Mar 11 • 3 min read
Since there's been a lot of questions surrounding the maintenace of PaintSquad recently, we've compiled a list of frequently asked questions along with their answers. If anything changes, this post will be updated accordingly.
Author
CRUGG
short answer: a lot of things were very broken at their core, so we had to take it offline to rework a lot of things.
long answer:
PaintSquad was never envisioned to be the size that it now is feature-wise and various software engineering design decisions were made poorly. Because of this, with each update, we came across more issues which are deeply manifested in the codebase. Especially with the latest major update, several things broke and trying to fix one issue caused the next to appear. Quickly providing hotfixes was no longer feasible which led us to the hard decision to temporarily take PaintSquad offline to completely rework most of our code from the ground up.
short answer: as much as we'd want to provide you with any details here, we can't provide anything yet.
long answer:
We completely understand that you all want PaintSquad back as soon as possible. And rest assured, we're hard at work. But PaintSquad as well as Xenyria itself relies on various very complex systems and infrastructures behind-the-scenes which require a lot of changes. We don't want to make the same mistake and rush things or make poor decisions which would cause the issue to just come up again in the future. Instead, we want to make PaintSquad very future-proof and expandable to easily allow us to add more content in the future and scale PaintSquad.
short answer: On its return, PaintSquad will have new content, but our main focus lies on reworking the systems behind-the-scenes, so don't expect too much.
long answer:
We currently only have one Developer working on PaintSquad, so we cannot work on much code-heavy content additions, because of all the behind-the-scenes work ahead. So don't expect a massive update, but you can definetly look forward to some new cool things!
These changes however pave the way for more cool and exciting updates in the future.
short answer: only one gameplay & infrastructure developer, work, large amount of technical debt that added up over the time PaintSquad existed.
long answer:
While we'd have liked to have already finished the rework, we're unfortunately still not there yet. This is due to various reasons, such as us having limited work power. We currently only have one developer that's capable of working on the gameplay, infrastructure, and systems (essentially everything related to the server itself). Additional, nobody on the Xenyria team is working on the project full-time at the moment.
Lastly, over the time, a lot of things that were coded in bad ways or are buggy have collected, adding up to a large amount of so-called "technical debt" which we now need to work on.
We don't want to spoil too much yet, but you can find occasional sneak peeks on our Monthly Recaps on the Xenyria Blog, such as in the February 2024 Recap.
If you would like to help working on Xenyria directly, you can check out our open positions here.
Otherwise, simply playing PaintSquad once it's back and sharing it with your friends is already a lot of help!