Dev Diary 19/2024: Adventures on the Scheduling Train

Let’s quickly catch you up on what we’ve been up to at Endless Studio! 🚀

Next Time on Endless Studio…

(If you’re new here, or just need a refresher: Our next update, 2024.3, is the final step before we start creating the eagerly awaited Manage Your Own Network feature set, chosen by our biggest fans as the next significant feature.)

Since our last Dev Diary, we’ve been busy with a few things.

First, we’re happy to report that we’ve completed the Scheduling Office by creating the detail screen for each schedule and tying everything together. The detail screen is very useful as you can see all the competing shows that air on different networks in the same time slot on broadcast and cable networks, or on the same week on streaming networks. You can also tap on each show to view its detail screen.

Next, we changed the starting rooms for new games. Now you’ll immediately have a Management Office, a Briefing Room, a Library, and soon, also the Scheduling Office.

We created a short video to show off the new starting room layout and the schedule detail screen. Check it out on our Instagram!

We’ve also begun preparing Endless Studio for iOS 18, because we know there are a lot of fans who will install the public beta as soon as it becomes available.

Then, we started a thorough test on how the new scheduling system works… and identified a lot of issues. For example, there were no schedules created for the very first week, which we solved quickly. Then, we noticed that the End Week process started to take a long time after about a year of playing. Debugging the reason was quite time-consuming, but we finally found and eliminated the culprit.

At this point, we were starting to feel good about the progress, only to find another huge problem: networks were not filling up all their time slots with shows, leaving a lot of holes in their schedules. Investigating this eventually led us to change a lot about how the network scheduling algorithm works. Even with these changes, we still haven’t solved the issue completely.

We expected intangible, hard-to-predict issues like these when we planned and embarked on creating the Manage Your Own Network feature set. This is why in the description for this feature in Feature Voting Season 2, we stressed in advance that this is indeed a huge development task, comparable to creating a whole new game. After it won the vote, we decided to break this huge task into four phases, so we could deliver new features to our fans much earlier, rather than just at the very end.

Believe us, we’d be the happiest devs if we could give you more new features, sooner, but we promised to develop whatever wins the voting, and that’s what we’re doing. We know this requires patience from our fans, but also from ourselves, as it’s not easy to continuously work on something for many months and not see the end result. But, we will get there eventually, and we’re trying our best to make it as soon as possible!

We estimate update 2024.3 is now about 65% complete. We’ll continue with the scheduling refinements until it works perfectly, or at least well enough to release in the next Early Access update.

Supporting Endless Studio

Endless Studio is a niche game with a dedicated but small community. This makes traditional pricing models, like one-time purchases, impractical since they would provide very little income. Third-party ads wouldn’t generate much revenue either, given our small player base.

To ensure ongoing development, we offer Supporter Subscriptions. This allows our dedicated fans to support our tiny, two-man game studio. While we’re still far from covering our development costs, we’re hopeful we’ll get there eventually. If you haven’t already, and if you can, please consider subscribing under Game Menu / Supporter Subscription! With a Level 1 Supporter Subscription, you’ll speed up development and enjoy the game ad-free. With Level 2, you’ll also get Early Access to new features, participate in Feature Voting, and be included in the Hall of Fame!

We are grateful for your contribution and try our best to deliver as much value to you in return as possible! 😘

Feature Voting Status Report

Our Level 2 Supporter Subscribers greatly influence what we develop next through their monthly votes on the Feature Voting screen. We’re currently in Voting Season 3, which will conclude when the winner of the previous season, the Manage Your Own Network feature set, is released with update 2024.4. Here are the current Top 5 features:

• Planned Show Ending: 2203 votes
• Critics & Awards: 1804 votes
• Feature Movies: 715 votes
• Producing Whole Seasons: 534 votes
• More Talent Variety: 346 votes

That's all folks! 🐷 Enjoy your weekend and happy studio building! Stay tuned for more updates from Endless Studio. 📺