Dev Notes: Week of December 8, 2014

[RhythmNBruise]

Good morning, all!

Here are our dev notes for this week. I'm going to un-sticky last week's thread, but I'll still be reading posts there as well as here.

5.0 Status

I'm sorry 5.0 isn't out yet - we're pushing pretty hard, but after all the issues with 4.5, we really want to make sure that what we're releasing is going to make things better.

We've spent most of the last week polishing up 5.0 for Android and running extensive testing on the back end code for both platforms. Since we're not planning on making this a forced upgrade right away, we had to do some last-minute upgrades to make sure that the old system of Funzio account transfers would still work, for those of you who choose not to upgrade right away.

We expect that the iOS 5.0 release will let almost all the locked-out players back in, but unfortunately, fixing the problem there exposed a new bug - new assets won't download correctly from the server for those players. The game will still work fine, it'll just look a little funky (some of the assets might be missing, especially in newer areas/for newer events). 5.0 also includes diagnostics for both that problem and what we think is the root cause of any potential remaining lock-out issues, so we need to get it out and have people play it for a little bit to help us find the problem and fix it. This will not be a problem for Android users.

Edited to add: The asset downloading issues in 5.0 are display issues only, and will only affect a small subset of the players who were already affected by the loading issues in 4.5. Those players will still be able to participate in events and receive rewards normally, you just might not be able to see the art associated with them until we get this bug fixed. Sorry for the confusion!

Other Work

We're working on an iOS 5.1 release that we're trying to get out before Christmas. That will have more loading time improvements, and a fix for the 5.0 bug mentioned above, if we can get enough data in time.

We also ran a really successful AMA, thanks to everyone who participated. We're still poking through that thread, trying to make sure that we've answered most of the big questions we can answer, even if we can't directly respond to everyone who posted something. We're planning to run a couple more before the holidays so you can ask us questions about the features in 5.0 after you've had a chance to play with them some.

How's it Work - picking features for development

There are two kinds of features we work on - big ones (which tend to be shared among all the games) and little ones (which are more game-specific).

For the big features, we rely on our designers and product team to come up with ideas. Then we all sit down in a group and evaluate both how long the feature will take to build and QA, and what effect we think it will have on the game. (Sometimes we want to shake things up, and sometimes we want to iterate on things we already know you enjoy.) We try (as anyone would!) to pick things that can be developed in a reasonable amount of time and still be fun and interesting.

Little features come from all kinds of places - you guys are a great source for those, as well as our QA team, who plays almost as much as you do! Little features we put onto the schedule based on how many engineers are available to do the work, and how much the QA leads glare at us when we tell them what we want to do. Because we know that you guys aren't terribly interested in adding more little features to the game, we're mostly focussing our efforts on fixing bugs and improving your experience instead of building those.