Introduction
Hello everybody, this is Loren from Donut Team and welcome to the final Tuesday Topics.
Today, we're going to be discussing why Tuesday Topics was absent for the past month, why this one will be the final one, and how we will be communicating with the community going forward in place of it.
Reflecting on Tuesday Topics
Originally inspired by Factorio's Friday Facts series of blog posts, we aspired to achieve the level of transparency and frequent communication seen in those posts for our own projects via Tuesday Topics.
Unfortunately, we do not believe we have managed to do this for a number of reasons. I'd like to go into these reasons now and discuss some of what we are doing to address them.
Inconsistent output
As a team, we pride ourselves on releasing quality mods, tools and websites. There are a lot of talented people on our team that have helped us achieve that time and time again.
The issue, however, is that if you were to chart everything we have ever released onto a calendar, the release timings would be extremely scattershot. As it stands right now, it has been:
- 2 years, 6 months, and 10 days since the last Mod Launcher update.
- 2 years, 9 months, and 6 days since the last Pure3D Editor update.
- 4 years and 25 days since the last major Donut Mod update.
Our number one issue is wildly inconsistent motivation and, as a result, wildly inconsistent output.
We are taking steps to rectify this, starting with the following for Donut Mod:
- Weekly team meetings to discuss progress and goals.
- Proper use of our internal issue tracker to keep track of tasks and who is working on them.
- An internal deadline for the next release.
We believe that these steps will help us keep on track and keep our motivation on the project up.
Poor communication
Despite the goal of Tuesday Topics being better and more consistent communication, this has not turned out to be the case. We are very aware that many Tuesday Topics blog posts cover topics that are not of much interest to most of the community or fail to cover much at all.
Part of the issue is Tuesday Topics has had a very rigid schedule since its inception. We originally aimed to post them every week and that turned out to be a real struggle. We then switched to every two weeks and that was still a struggle. I've been aware of this for some time but I recieved some pressure internally to keep on this schedule anyways, even when it didn't make much sense.
We are now retiring this rigid schedule and will instead be focusing on a few other things to keep up our communication with the community:
- Posting more specialised "Development Update" blog posts, each aimed at a different project of ours, whenever there is actually stuff to talk about instead of at a set interval.
- We are aiming to have the first "Donut Mod Development Update" blog post out sometime in October with more teasers of what's to come.
- There will also be a "Mod Bakery Development Update" blog post as we move into Closed Beta, most likely also in October.
- A return to making video updates on YouTube.
- Keeping on top of mirroring or linking our blog posts on social platforms such as Ko-fi and Mastodon.
Conclusion
We hope that this change in direction will allow us to better communicate with the community and better keep you all up to date with what we're working on.
Thank you for reading and we'll see you in the first Donut Mod Development Update blog post in October.
- Loren from Donut Team
P.S.: Jeff wants you to listen to this and George wants you to listen to this.
P.P.S.: Jake wants you to listen to this this but the rest of us don't know why.