Posted April 01, 2024 by SolitaryScribbles
#postmortem
Hey, all.
Just thought I'd make a small postmortem about the launch of 1.0. Most of this is taken from Twitter, so bare with any odd formatting.
I know it's only been a day since 1.0's launch. But dang, it's been a rough one. First off, I'm really sorry to the people who are experiencing game breaking bugs. I'll try to have them fixed as soon as I can. It just kinda unfortunate, y'know. The main thing that spurred this whole update was refactoring code cuz I felt bad seeing posts on 0.5 say stuff like "my game bugged out, all my citizens are default, and the game won't let me make another". I wanted to make sure that no one wouldn't be able to play because of a dumb bug. And I really thought I ironed all the major stuff out (you have no idea how much worse things were during development). This this has been tested by so many people, multiple different times. There has been SO much but fixing. But I guess I didn't get everything.
When I heard people were experiencing characters not loading, changes not saving, and hard crashes, it made me go "what the heck. Some of this stuff has never happened. Not even during the 300+ people pre-release? Why is it happening to people now???"
I'm not sure what's causing a lot of this junk. But I'll look into it as best as I can. I'm really sorry to the people who are unable to play the game properly at the moment. I'll try to do what I can to fix things. As well as balance the game better.
Bit shifting gears a bit, goodness, some people have been pretty dang brutal. I know, it's just part of life and people are more likely to be vocal about stuff they don't like as opposed to stuff they like, but dang, it's still hard to filter sometimes. To work 15 months on something and then get numerous posts that are just like "this is everything wrong with your game. Play 0.5.2 instead". I dunno, its demoralizing. It's not a perfect game by any means. But dang, some peeps aren't holding back. To read stuff like "this does not feel like a 1.0. It feels more like a scraped version of the original". Or walls of text that don't mention a single thing they enjoyed. It makes me think "dang, I didn't do ANYTHING right? Did I waste the past year+ of my life with this thing?"I understand it's not personal, and it comes from a place of wanting the game to be good. But dang, it can feel a bit disheartening. I wanna make something people enjoy, and it seems like a lot of people aren't.
I know there are people enjoying the game. Believe me, seeing posts of people making their favorite characters and getting up to shenanigans makes my day. And I'm really grateful for you all. I don't want it to seem like I don't notice you. I definitely do. It's just that sometimes the really negative stuff hits hard and sticks with you, ya know? Friends have told me to take a break from socials, and I probably should. But I WANT to know that people enjoy the game. I WANT to know people are having fun, so I keep checking. Sometimes it results in a great feeling. Other times it makes me feel flatter than the new model's face (people really don't like that one. It was a choice made to make development more manageable. I understand if it doesn't look appealing though, I'm sorry).
Anyways, if you are enjoying the game, thank you very much. I hope you continue to and that it doesn't break for you. To the people who are experiencing issues, I'm really sorry and I'll try my best to fix what I can. To the people who don't like the game in it's current state, I'm also sorry. I hope I can turn it into something more favorable in the near future.
If you actually read through all this, thanks for hearing me out. I appreciate it. Hope you all have a good day today.