“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” - Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario and The Legend of Zelda
During the pre-order campaign for Skatter v2, we said that we planned to give early-access to the Beta versions during Q1 2020, and release the public 2.0 version during Q2 2020. While the Skatter v2 Beta did start during Q1 2020 and everyone who pre-ordered have access to it, we missed the ETA that we originally planned for the public 2.0 release.
In this article, we would like to take the time to explain why that happened, what’s currently going on, and what our new ETA is.
Why we missed the original ETA
While we never gave any guaranty regarding a release during Q2 2020, we really thought we would make it. Before the Indiegogo campaign, we went through our entire todo list and tried to estimate the time required by every single task. Then we multiplied the total time by 1.5 to give us some margin “just in case”. That’s how we determined the Q2 2020 ETA.
Well… A big lesson learned is that we were overly optimistic when estimating. All of these things took much longer than we anticipated, for several reasons: we faced technical challenges, some tasks were redefined because we realized that the original idea/plan wasn’t going to work, etc.
Specifically, the new Library/Marketplace was barely started when we launched the Indiegogo campaign, and it turned out to be a much bigger project than we expected.
There were also several factors outside of Skatter itself. We had to spend more time than we would have liked on the 1.2 version of Transmutr. Then Covid-19 hit, and other personal stuff happened.
Where we’re at
The good news is that most of the major features planned for v2 are done. The last two major features in Skatter itself that need to be done are Use other compositions as masks and Linked compositions.
The other big piece is the Library Browser and its Marketplace integration. We have made very good progress, and will soon start a Beta cycle once we get some content on the platform.
New ETA?
We are reluctant to announce a new ETA. Although most of the major features are done, there is still a lot of work to prepare Skatter for the public release, and stuff around Skatter itself (manual, tutorials, website, etc).
We will release Beta 4 in the next few days. But at this time we still have 28 entries on our todo list, that range from fixing bugs in the current beta, to smaller features like localization, a cancel button, or improving numeric inputs, all the way to performance optimizations, the manual, or tutorials.
We want to release as soon as possible for everyone to enjoy Skatter v2, and because our campaign money has run out and we need income. But we don’t want to rush too much, because we want to avoid putting out a buggy version. The first public version should be polished enough to deserve the 2.0 tag!
In the meantime, if you pre-ordered on Indiegogo, we encourage you to use the Beta. It’s almost feature-complete, and the more feedback we get, the better the 2.0 version will be!