I figured I would let you guys know what the plans are for how Keith and I are tackling November, so that there wouldn't be any miscommunications.
Phase I: Light of the Spire Development (ends November 19th)
During this time period, Keith and I will be spending approximately 80% of our work time on new features for Light of the Spire. The other 20% of the time will be on the most-important bugfixes (like crashes, lockups, desyncs, and so on) and balance tweaks, plus anything that is helpful and fast that we can fit into that timeframe.
Some of these changes for Light of the Spire will, as a byproduct, also result in various miscellaneous improvements to the base game itself, but otherwise that's not going to be as much of a focus here. 4.0 just delivered a massive truckload of free toys for the base game, anyway.
Phase II: Refinement (November 20th through ??)
This part is very important, and is the main reason I'm making this post. AFTER LotS is feature-complete, we'll be focusing heavily on polish, smaller balance issues, and so forth. Trying to whittle down as many remaining bugs from the bugtracker (for both the main game and LotS and CoN and whatever) as we can.
The end of this period is ?? because that's going to be dependent on our distribution partners and when our official release date winds up being. I expect it to be sometime the week of November 29th, maybe that Wednesday, but it could be a week or even two later if our distribution partners recommend that based on their release lineup at that time. We coordinate with them to try to pick an ideal time, but speaking to them in the past it seemed like that first week was the ticket. Ideally it will be that week, though, and at any rate you'll have a highly-polished version of LotS by then either way.
Key Differences Between Phase I and Phase II
The reason I bring this up is that during Phase I, we specifically won't be focusing on refinements like checkbox contrast, screen panning being a bit odd in the corners, and other subtle things of that nature. That's stuff for Phase II.
Why? Because if we don't put 80% of our time into finishing LotS in Phase I, it won't happen. Similarly, if we go for polish on every feature right from the start, then there's not enough testing time to find the polish issues on the later features. By getting everything in early, THEN focusing on polish, we can make sure that the maximum testing and polish time is there for all features, and thus have the most solid product at the end of the month.
That said, though, certainly things that are quick-to-fix or particularly egregious will be taken care of in Phase I -- that's what the 20% bughunting/balance time is for, after all.
During phase I we still want to know about whatever bugs you find, no matter how tiny they may seem, we just won't be dealing with the tiny ones until Phase II -- doesn't mean we're ignoring you in the meantime if we don't respond, we just have to meter our time.
Just figured it would be easier if we let everyone know what the plan is now!
