[2023] Game Jam - This Week In RuneScape

It's a trade off of no updates for a week to gain complete focus on putting together really exciting projects for more meaningful future updates.

Game Jam took place for an entire week this time, and some really exciting stuff came out of it - some of which will manifest into the game like we've seen over the past year from these.

The benefit is that it enables a lot more significant QoL updates, new features or even much demanded things like graphical updates for the F2P areas last year to come to life.

While it might not be now (because we have to schedule this in a way that ensures there's time for polish and QA), the end result is better updates down the road. These will happen periodically over the year and often have a light/no Patch Week to follow in those instances too for that exact reason.

• We're talking to the team about the World Crash reports and it's being investigated.
• You'll see more of the streams we used to do (Q&A, PvM, Dev Chats etc) coming back in the months ahead as the new CM settles in and takes the reigns on streams
• Jagex Launcher focus right now is the Jagex Accounts, which went into their closed beta phase recently. More updates are coming on this very soon too as we move to the next phase.
• We'll be talking about Necromancy in the not too distant future, but don't expect anything this month. We plan to talk about it much earlier than we do for standard updates, but we're not at that point as yet.
• New addition to the CM team is settling in well. It's only his third week in, so we're giving him time to get to know the teams, how things work, major focus points for the year and so on. We'll be introducing them in the coming weeks, likely as early as next week, with a stream.
• Max Cash is an Engine Update that is very much in the works. We don't have a 100% locked date yet but it's still on the way.

I don't have detailed updates to share on your other questions right now, but we'll look to see if we can answer more on those as soon as we can.

There's a Ninja Strike focused on the Wilderness coming next Monday - definitely things to look forward to next week.

Mentioned this in another post, but to share it here -

We do plan to talk about it much earlier than we would for a standard content release, but don't expect any news on it this month. Necromancy development is moving along really well, but it's not at a stage where we're ready to start revealing aspects of it just yet.

Coming next week.

There's an Economy Stream with Mod Jack on Wednesday where he can speak to that!

We generally announce them the week of so we would have been a bit early putting it in this week. Its next week tho.

Getting fixes into the game is a production line process. It passes through multiple hands to get into the live game - reproducing the issue and documenting the repro steps, the development to fix the bug, peer review of the code to verify the fix, QA testing to verify it functions as intended, catch edge cases, and re-coding to account for found issues, localisation to translate any text into German, French and Brazilian-Portuguese, scheduling, upload management, re-testing of the release build by the Release Candidate QA testing team, editorial of the patch notes.

We make game jams available to all staff involved in that process to flex different creative skills, and therefore the release process shuts down for the week of game jam so the release team can also contribute to game jam projects.

If I chose to not participate in last week's game jam and instead use that time to fix live bugs, they still wouldn't have released this week, because the production line was turned off for a week, to give us permission to game jam. At best I'd create a backlog of initially deved fixes for future processing through the production line when it's re-manned the following week.

I can entirely understand the surprise and disappointment, as regularly scheduled game jams are a new thing we're trying, and I sympathise with the news post editors who deal with the fallout when we down tools for a week. Especially as we can be cautious about talking about the fruits of those game jams too soon in case it creates expectations of imminent release.

As a developer, I'm appreciating the creative outlet and a space to explore game health projects that are bigger than bugfixes, require more complex solutions than ninja strikes, and outside the scope of monthly headliners on the release schedule. I very likely aren't working on the thing you consider the game's most important priority fix, but I'm getting to fix something that I've really wanted to fix for years, and haven't 'til now had the opportunity to do so (or even explore the potential of doing so).

Game jams are experimental and only a fraction of what's explored is going to be green-lit for release, lead to practical outcomes, or shippable in its first iteration, but game jam provides us a platform for lean passion projects that can have an extremely good return on investment, and I'm very grateful our leadership team are scheduling time to make game jams available to us.

This Week In RuneScape is a weekly Newspost we do regardless of the size of the update (or in this case, with no Patch Notes).

It's more to give an update on anything happening in and around RuneScape that week as a whole - including Maintenance, Livestreams, Pink Skirts events, celebrating community content etc.

We sometimes break that rule a little to share certain news more broadly - like Murder At The Border which we dated in our last Email Newsletter and wanted to bring here too - but we think it's important we always have a one stop shop for what's going on (or not) in RuneScape every Monday vs just not posting.

It's context right? We have no Patch Notes, but it's for the reason of investing in the Game Jam for potential future content releases. We felt it was important to let you know why we have less updates for the sake of upcoming ones.

In terms of releases from Game Jam, that's a reality of most Game Jams you'll see out there. Some stuff will make it out fairly quickly, some stuff will come later (like our last Game Jam update earlier this month which contained some stuff from back in October) and some might be on ice until there's an opportunity - which can be anything from scope around other content production or a myriad of other things.

Edit: Stu posted something for context on what goes into bringing a Game Jam project to life from prototype to shipped if you want more insight on this. Find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/runescape/comments/11jvw1n/comment/jb4q7cz/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Essentially, if we're going to be more open with Game Jams and what people have made like we have recently, the thing to bear in mind is that not everything produced in a Game Jam makes it into the game short term. Definitely worth providing feedback on what you love most when we do those blogs though, as that's feedback we can get back to the team!

Necromancy is a 2023 skill release. We're not targeting 2024 in any way unless there's a major shift in our project timelines for any reason.

Glad you liked that blog in October! Definitely going to discuss a repeat with the team.

We can't produce a look week of as we write This Week In RuneScape earlier in the week and projects are only shown off at the very end of the week. Even if we wrote it on Friday it'd be too late to get it in.

That's a great thought actually. We'll go away and think about how we bring more dev insights into our posts around stuff like this.

Thank you for the detailed and considered feedback too!

A quick heads up that the maintenance planned for today at 10am has now been cancelled. No 'Scaping interruptions this week!

I believe this is intended as doesn't cutting by hand have a chance to become a rock instead?