My 13 steps to do for each release

Since development is currently going a bit slowly I thought about entertaining you with a list I made some time ago that show you what steps a project such as this has to do before each release. So here are the 13 steps to do before each release.

  1. Update version number in internal preferences and in the manual.
  2. Run the programm briefly and quickly check basic functionality.
  3. Make screenshots of new and interesting views of the game.
  4. Run packaging scripts (update version number there too).
  5. Run setup creator which produces an executable installer from the package.
  6. Archive screenshots and packages and installer locally.
  7. Upload installer and sources to a download center (sourceforge in our case).
  8. Manage wordpress powered blog site and adjust links and version number on download page and on frontpage.
  9. Upload screenshots to blog.
  10. Write news post (like this) and link to screenshots.
  11. Write announcement in the community forum.
  12. Copy current state of the develop branch of the Git repository to master and tag it as release.
  13. Review the task list and set completed task to complete and create new tasks if appropriate

This typically takes two hours and during this I haven’t written a single line of code to advance the game development. This shows maybe why I’m reluctant to release too often (and the lack of new features too).