As we plan for Mudlet 5.0, the team has taken a step back to reevaluate the overall direction of the project. To ensure we are working in the right direction, we are making some core changes to how we approach development, feature requests, and our release milestones.
Here is what you can expect from the direction of Mudlet from here on:
1. Reevaluating our goal posts
We want to see releases happen sooner rather than later. To do this, we are bringing our goal posts forward. Instead of massive, sprawling updates that introduce a slew of new features (like we saw with 4.20), we are focusing on tighter, bite-sized milestones. Sticking strictly to our milestone goals allows us to drive the project forward efficiently.
2. A stronger focus on bugs and stability
Alongside our focused milestones, our day-to-day priority is shifting heavily toward stability. We want to dedicate more of our bandwidth to squashing bugs and refining the core experience rather than new feature additions, and very much welcome more help in this area from the community.
3. The Mudlet 5.0 goal: The first-time player experience
Applying this new philosophy, the 5.0 milestone is strictly focused on a single, vital theme: The first-time player experience. We want a brand-new user to be able to download Mudlet and start playing without hitting immediate walls.
For 5.0, we are exclusively focusing on:
- A default GUI highlight tour: guiding new players on how to read and interact with the client. Many folks, when they first download Mudlet, genuinely don’t know that text scrolls from the bottom up, or where they type is all the way at the bottom of the client.
- Modernized help & tooltips: trimming down paragraph-long tooltips into quick, digestible hints.
- Other improvements mentioned in the 5.0 milestone
4. Public interest drives features
Moving forward, we are putting a much heavier emphasis on community validation. Large features require large interest: before we commit development time to a major new feature or technical overhaul, it needs to have demonstrable backing and interest from the public and our user base. This is crucial so we can continue to grow Mudlet in a sustainable way. We need to avoid introducing large, complex features that are only used by a handful of people, as maintaining a pile of niche features would become problematic for the project long-term.
5. Check out the 5.0 goals
If you want to see exactly what we are working on, or if you’d like to contribute by helping implement them, which is very much welcome, please take a look at the official milestone tracker here: Mudlet 5.0 Milestone.
Thank you,
Vadim
