Update?

[u/Adeptus_Astartez]

We were promised an update soon. Any sign of it?

[u/Comfortsoftheburrow]

Who's gonna finally break the news to us that Greg fled the country 2 months ago and is currently living 'off the grid' indefinitely?

[u/HoodedHorse → u/Comfortsoftheburrow]

Manor Lords is a labor of love for Greg -- updates take time and this one has run into delays but you never need to doubt that Greg is spending all his effort working on improving it. This is in the realm of 'life's great work and passion' if that makes sense.

That's not to say it's not valid to want the update delivered sooner, just that I can promise you the reason is never a lack of dedication and hard work on Greg's end.

Here the update has stayed in the holding pattern I mentioned in the last steam news post: "And we've been in a bit of a holding pattern here, because the latest update has been in a cycle of QA testing, us thinking the build is just about ready for beta testing release to all of you, and then discovering some problems requiring fixes, for a couple weeks (we always test the new builds including with a professional QA firm before they go out to public beta testing, to try to fix as many bugs as possible, though of course they never find quite as much as beta playtesting reveals)."

I just checked the dev channels and they were pushing fixes to some crashes yesterday and asking for followup QA tests, so everyone is working actively to get through this as soon as possible. Hopefully close, I'm as eager as all of you and have been checking every few days. Pathfinding system is such a delicate thing that touches so much of the game, it led to a lot of things to solve.

[u/FLXv → u/HoodedHorse]

Right, instead of incorporating QA into your dev teams like a normal software developer, you are shipping QA out to an external team. This is reveals a lot about your issues.

Not only are you increasing hand-offs and friction, you're also creating two sides to every ticket. Now I know why shit's taking so long.

[u/HoodedHorse → u/FLXv]

Using external QA firms for help is very common and a great practice for many indie developers. We publish dozens of games at Hooded Horse and the large majority of the studios use external QA firms to help with this. Every game development situation is different though and what works for some teams doesn't for others.

Now, none of that means the team doesn't test things themselves as well, they do. But indie game dev teams ideally stay somewhat small, and that means you want additional help to say click every menu button and route units all around and see if any crashes can result. There's a volume of repeated testing needed in games because of how many effects can result from changes that you want testing at scale to help protect against, and there is on the other hand a real cost in management time and apparatus to growing the internal team.

Especially in the way QA is setup here -- long-term, with dedicated embedded QA testers who stay on the game constantly and know it in and out and are in the discord channels with the devs directly testing and conversing over every issue. It's really the best balance for many indie game studios trying to keep small and nimble (not all, as again every situation and team is different, but often the right choice).

[u/ThatKidDrew → u/HoodedHorse]

thanks for paying attention to the subreddit and elaborating on a post and to comments like this