Hey friends! Today we’re announcing our first official (still in-testing) version of Bibidi Bibidi! Warning: game inside. We’ve put quite some work into it, so I’d be overjoyed if you’d take the time to test and write feedback, through any channel you’re comfortable with.

How Am I Doing?

I’m chilling, but was kind of busy last week. Nothing crazy, just a lot of administrative stuff and fun social calls. It left me without much time to write this newsletter, which is (I think for the first time ever?) a few days late!

Also, I just realized it’s June already, which means that soon, half of the year will already have passed. This time around, it felt very “blink and you’ll miss it”. At the start of the year, I consigned myself to focusing completely on work, in order to hopefully create some runway to sustain my current lifestyle. That’s going well, but it also goes to show that if you’re not actively making memories outside of that, time flies by way too fast for comfort. Hopefully Jonas and I can scrape our current project together with enough gusto to allow myself a proper vacation next year!

What Am I Doing?

Bibidi Bibidi! is coming along very nicely, and I’m proud to present version 0_01_00, which you can play in your browser: RIGHT HERE! Once again, all feedback is welcome.

It’s crazy how much has come together since our prototype a month ago. We focused almost exclusively on user experience and placeholder art, and you can really see the fruits of our labor when we compare the prototype and the current version next to eachother.

I’ve been mostly working on making a build pipeline from Godot to Steam, because it’s a very tedious process. We ended up going for another itch.io build in the meantime, but the goal is to start using the Steam Playtest feature soon. Before that however, we want a beautiful-looking steam page, to perhaps start collecting wishlists already.

Why Am I Doing? (this)

While working on build automation, I got in the weeds of versioning. You’d think by now, in our tech-heavy society, we’d have a universal standard convention for software/game versions. Well, we don’t! It’s a big mess of betas, pre-alphas, early access releases,

The general consensus is something like (Major Release).(Minor Release).(Hotfixes). That’s already a nebulous system, but in games, it’s even more wonky. The first digit tends to just be 0 before official release and 1 for after. I’ve seen games who do a 2 for a big overhaul of old systems and brand it as a completely new experience. I’ve also seen games use iterations for DLC’s or expansions as the first digit.

And then what constitutes a minor release? The addition of a feature? What about UX improvements? It’s a mess. The only important thing in the end, is that you’re consistent to your own rules. I’ve opted for something like (Release Version).(Any feature addition).(Bug fixes/QoL improvements). Essentially, that boils down to the first digit being any kind of release we’d do a big marketing push for. For now, during testing, that will remain 0, and will be 1 when we officially release the game. Maybe it can become 2 if we’re ever successful enough to do an expansion.

I realize this isn’t super interesting to a lot of you, but I need to write my thoughts on it somewhere anyway, so there you go!