Studio Freya Games

For the past months we’ve been trying to release Burnt Islands as frequent as we can, ideally every week. A “one week” goal is easy to set, but not so easy to maintain.

What good things frequent releases bring:
– You test your code much more often and thorough
– You can easily see how you’re progressing after each release, this to correct your future path
– You update your blog and any other sources for communication with your players more often. Then people don’t forget about you.
– You see bottlenecks in your game earlier.

Holes in terrain while digging

But you need to be in control all the time. Our last release 0.12 is already taking a whole month. It is a release where we decided to improve graphics in the game. Graphics programming takes a lot of time here as none of us are experts with it. We learn every day. We try and fail every day. We were going to release 0.12 on Wednesday, but a whole bunch of came up in release test.

Triangles without texture in strange places

So, you know, you stand up on Wednesday morning and is planning to take it easy after a quick release, but is instead sitting and fixing bugs til Friday. On Friday we found out that our game is too slow. This bug was there for a while, but we never saw it really as a problem before.

But we are in release 12 and it is time to think that people might actually buy the game as it is available for pre-order already. And then not everybody have super fast computers as well.

That being said, we are going to make our best effort to make a release as soon as possible.

Our current bottleneck is graphics and too many triangles in the scene. It’s a really complex matter where we need to study some research papers in order to find a solution.

Keep in touch!