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.
- Update version number in internal preferences and in the manual.
- Run the programm briefly and quickly check basic functionality.
- Make screenshots of new and interesting views of the game.
- Run packaging scripts (update version number there too).
- Run setup creator which produces an executable installer from the package.
- Archive screenshots and packages and installer locally.
- Upload installer and sources to a download center (sourceforge in our case).
- Manage wordpress powered blog site and adjust links and version number on download page and on frontpage.
- Upload screenshots to blog.
- Write news post (like this) and link to screenshots.
- Write announcement in the community forum.
- Copy current state of the develop branch of the Git repository to master and tag it as release.
- 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).