Regarding the state of development
We’ve observed that the majority of players view and use the nightly build as an “early access” branch compared to beta. Players expect the changes in nightly to be unpolished and experimental, but they also view those changes as set and decided for the beta release. Features that make it to the nightly branch are perceived as the entire development team’s final decision, so much that word of those features often extends beyond the testing community and sometimes even beyond the HDR community entirely.
When we released our first beta and became open-source, the nightly branch replaced private/internal testing of changes. The nightly branch was intended to be a place where any change can be tried, tested, adjusted, and even reverted. We expected relatively few players to go out of their way to play a build so volatile, and we never expected tournaments and brand new players to play on nightly.
Development changes and beta pre-releases
Going forward, we will be making changes to the development process to attempt to meet the players’ expectations, and to create better developer tools.
Instead of the nightly build, we will begin releasing periodic beta pre-release builds. This will be a new kind of build that’s more in-line with the players current expectations for nightly. It will be an opt-in early access build where players can test beta-ready changes and find issues in polish and balance. We will use feedback from large-scale testing to make adjustments and post subsequent pre-releases, until we’re finally happy with the changes and ready for a full beta release.
To accompany beta pre-release builds, development-team changes will become private until each pre-release. We want to give our developers the confidence to work on proof-of-concept features, test contentious character changes, and polish their work over longer periods of time before introducing them to the whole community. We also want to remove the current feeling of “character ownership” that’s pervasive in players and developers alike. The changes that eventually make it to beta pre-release builds will be those that the development team has collectively viewed, tested, and decided on.
The future
We understand that these are big changes that could be worrying to dedicated players and testers. To be clear, this does not signify the end of community contributions, or our status as an open source project. Beta releases and our codebase still are, and always will be, fully viewable on GitHub. Pull requests can still be opened by anyone and reviewed by the dev team as normal. Any approved PRs will be brought over to the private development branch and treated like any other change.
We’re truly privileged to witness our project grow and amass the following it has today. We’re also privileged to create something with such a heavy emphasis on open community involvement and discussion throughout development. The development team is confident in these changes to our workflow, and we hope you’ll continue to help us make the best game we can.
The HDR Development Team