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I used to regularly add some new cool stuff to my games. And I used to do it quite steadily, once a month or a month and a half. This went on for quite a long time, about four or maybe five years. Players liked it a lot and that was probably one of the reasons why the activity was growing (number of players, comments, downloads and all that). But at some point I stopped doing that and updates became just a formality. So why did I do that? Am I an idiot?

 

But before I explain why this happened, I should first tell you why I started doing all these major updates in the first place.

 

The thing is that in the beginning all this feedback in google play was new to me. I was happy with literally every review, because it was nice to see that people cared. I read all the reviews, responded to all the comments and it was important to me that people were satisfied. So if someone wrote their wish and it was not something impossible in terms of realization, I did it. So, for example, in antiyoy initially there was no level editor and no ability to save. And there was almost nothing there at all. There were no player levels (what levels if there is no editor?). There was not even the possibility to choose your own color. All these things were suggested by players in the comments.

 

That is, initially the main reason why I started to make major updates was feedback and my attitude towards it. But it should also be noted that there is such a thing as "low base" or "start from a low level", I don't remember how it's called. The point is that if the game has almost nothing, it is much easier to develop it than if the game is full of all sorts of features. You have to realize that each new feature increases the code base and adds some new connections between entities. Of course, it depends on the feature itself, not always it prevents some future changes. But in any case it's like a snowball effect, each new feature makes it harder to implement the next one.

 

This sounds like an excuse for why I stopped actively developing my games. But actually the main reason is not that. The reason is that not all ideas are good. Some ideas are too difficult to implement, for example, in order to add fleet in antiyoy I need to rewrite all the code base associated with the game logic. Well, that is, in fact, rewrite the game from scratch. And also draw a nice enough sprite of the ship that doesn’t cut the eye when you’re looking at it. Some ideas seem to make sense, but are not worth the effort that must be spent on their implementation. You have to realize that life is not infinite and time should be spent efficiently enough. Well, some ideas are simply harmful and their implementation will only lead to the deterioration of the game.

 

You can think up ideas for updates endlessly, but the problem is that good ideas sooner or later come to an end. And this, in fact, is the reason why major updates on antiyoy, achikaps and other old games stopped coming out.

 

P.S. By the way, antiyoy online can be considered a global update to antiyoy. I was asked for years in the comments to add online multiplayer to the game and I did it after all. It took me about two years to do it. About half a year I spent learning the basics of online multiplayer. Then I spent about another six months on cheepaska (as you know, the first pancake is always lumpy and I didn't want it to be AO) and about another year on AO itself. This is an example of how long it can take to implement a seemingly simple idea "add online multiplayer".