Hello… It’s been a while. I have a release plan for Fabrication. The Steam presence is sorted too – all that remains is to finish the store page, but that won’t be until closer to the game’s release. I’m actually doing all this, like, years in advance? Well… I know to be prepared now. The game is far from finished!
Before I get into the main content of this post – I wonder which description will be better…
Bugs in Fabrication will be handled differently than White Pearl. The player reception to White Pearl was good, and players were satisfied by the developer support. However, as Fabrication will mark the emergence of my second game, I plan to increase the support even further.
The biggest problem with White Pearl’s release was bugs. As such, I will take countermeasures for this.
- After the master build of the game is finished, around 2-3 months will be dedicated to Q&A and polishing the game. Once that is finished, and the game is completed and tested to a satisfactory standard, I will release the game on Steam several months after that.
For example, the master build was finished on August 1st 2019. I will spend up to October 10th to QA the game. Then the game would be released on December 2019. That’s how I will go about it! The reason why I want there to be a gap between development and release, is to focus on my release plan and to make sure I’m rested and ready for launch, being able to solve any major problems that may arise on that day.
I will identify bugs into categories and, depending on how I classify the bug you submit, it will be handled accordingly:
- Fatal = Bugs that I class as “fatal” will involve the game executable crashing. Even if the bug cannot be replicated under normal circumstances, it would still be classified as fatal because it halts the player’s experience. These types of bugs will be fixed as soon as possible – within 1 hour of discovery.
- Major = Bugs that I class as “major” will involve the inability to progress the main story or any other quests due to a bug. These types of bugs will be fixed as soon as possible.
- Minor = Bugs that I class as “minor” will be small graphical glitches (either to do with sprites or any other interactable). These types of bugs take lowest priority, and the fix will be present on one of the major patches (i.e. 1.0.1, 1.0.2 etc).
*These are just examples of many more bugs that I can classify accordingly.
Regarding Major Patches to Fabrication
Those of you who have watched White Pearl after release are surely familiar with patches such as the 1.0.7 patch adding a new alternate ending, as well as fixing myriad issues.
With the release of Fabrication, I aim to provide content as-is. That is, no further content besides an alternate scenario will be made. In White Pearl, I added a lot of new events in different stages of the game. Because most players had already played the game by then, it was frustrating. I will not be doing this with Fabrication. If I was to add additional content, it would be post-game. Also, I would like to make access of the alternate ending available through the main ending area, too – if I was to add it with Fabrication. Patch Notes will still be present and uploaded on itch.io for Fabrication, but the changes will not be as huge. Because it is a long time until release, I cannot foresee what would need changing and what doesn’t. There was a lot of quality-of-life adjustments in White Pearl’s patches: such as the addition of “potencies” on tooltips with Patch 1.0.8. This will be carried over to Fabrication’s design.
White Pearl Patch Notes Archive
https://ottreadev.itch.io/white-pearlrpg/devlog/52479/patch-20-notes
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