v0.3.3 has finally entered official development! What does that mean for us? What does this mean for you?
In working on Cornucopia, adoomgod and I share a google doc in which we directly describe every change we intend to make for a patch as specifically as possible. We are more specific than the patchnotes that Crate releases, as rather than saying “increased X skill’s damage significantly” we’ll say “increased X skills damage by Y% multiplicatively”. This is as much for your benefit in understanding the changes as it is for our benefit in implementing them.
Point being, the first step in making v0.3.3 was figuring out precisely what changes we wanted to make. This is undoubtedly the lengthiest process of our release schedule, as it first requires us to be creative at times and to check each other’s suggestions against other changes we’ve made in the mod, making sure everything ‘works’ in a balanced manner. On a small scale this is complicated enough, but the googledoc we’ve made for v0.3.3 is almost 15,000 words long and spans 22 pages.
It’s been a lengthy process.
From here, we actually go about implementing our changes, which should only take a couple weeks. After that, we enter a closed-testing period in which we send our release to our handpicked testers among you, and they look for irregularities and offer their immediate insight into the patch, so that when we go public with the patch every corner of the changes has been as thoroughly looked at as we can reasonably muster. Closed testing shouldn’t take more than one or two weeks, too.
Finally, when all of that is said and done, we’ll release the patch to you fine fellows!
…unfortunately, this also means we’re kind of going to ‘go dark’ on updates and hotfixes for the next couple of weeks. Bugs spotted in the next couple of weeks will remain present and unfixed until we release v0.3.3, as our working versions will essentially be incompatible. Having said that, if you see something that looks ‘broken’, please report it to us!
We hope you enjoy the present state of the mod, and that none of it breaks too much for you.
Thanks for sticking with us through this lengthy, wild ride,
adoomgod & Ceno, Cornucopia Dev Team