Hi!

This is our first official blog post!
That’s exciting and a little daunting at the same time.

My name is Mark, you’ll find me in Discord -> www.fusionguards.com/discord and the game with the handle “Aracos”.
I’m the Design Director and Co-founder of Janeious and I’ll regularly plop into this blog from now on to explain some of the decisions we’re making in regards to Fusion Guards as well as generally give you a closer look at what goes on behind the scenes at Janeious.

For today I want to talk about:
1) The new workflow for our test versions
2) A change to a core feature we call “Unique Guards and Pilots”
3) Upcoming features

1) TESTING workflow

If you are not aware yet:  There are currently 2 versions of Fusion Guards “available”:
 – The actual store version
– A closed TESTING version to get early feedback. The rest of this blog is referring to this version.

As we’ve mentioned in Discord before:
We’ve decided to not hold back on TESTING versions quite as long anymore. So far we were somewhat hesitant when it comes to updating TESTING which resulted in large gaps between versions. We’re trying things differently now, and then see if this is a better approach.
The reasons behind this change is simple:
When we started working on Fusion Guards we were a very small team, now that the team has grown to a size where we can have multiple people working in parallel on different features it allows us to get things out of the door way faster than before.
This is great but it also means that if we wait for a long time between versions that there will be a ton of things to test. Which in turn means it’ll take us longer to figure out if everything is working as intended as well as it having the potential to introduce bugs because of the way features interact with each other.
So we’re cutting that out and we’ll be pushing updates out quicker.

That has a big disadvantage though:
Not all features will feel great if they’re introduced in a vacuum.
You’ll see what I mean with the “unique guards and pilots” topic below.
However we decided this was a cost worth taking as it will still allow us to push out the whole suite of features faster if we don’t hold them back.
It also allows us to get feedback from you way earlier.

We’ve decided to go one step further still:
We’ll be pushing out features with what we internally lovingly call: “Coder Art”.
What we mean by that is that you’ll see features where the interface can be a bit confusing or just not very pretty as it didn’t go through the hands of our UI artist.
This way a lot of features are quite fast to build and get to a testable version. If we wanted to only show them with proper UI it can add a tremendous amount of development time on top of it.
With the downside of having no guarantee that you’ll even like the feature, which would mean we’d have to throw it out and redesign it anyways.
Making it available earlier allows us to iterate faster.

Now let’s talk about the fun stuff:

2) Unique Guards and Pilots

This is available on TESTING right now! Coming to Live when it’s ready.

So in this version you’ll find a few things are a little different: – Guards and Pilot are now unique. Whaaaat? Yup.
Which means you’ll only get to use a single Ember, Barrett etc. in your squads.