Version numbers are not a progress bar. There will be no version v0.4. Once we're done with the UI, we'll be moving into beta (v0.3), and then the full release will be the next major milestone (v1.0). The game has also not even been in development for four years... if I look back at old comments, we've apparently been working on the game for over five years for several years now (the first comment we got that said that was in 2018, no joke, I have no idea where people get this idea), but, no, development started in August of 2016 during that year's lewd game jam on itch.io while I was on a week of PTO from work, and we didn't start working on the game full time until 2018, when I left my old job and Alis started working on it full time instead of working on patron-voted non-ToA art as well.
We also got complaints when we first increased the version number from v0.1 to v0.2 because, like, we show progress every week. Of course you're not going to see a sudden discontinuous jump from one version's progress to the next. Although this time, we are actually keeping the bulk of the UI work under wraps for exactly this reason. If it hadn't been for that backlash, we would have incremented to v0.3 when we moved onto content creation for existing characters, to signal that, but we decided against it, since the last time it led to confusion.
For future reference, our versioning system: the first number is the release number. It's 0 right now because the game is in development, it'll be 1 after release and that's it. The second number is the major version. It represents the phase of development - you can think of it like v0.1 being the pre-alpha, v0.2 being the alpha, v0.3 being the beta, and it'll reset to 0 for the v1.0 release, and then that number will go up if we do "expansion" style post-release content. There would have been more major version updates (ie, v0.2.13 would have been v0.3.00, which would mean that we would be in v0.3.10.1 right now) if the previous one had gone differently.
The third number, which, again, is not a progress bar, is the minor version. With our release schedule there's a new one every month. If we worked 170 hour weeks for an entire month, using shadow clones and time turners and all that, that number would increase by 1. Literally, no matter what, that number will increase by 1 per month, unless we're hospitalized or something and have to miss one, which hasn't happened yet. It's two digits, unlike the other numbers, because a development phase will definitely last longer than ten months.
The fourth number is the patch number - how many patches a minor version has received. This increments every time there's a new release, and it helps us keep track of the appearance of bugs and the like. Typically, there's one of these each week for the weekly releases (so 4 or 5 on a given month depending on how many Saturdays there are), but if we discover a crash bug or something like that we'll release a hotfix. The changelog only contains these versions for the current month, which get collapsed into a minor version (monthly) changelog at the end of the month.
There's nothing magical about the version number. The version prior to release will not be v0.99. Spelunky did that, and I thought it was funny, but that is not typically how version numbers work. Different teams use different versioning formats, and the main goal for versions is to establish what version a user is using to isolate bugs and to ensure they've updated properly (if, for instance, they're not seeing some new content or feature), not to "count up" towards some sort of milestone.
We also got complaints when we first increased the version number from v0.1 to v0.2 because, like, we show progress every week. Of course you're not going to see a sudden discontinuous jump from one version's progress to the next. Although this time, we are actually keeping the bulk of the UI work under wraps for exactly this reason. If it hadn't been for that backlash, we would have incremented to v0.3 when we moved onto content creation for existing characters, to signal that, but we decided against it, since the last time it led to confusion.
For future reference, our versioning system: the first number is the release number. It's 0 right now because the game is in development, it'll be 1 after release and that's it. The second number is the major version. It represents the phase of development - you can think of it like v0.1 being the pre-alpha, v0.2 being the alpha, v0.3 being the beta, and it'll reset to 0 for the v1.0 release, and then that number will go up if we do "expansion" style post-release content. There would have been more major version updates (ie, v0.2.13 would have been v0.3.00, which would mean that we would be in v0.3.10.1 right now) if the previous one had gone differently.
The third number, which, again, is not a progress bar, is the minor version. With our release schedule there's a new one every month. If we worked 170 hour weeks for an entire month, using shadow clones and time turners and all that, that number would increase by 1. Literally, no matter what, that number will increase by 1 per month, unless we're hospitalized or something and have to miss one, which hasn't happened yet. It's two digits, unlike the other numbers, because a development phase will definitely last longer than ten months.
The fourth number is the patch number - how many patches a minor version has received. This increments every time there's a new release, and it helps us keep track of the appearance of bugs and the like. Typically, there's one of these each week for the weekly releases (so 4 or 5 on a given month depending on how many Saturdays there are), but if we discover a crash bug or something like that we'll release a hotfix. The changelog only contains these versions for the current month, which get collapsed into a minor version (monthly) changelog at the end of the month.
There's nothing magical about the version number. The version prior to release will not be v0.99. Spelunky did that, and I thought it was funny, but that is not typically how version numbers work. Different teams use different versioning formats, and the main goal for versions is to establish what version a user is using to isolate bugs and to ensure they've updated properly (if, for instance, they're not seeing some new content or feature), not to "count up" towards some sort of milestone.
