Weekly devlog #22 - Alpha plans

Hey everyone, it's been a week since the halloween update got released. This update had a bit of a rough start, with the new client having many bugs and missing features. But in only a week I made 64 bug fixes and feature additions! And I think now the new client is in a way better state.

Ko-fi supporters
I want to thank everyone who supported Crystal Realms on ko-fi! Last devlog I announced the ko-fi page, and now all of the sponsored items are already sold out! Like I said before, I am planning to do weekly updates for Crystal Realms where I add one or two new items a week. And I am guessing that most of these updates will have items that are sponsored by the players. Now that the halloween update is fully released, I will start working on designing those items.

Automated release
In previous updates I always just built the updates by hand. But this was very tedious, and often took two hours for each update. Especially now that I am gonna be supporting more platforms like MacOS, arm linux, android and IOS. So this week I spend some time automating the release process. It took a lot of time, but now it is finally working! This means that releasing new updates takes less than a minute for me now, and it will automatically publish it to itch.io and the crystal realms website. No longer will the website have an out of date version of the game!

Alpha release
The next major update of the game will be the alpha release. The goal is to release this update before the end of this year, and I think that is possible. Some things that I am planning to add to this update are: new blocks, a new world type, new enemies, improved UI, a lobby world and a new currency for the marketplace. So basically it will be a huge update! I am not sure if I will be able to do everything that I am planning, but if not it will probably mean I will release another update for it soon after.

I am also planning to do a lot more marketing for the game. And the alpha will be released to android, and hopefully IOS too! If you want to be part of the IOS testers you can fill out this form.

That's it for this week's devlog, thank you for reading!