Editing A Pets Update (section)

=== Developer Notes ===

Throughout Bconomy’s existence, <em>The Pets Update</em> has remained a symbolic, unachievable milestone that’s never actually materialized. For years I’d charted it out extensively in notebooks and word documents, planning out the intricate details that would open the game up to a new world of complexity and depth. But the amount of development effort to fully realize that perfect update has always proved itself to be unrealistic. In previous attempts, adding all those features meant constant rewrites to try and retrofit an already unmaintainable codebase with complex new mechanics. Hours of effort would melt away with no tangible progress. Without fail I’d always burn out on making <em>The Pets Update</em> happen after a solid few weeks of development. An impending “Pets Update” has always led to the downfall of past iterations of Bconomy, causing it to lose any momentum and community goodwill it gathered. Periods of update drought, unpatched balance issues and stale gameplay resulting from trying to deliver <em>The Pets Update</em> had more than once caused the game to “die” in the eyes of many devoted players.

But, today, I’m releasing an update that finally returns Pets to the world of Bconomy. They finally have a role beyond sitting on your profile and having cool (read: useless) stats! But, is it <em><strong>The</strong></em> <em>Pets Update</em>? Not quite. This update makes up only a tiny fraction of my vision for what an ideal <em>The Pets Update</em> would’ve looked like. But I could feel myself reliving what caused the game to fail in past times as development progressed… so <em>lots</em> of features didn’t make the cut. Pet Ascensions, Active/Passive Abilities, Random Encounters and Combat would have been so awesome to ship. But if I wanted this update to see the light of day, and for this game to survive, they had to get shortlisted. As long as this project is still kicking (and so am I), those features will be implemented someday. But probably more gradually, in a way that’s more sustainable for the development of the game and my sanity.

So this is “A” Pets Update, not “The” Pets Update. In fact, “The” Pets Update may not ever end up existing in the way I originally envisioned it. And you know what? That might be a good thing.

Anyways… at least we got that boring dev commentary out of the way. Hope this update didn’t screw the game balance too hard! I’ll be doing spot adjustments and hotfixes as needed throughout the week. Bug reports and feedback are appreciated. Enjoy the new content, and – as always – thanks for playing.

Wewert

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