IMPORTANT: New Release Schedule for Less Bugs and More Ambitious New Content

(Rest assured, there will still be 3 kinks a month, more consistently so, even.)

As you know, I switched to the current 3-updates-a-month release schedule (usually around the 8th, 18th and 28th of each month) about 2 years ago to fulfill the promise of the $1000 milestone. While it hasn't been too difficult to actually release 3 updates a month, I think it's time to admit that the release schedule has been harming the overall quality of the project.

First, the obvious: 3 updates a month has introduced so many more bugs that pile up more and more each month, worsening the players' experience by the month. Because I only have 10 days max to work on each update (significantly less if it's Feb, or Christmas etc), by the time I've finished the new content for each update's kink, it's usually around on the ETA or at most one day before ETA so the playtesting and bugfixing is usually rushed. You might have noticed in recent months I've tried to mitigate this by not being so strict on the 8th-18th-28th dates and have taken a day or two extra if needed for bugfixing until I felt comfortable enough to release the update. Still, a day or two extra playtesting on my own doesn't guarantee that I have been able to detect all the bugs let alone fix them, because LifePlay is a lifesim sandbox that's getting bigger and bigger, there are just so many playstyles and variables that honestly, the only way to detect all the bugs is with the community's help with all the different players playing the game. There have been times in the past where I felt I took the time needed for playtesting and felt pretty confident about releasing an update, only to find out within days of the release from the community there's a game-breaking bug when playing a specific type of player character. This has turned into a bit of fear and instead of looking forward to people enjoying each new update, more often than not, I'm nervous about whether there might be a game-breaking bug I missed. Furthermore, when I don't have enough time to fix bugs, I have even less time to support modders and expand modders' API, which has killed the modding scene a bit.

Being terrified about bugs causes a more serious but less obvious problem: new content has become stale and 'safety first'. When I'm already overwhelmed by existing bugs, it's extremely hard to get over that fear and reluctance to work on new content that is ambitious, aka dangerous in terms of potentially breaking things. This includes a lot of good ideas I see every week in the Discord brainstorm, that I feel guilty to skip, but is too worried about it messing with existing systems and introducing game-breaking bugs. Instead, especially when I know there are already a lot of existing bugs I haven't go to yet, I've usually stuck to adding new scenes (i.e. lpscene files) only for the particular kink, rather than working on more advanced stuffs. I'm sure many players don't mind just new scenes, but there's a limit to what the lpscene format can do and tbh, with the game already having modding capacity for third parties to make their own mods full of new scenes, tbh just being a writer of scenes isn't the best use of the developer's time. I really should be working on the advance stuffs that modders can't as well as improving the API for modders so that they can make more mods aka far more scenes that I can write by myself anyway.  

So, here's the new release schedule. Two updates per month:

- Each month's Beta Update is released between the 18th to 21st of each month. This Beta adds all the new content for the month for all three winning kinks of that month.

- Each month's Stable Update is released between the 28th to 31st of each month. This update adds no new content is all about fixing bugs and expanding modders' API. 

Between the two updates, there will be a public beta testing + modders' requests period (about 10 days) on Discord and GitHub (I will post a new GitHub repo link for this when the next update comes out) where everyone is welcome to playtest the beta update and report bugs so that I can fix them. The advanced bug reporters can directly do pull requests on Github for scenes. Of course, it's perfectly understandable if you just skip the Beta update and only play the Stable update each month, but the more people playtest the Beta update and report bugs, the more effective the system will be.

This way, not only will I have more time + community help when it comes to detecting and fixing bugs, but also for the Beta update, because it's a beta update with players knowingly volunteering to playtest, I don't have to be so afraid of adding the more ambitious new content that might break things. Sure, I'll have 20 days instead of 30 days to work on each month's three kinks. This will lead to a reduction in new scenes written by me directly and a switch of focus to me working on expanding systems and adding advanced hard-coded content that modders can't. However, hopefully with each month's Stable update now also expanding modders' API to support them more, the new scenes coming from modders will be far more numerous than what I used to write myself anyway. Also, there will be consistently 3 kinks each month now (the 2 top of the poll + 1 chosen as unlucky loser), no more occasional bugfix-update that takes away one kink.

To fit the new release schedule, new versioning numbers will be used for clarity. So accordingly, the next 4 updates upcoming will be:

- v 2023.04 Beta (paul Ince..., Vore, University). ETA 18th-21st April.

- v 2023.04 Stable. ETA 28th-30th April.

- v 2023.05 Beta (Fantasy Races, Pregnancy + one more kink to be voted on). ETA 18th-21st May. (you might recall Pregnancy is the update I 'owed' from last month)

- v 2023.05 Stable. ETA 28th-31th May.

Thank you for your support to date and I hope you can understand and support this new release schedule going forward. I genuinely felt the project was going off track with the last release schedule and this is the only way to get back on track, stay on top of the bugs, add more ambitious content and revive the modding scene.