Vore Tournament 2.0.0 Alpha - Release Target Announcement

The time has come to unveil my plans for the first Vore Tournament release. A lot of users have been waiting for this announcement, and asking when a release of the new Vore Tournament is going happen. I heard you and have not been ignoring this important public demand! However I needed time to think about the various aspects, as well as making sure there are no major bugs that would cause total breakage. Although I'm still working some things out, I believe I have decided on the primary points, and can announce what's going to be happening in principle.

I'll start with the important bit: The VT 2.0.0 release is going to be a Patreon target, and will happen after I hit the newly added goal. As I'm currently close to $300, my goal will be for $400 per month. While I don't wish to annoy my watchers with unnecessary details about my situation, I feel I need to explain a bit about why I took this decision first:

• As I've mentioned on multiple occasions, we're still in great need of money. This is in fact the target I've been trying to reach ever since I started my Patreon, as it represents the minimum income me and my mother need to live above the poverty line and begin climbing out of debt.
• Vore Tournament is a project developed by one person (myself). Although it's built on top of the Xonotic code base and uses freely available assets, I still need to create and maintain the code as well as editing those assets to work as intended. This is no easy task, and many features have taken whole days of non-stop work to complete.
• Unlike many Patreon projects, Vore Tournament is free open-source software and available to everyone, without any of the main components being hidden behind a paywall. Once a development update or release happens, it's immediately available to everyone out there! This is the only model I ever wish to work under, but doing so implies a slightly greater effort in drawing support for the project.

Most importantly, this target is temporary and does carry a limit! The release will happen either way at some point, even if the goal is not reached... however reaching the goal will make it happen sooner. I promised I'd publish a release until the end of the year, so the deadline is this December... if it doesn't happen until close to 2018, the release will occur regardless at that date. Obviously I'm hopeful this will not be the case, and believe I can achieve the goal within 1 to 3 months from this posting.

With that being clarified, here are the rules in more detail and the expected course of events to follow:

• The goal is officially considered reached at the beginning of the month! This is because my account doesn't use the "charge upfront" feature, since I consider it too limiting for new patrons... to compensate for that, I need to make sure the milestone actually gets charged, and no patrons pull out right before the 1st or are using invalid payment info.
• Once it happens, I'll be going into feature freeze mode... excluding potential small features which can be kept under control.
• I'll be dedicating a few days to thorough testing in less usual setups, and fixing critical bugs in case I run across any. The release package will have to be tested against Xonotic's own release build.
• I'll want to hold at least one multiplayer session, with players who are running the development version and can connect to a Git version server. Testing thus far has only been done locally, we need to see how VT 2.0 holds up in an online game! I'll post an announcement about this at the time, and see at which hour others are free to have a bit of fun online.
• The moment I'm happy with the results, I'll generate the zip for the mod and publish it. The version in Git will then be bumped to 2.0.1. A link to the download will be posted in a new announcement.

The release will be distributed as a single archive, which will run on top of the latest Xonotic release. You'll first have to download and install vanilla Xonotic, then simply extract the data_voretournament directory inside, and run xonotic.exe with the proper command line parameter.

Once this release is out of the way, I'll begin moving toward 2.1.0. Now that the base code and primary functionality is in place, the focus of the next major release will be the artistic aspect: New graphics, new music, new sounds, actual characters for the bots, and perhaps even an original campaign! I have quite a few ideas in mind, but will be keeping some of them for later.