Hello again!

Progress has been swift since the semester wrapped up! I'm thinking of releasing 0.7.0 soon for a couple reasons.

Most of the features have been implemented - in fact, there's really just one major feature left - and a lot of my time spent on this game will soon just be testing and bugfixes. That's really important, and I'd usually want to release versions of the game I can be really proud of, so my natural inclination is to find and eliminate every possible bug before I set this thing loose. However, that kind of defeats the purpose of a "beta version," you know? The whole point of the release is that it's not fully finished yet. If I spend a lot of time trying to fix bugs, that's only going to delay the update's release further. If major bugs are found, I can just release an updated build once I fix 'em, like I did with 0.6.0. All in all, there's really no reason NOT to release what I have once the last major feature is implemented.

I don't have an estimated release date yet, but it will almost definitely be this month, if not next week. I'll have to check, but I know for a fact that we're coming up on the 1-year anniversary from the beginning of development, and I'll probably aim for there at the latest. After that, I don't know. I'll be ready to fix any bugs that show up in releases of 0.7, but I don't think my development will be focused on mARS anymore. I want to move on to other projects for a few reasons, and I think I've stated them in the monthly check-ins, but I might as well go over them quickly here.

Simply put, I started developing mARS as a way to learn how to make games, and I've definitely made massive progress towards that goal. This is made most obvious by mARS itself; my recent code is leagues better than the code I created when development began. Working on mARS is clunky, unintuitive, rigid, you name it. In fact, I've sometimes thought that the only way I can make the game better and implement the features I wanted for 0.8.0 and beyond would be to completely redo this whole game's programming from the ground up. That's a little bit of an exaggeration, but still, it's not something I want to spend my time doing when I have other ideas to create and other lessons to learn.

Still, though, I remember what happened over the 9-or-so months of this update drought: I was simply too busy for mARS, and I forgot how to work with it. Now that I'm back into the swing of things, would it really be the best idea to abandon the project to work on something else? If I am going to make this game any better in the foreseeable future, the time is now. Because of that, I'm torn. Theoretically, I could COMPLETE the game if I spend the rest of the summer cleaning up my spaghetti code and adding new features, and even though that would be less fun than starting something new, it could end up being even more satisfying.

I think if I had to choose right this second, I would continue developing mARS for a maximum of a month and a half in order to create a 0.8.0 version with bonus modes and other new features before bidding mARS farewell and starting work on a completely new game. I'm still undecided, but that might be the route I take. That said, it's always possible that I might have less time to work on game development in the future for a variety of reasons, so developing 0.8.0 alone could take me the entire summer. I doubt that, but so far experience has taught me that game development will always take, like, four times longer than you expect it to.

Anyway, that's all from me for now. See you all later, and thanks for reading!