Time for take 2 of the Dev Diary series. I had initially planned to put one of these out every month, but that plan quickly fell apart. I'm going to try and be more consistent with this going forward, trying to get a release out soon after the end of a month.
September was a pretty slow month. After finally getting the re-designed website out in August, I decided to take some time off as I was starting to feel pretty burnt out. The initial plan was to take a week off everything, followed by a week working just on the stream overlay, followed by work on the next version of Coppice.
Unfortunately that quickly fell apart. The burnout is somewhat more severe than I first thought. I struggled to work through the overlay and struggled even more with Coppice. I've realised I need to take more time to recover and that requires taking things much more slowly.
As such I've put the development streams on hiatus. I need to rethink them and how to best utilise them in a way that benefits both you and me. I'm thinking maybe doing four 2-hour streams rather than three 4-hour streams per week, but I'll only be re-starting when I feel I have the energy back.
I'm also going to be re-thinking the next version of Coppice. My initial direction was to introduce an expanded theming system with some special themes you can choose from. However, I feel like this isn't going to be as useful as it could be.
Instead I'm considering going down a more generic "appearance customisation" route, allowing you to customise things like colours, styles, etc. This will probably end up being something I spend the next few weeks designing but gradually add over several releases as I want to revisit a lot of design decisions prior to starting work on the iPad version of Coppice.
I should hopefully have something more visual to share next month with ideas of where things are going. Until then, I hope you have a wonderful October!