Bridge of Fate's Status, One Year In

I at Rodent Predator am proud to inform you that Bridge of Fate, as of this May 2nd in New Zealand, has unscathed reached a year of existence since its launch party. It's a big date, and I decided to celebrate it a bit by designating any current post to come out here and by releasing this speedrun. But how is Bridge of Fate after all this time, and does it need anything more?

As much as I'd love to talk through the Rodent Predator channels with "we", right now the company and its workers are just one person. Unless you count the unpaid friends of mine who offered to test my games out of friendliness. So the reference to RP company personnel will be first-person singular throughout this post.

Over the course of mid to late 2021 and early to mid 2022, I didn't just ignore Bridge of Fate. I didn't exactly develop it, but I returned over and over to play it again. Mind that I, as far as made sense to me, could not develop it. Once I fully release a game, I have a complete game. A complete game that I don't need to update unless I find jarring bugs. I've long resented the idea that any game that is created needs to be created on top of again or else it's "dead", or that updating a game repeatedly is an expected and normal procedure. Bridge of Fate is, essentially, all completely ready.

However, far be it from me to keep a game in a broken state published that way for all of time, I still do and many times have come back to a game if I find a jarring bug in it. Like I said. Startup Tophat, Quik Game, Terrifying Rocket Zest, and Auckland Scumbag University all got updates a while after their official release to upgrade the state of features to the quality they were already long since supposed to have been in at launch. For two examples, Auckland Scumbag University let you walk through some critical walls, and Startup Tophat had a terrible simultaneous music bug.

Well, it turns out Bridge of Fate had a few bugs too, but nothing to hypothetically write home about if I were fighting to save Internet freedom on a more physical battlefield at that point. I found some issues while playing the game for fun, alright, but nothing made me so intent on actually bothering to come back and fix them with an unconflicted interest until I saw that the resolution settings don't save.

So, it's official. Bridge of Fate is getting an update. I will make the resolution settings save, and while I'm in the area I'll get rid of a bunch of other problems, too. This will not really add much, so the gameplay is safe. All the balancing will stay where it is because this is almost entirely fixes for errors. Development on the 1.0.1 patch won't start immediately, and indeed it might take about six months to complete the update after I actually begin work on it. But I'm intent on making it come out at some point.

Since this update will have extra quality and a certain secret made possible by the passing of time in it, I will take the release of this update as an excuse to raise the selling price of Bridge of Fate. That's been asking to happen for a while anyway.

Among other things - things I'm just sort of allowing myself to mention with being vague - I think it's a good idea to have an attempt at optimizing the game's performance. No promises there. If I'm lucky, I feel I can finally make Bridge of Fate have less bugs and be low spec.