Runescape Dev Tracker

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.

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/...

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.

Heyo Folks,

Just wanted to jump in here and try to expand on what the role of the "This Week in RuneScape" post.

Essentially the intent of the post is to give updates on what's coming up, this can range from new content being released that day or upcoming events/content to Ninja Strikes/Merch updates/TH Promos/Livestream Calendars/Game Jams etc.

For example, the "Murder at the Border" section was included as the Newsletter went out recently informing people the date of the quest is the 20th, so we wanted to get that information out openly to all our players.

Now I understand that is not how some players view it as they instead see it as the weekly update post and generally only wish to know about new additions/patches/fixes etc and as such would have preferred if nothing was posted today. While I get that it's missing the goal of the post and fundamentally this seems to be where expectations are being set and broken.

I personally made the cal...

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...

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

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

Coming 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.

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

• 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...

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.

"What about second Game Jam?" Yep, it’s been Jam week and the JMods have been busy working on future projects, so this will be a pretty light update! Let’s take a look ahead to our upcoming murder mystery quest, plus Treasure Hunter, community updates and all the rest…

https://secure.runescape.com/m=news/game-jam---this-week-in-runescape

Thank you! Glad you like it. :)

We do have more buildings planned, but suggestions for things that would be wanted are always welcome.

It's a separate topic for two reasons:

The first is that two factors can independently affect the same thing. For example, gold comes in to the game from multiple sources. (You can see from the data we shared the relative impact of each.) It's definitely good to look at each of those factors, but that doesn't mean you just ignore all of them because you can't fix all of them at once. You have to start somewhere.

The second is that I believe that open communication with players is the best way to improve the game, which benefits players and Jagex alike. However, I am not free to discuss all topics equally openly - monetisation is obviously a sensitive subject, but there are other topics as well like upcoming updates, negative takes I might have on recent content, and so on. My ability to speak freely is limited, as it is for any professional in a work capacity. If players take the attitude that I shouldn't talk about the things I can talk about without talking about ...