Dev Diary #233 Ymprovements on the way!

Aleš Ulm · July 22, 2022

Hey there, fellow Ylanders!

We're very excited to let you know that update 1.10 "Ymproved Ylands" has left our doors and after it goes through some external checks, you will get your hands on all the cool stuff it brings (*cough* FPS camera *cough *).

I realized that it might be interesting to explain what is going on with the game build now, and what it has to go through before it gets to you. So let's do it.

At some point, when we feel confident enough about the current state of the game version we're planning to release, we do what is called a "submit".

At that point, the version of the game exists in a specific development "branch" called RC - Release Candidate. This branch is created from the current game code branch that is generally called "trunk" when the data lock happens - when we reached a planned moment when we say "from now on, no new features will be added to the planned update and we just focus on testing and fixing bugs". At that moment, we copy the whole game source code and create the RC branch. It is necessary because some devs are already working on features meant for future updates and the last thing we need is them changing the game parts that have already been tested and approved for the release.

So once we're happy with the state of the RC branch build, we say that it's ready to be released. "Happy" as in "there are known issues, but they are not critical and there are about a million things we would have liked to squeeze into this update as well, but it's too late", not as in "there are zero bugs we're aware of and the update contains absolutely everything we wanted it to contain".

Next, we do what's called a "submission". All platforms have some rules you have to follow and an automatic process that checks your build before it lets you make it public, so we first need to send the game update for approval. On one side of the spectrum is Steam, where you can send pretty much anything and players can access it almost instantly. On the other side is Apple, where the guidelines are very strict and they change quite often and it can take days to find out if there's some issue, so every submission is, for the lack of a better word, fun.

Once we've been approved by all the platforms, we can do the actual release. We let you know that there will be maintenance beforehand and when the time comes, we prevent you from running the game. Every major update requires that we upload it to the backend (pretty much the game servers) and run it there. If we didn't do it, you would download version 1.10 which would try to communicate with the servers running version 1.9 and the game wouldn't work that way.

The actual update process is quite fast so the most of the two hours the game is unavailable to you we test if the connection with servers is working correctly and everything runs as expected. If we find a problem we fix it and if it takes a longer time than expected, the maintenance window is made longer.

So now, when you (hopefully) see the maintenance message sometime next week when you run Ylands, you'll know that somewhere in Prague, in a large glass building we are frantically trying to make things work so that you can enjoy "Ymproved Ylands" (the update, which, by the way, was originally named "Balanced Balance" ).

That's it for this week and we'll talk to you again soon. Until then - stay classy, Ylanders!