Efficiency Overhaul

Hey y'all!  Just want to give you guys a quick update, let you know what I've been up to lately and what's coming up next....

Spring Cleaning

It's that time of year... time to catch up on all those annoying chores I've been procrastinated on for months, clean things up and get more organized and efficient.

This past week I've been navigating my way through accounting and tax hell (damn you Uncle Sam!), moving all of my equipment to a dedicated office space in the house, and doing a lot of much needed "spring cleaning."  I also cleaned up all of my project files and setup a secondary backup system to save things to the cloud in case anything catastrophic were to ever happen.

It was a pain in the ass, but it had to be done.

Taxes and Accounting? Check.
Clean and Organize? Check.

Even though I've been able to put out new updates 1-4 times per month, sometimes I feel like it takes me forever to add new features that have been on my list for weeks, or even months.  I don't like that.  I wanna crank things out FAST!  I wanna give you guys new feature requests more rapidly, and I want to make each content update more beefy.

As a result, I've put a ton of effort into overhauling my development pipeline this week.  I've got new software, new tools, and a new method of doing things that should speed things up significantly!  I also organized all of my to-dos, feature requests, and bug reports into a Trello board to keep things tightly focused and organized.  There's still a learning curve to some of the new stuff, but it should speed up development a lot as I get more familiar.

Overhaul gamedev pipeline so I can build the game faster?  Check.

Another thing I've really needed to make time for is improving my programming skills.  This area is my weakest skill and easily eats up most of my time.  Also, since this is my first project, I've spent a lot of time refactoring old code to make it more efficient and manageable.  I've spent a lot of time this week studying up in this area and cleaning up my code, and just learning how to be a better programmer in general.  Being better in this area should also speed up development.

Improve coding skillz?  Check.

Although I don't have a new game update for you guys yet, I finally took care of a lot of must-do tasks and I'm in a better position to develop the rest of the FASTER, and--hopefully--with bigger updates each time.

What's Next?

Going forward, I'm going to focus on rolling out 2 major updates per month: 1 for the main game content and 1 for the level editor.  Bug fixes and minor features will be worked into these updates, instead of doing the small, frequent updates I've been doing since Early Access launch.

There might be one small update at the end of this month, and then 2 major updates per month starting in May.  Probably mid-month and end of month.  The goal is to make these beefy, content-heavy updates.

I also have something big planned for June or July, but too early to announce anything yet.  Stay tuned for more!