
- After that, we will finally enter the "normal development phase," during which I go back to working on the listed roadmap features to build the final game. There will be new releases at least every time a new branch is added, more if a significant batch of new non-branch features was added.
In the meantime, know that because I'm still handling short-term launch-related issues, responses to anything non-urgent on the forums, like suggestions and ideas, will come very slowly for now. I'm not ignoring those boards--they will eventually be getting a lot of attention from me, but I need to get past all this other stuff first.
I appreciate where any members who are familiar with my plans/thoughts/statements from wherever can help answer any questions on my behalf if it's taking me too long to get to them. (And feel free to discuss amongst yourselves so that when I do have opportunities to join in, there are already a number of viewpoints to examine.)
Looking forward to the rest of the year!
