Dilemma:
Last year, your game’s christmas update was AMAZING!!! It took you longer than a month to create… you turned your whole map into a winter wonderland, made a cozy cabin, even a snowboarding slope with a special Santa event! Your whole playerbased loved it so much that they are expecting it to make a comeback this year again.
You want to bring it back, but the map/game has changed so much since then… after all, it’s been a whole year.
Do you boot up the year-old copy you saved, and try to copy pasta literally every little new change you’ve done in the whole year into the old map? lord knows i can’t even recall what I did last week much less what I did the whole year…
or do you try porting the old update into your current game? you realized just how much has changed when your christmas tree is now in the middle of the ocean.
What I do (bery bad):
most of time, i can barely even stand to look at last year’s creations. in my head it might be salvagable, til i boot the place up and see how much can be improved on (and now finally realize just how much i’ve learned in the past year) i dabble in fixing some issues for 10 minutes until i see more and more issues piling up… then i just end up just making it entirely from scratch because not only is it easier, more fun, but also fresh and new.
I still feel bad for scrapping content people loved… i like to say “it is better in your memory”.
buuut i don’t think im convincing enough.
how do you go about bring back old versions of maps when a holiday, or any yearly event, comes back around? what are your methods of integrating your old map into new content?
sidetracked question: holiday updates have taken up so much of my time its not even funny, when do you find the time to work on permanent updates?
here’s a basic rundown of my year long schedule: (spoiler alert, april is like my only completely free month)
september: working on Halloween/Dia de los Muertos
october: mentally recovering from the giant halloween update/get a little bit of permanent work done
november: working on christmas/putting game back to normal from halloween
december: recovery/working on big new years update
january: working on valentines/mardi gras/removing christmas
feb: working on saint patricks
march: working on easter/april fools day
april: omg finally some time to work on perm updates and not holidays!!
may/june: BIG SUMMER UPDATE COMING RIGHT UP!!
july: lets just stop what we are doing and whip out 4th of july/canada day real quick
august: mentally preparing for the update that is halloween/ some time to work
(repeat)
you’d think maybe i could remove maybe a smaller holiday like… saint patricks from the list, but no, our rainy day treasure update for st. p’s is one of the player’s most favorite holiday updates
please save me from this cycle