supersoup:

We’re trying something new.

Until now, we’ve had a very aggressive, very Agile development cycle. We were often working on features or committing code and assets up until hours before the patch was to go live. This allowed us to practice some quick turnarounds on patches for reported issues. But it also resulted in moments where fixing an issue meant creating issues elsewhere, or unfortunate regressions crept into releases.

Clearly, that’s unacceptable. So it’s time for a different approach.

Starting with the past patch, we’ve implemented a new process for putting together any public release of NewCity, including both hotfixes and larger patches. Now we’re staggering feature work and bugfixing instead of mingling them, taking full advantage of the two weeks between major releases and giving us more time for testing, tweaking, and tuning. We’re locking feature work a week before a patch is set to go live and spending the intervening time ensuring it’s ready.

Simple to say. But it was a hard lesson learned, to be sure.

What this means is that we’ll have to learn some patience. And by we, I mean the development team. But we do appreciate your patience as well!

When you’re working on something like NewCity and you have a feature that you’re really excited about, you want to get it out into the wild for some feedback as soon as possible. Not to mention that, naturally, we hope others will enjoy it as much as we do. But this rapid-fire release process meant that the result was often less than enjoyable.

We acknowledge that. We’ve tried to restrict the volatility to the test branch, but due to the other positive changes often released weeks in advance on test, such situations negatively affected a large portion of our playerbase. We apologize for that.

So now we’re doing things a bit differently behind the scenes. It won’t affect the tip of the iceberg that is the player-facing NewCity, other than (we hope) more stable releases with bugfixes that actually do what they’re supposed to do. Which is to make the bugs leave and never come back, those rapscallions. And once we can ensure consistent stability, more frequent migrations to the default main branch is quite likely as well.

Thanks for sticking with us.

Questions? Comments? Feedback on the game? Sound off on our Discord.

As always, we’re incredibly thankful for our great community across the web. We love seeing the hard work and attention to detail you pour into your cities, and it inspires us every day to keep building. Thank you again for your support.

If you want to play the game and haven’t got it yet, head over to our Steam page. We’re also on Reddit and Twitter. Give us a follow if you haven’t, and we’ll keep you up to date on what’s new with NewCity!