Time for one of these again! Let's reflect a "little" and look into what the VS Team has been up to, while listening to awesome pixel remixes :D
1.20 post mortem
When you are knee deep in development it can be difficult to see the bigger picture, because oh boy did I not expect the amount of growth this update has created. On the day of release, the amount of purchases grew by 300%, consequently overloading every single server of ours one after the next over the course of 3 weeks. In addition to that some of our 3rd party providers had issues on their own causing further downtime. We had to optimize and up the specs on all the hardware we use to be able to deal with the additional load.
The downtime especially created massive amounts of new support tickets which our team was wholly unprepared for, so we had to quickly upscale the support team to overcome the flood of tickets.
Releasing the update on time itself came with quite a few sacrifices in terms of the content that we still wanted to add, but that has been the case for almost every update. Some of the rough edges have been ironed out in 1.20.3 and 1.20.4 with a few more things on the way, but more on that later.
Community and TOPS
Not only did we have an overheating help desk and servers, a growing community also means there are more points of contention and so we've had to adjust game content, processes and rules to ensure all our gathering spots remain friendly and welcoming places. Turns out, TOPS, our official public game server, is the perfect testing grounds to evaluate what tools are needed to provide just that. We have now added the capability for players to join in-game groups without invite (for language channels), prevent uncertainty when joining a full server with a join queue and we are in the works of adding a mod whitelist system so everyone playing there is on the same page. The additional game content of 1.20 also notably increased the hardware load on our game servers so that we had to lower the maximum player count on TOPS from 70 down to 55 and we are now optimizing various areas of the server code to bring this back to 70 or 75 - to date we are already at 65 max players on TOPS. Furthermore, just very recently we've been hit by quite large DDoS attacks on TOPS and other player-run servers, which we are mitigating through optimization and blocking mechanisms, with a 1.20.5 coming out soon so other server owners can benefit from this mitigation as well.
The Mod Database also required urgent attention as we were lacking moderation tools there and we had to optimize the download bandwidth quickly, as it was bleeding money due to the peculiar cost structure of Amazon Web Services. In fairness, AWS even called me personally on their own initiative to offer their assistance with that. The VS ModDB is now serving 2.5 Terabytes of data daily.
On our Discord server we are currently testing a moderator support ticket system in order to simplify and streamline contact requests to moderators, which should come online very soon.
Moderation demands have also only grown and we have not yet kept pace with this increased demand. On that note, please be kind to our staff. We might not always get it right, but we try and we do listen to your feedback as much as possible.
Management overhead
At the same time, simply growing a company and all its related paperwork to satisfy all rules and regulations could be a full time job on its own. We are glad to have very good support for this from a local partner. Needing to keep an eye on all these aspects of this game project meant I am on a declining trend of availability to do the usual spearheading of game update programming and integration efforts. The demands on my time seem to grow quicker than my ability to delegate 
That being said, I am optimistic that the right solutions will fall in place sooner or later and that I will be able to more strongly focus again on helping to get our next update built.
Continuing where we left off
As mentioned, the Team was left a bit dissatisfied with the current state of the 1.20 update. Consequently we initially planned to do a very very limited update with a much shortened development cycle, but the bar for this kept getting raised so we'll be doing it proper and make it a major release, ahead of our original plans for 1.21. However I will make sure to keep the scope limited to have this update released quicker than our previous ones.
Here's some of the points that we would like to address for 1.21. Disclaimer: Aspirational goal, some of it may get cut again.
- 2nd Boss fight improvements
- Bowtorn AI improvements
- Re-add Coral Reefs
- More direct ways to introduce the player to the game story
- Elk taming system: The elk should not be locked behind the lore content
- Better sailing system
- More work on some of the lore locations
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A rework of some of the existing animals and new wild life dangers for the warm climate zones, all very WIP still:
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We also got something smol in the works
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In parallel to that, we will more heavily focus on performance and RAM optimizations which will get added whenever the optimization is ready and tested. One of which is already in 1.20.4, another one will make it into 1.20.5 and more of them will come in future updates.
Beyond 1.21
Version 1.22 would then become what we originally planned for with v1.21 - dejank a number of mechanics and systems, mechanical power upgrades and likely one or 2 new or reworked crafting mechanics.
Version 1.23 will be the next major lore update where we will make more extensive use of the new dimension mechanics.
In Summary
Old plan:
1.21 Large update focusing on dejank and Mechanical power
New plan:
1.21 Small update to finish 1.20 content and fill in a few game content gaps
1.22 Large update focusing on dejank and Mechanical power
1.23 Large Lore update
One more thing
Wait you thought that's all? We wouldn't be called Anego Studios if we wouldn't be doing a hundred different things at once 
We have also hired a fulltime & fullstack game developer that will work on a brand new secret game project completely unrelated to Vintage Story, but also a lot smaller in scope. Work on this project will be fully in parallel to the development of Vintage Story, so there will be no change in pace of updates for VS itself. I do have to say, its quite exciting to see it progressing already, I believe it has lots of potential.
That's most of whats happening around Anego Studios that I can think of right now. Next devlog in a month or two + 1.20.5 with fixes soon. Thank you for tuning in and keep being excellent!
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