Q&A #2

Note: this is a copy of the full text of an update from Blaseball.com. You can see the full history of updates in the Messages tab.

This week we have a Q&A for you!

Will I be able to financially support Blaseball and its development? Absolutely adored the idea of the Patreon and getting to submit names for players, really hope we get a system like that again.

Yes, eventually! We’re exploring ways for our audience to spend money on Blaseball without any of the obvious pay-to-win strategies, which will take some time and research. A lot of that work is driven by something our Community team said — “There are two things all Blaseball fans love: committing to the bit, and number go up.” So we’re thinking a lot about how to introduce optional fun, enrich the Blaseball experience for everyone, and, hopefully, shitpost a bit with the community.

When it comes to the name pool, we’ve done a lot of internal work on broadening representation in names from all over the world. We want to give that a chance to populate the current League, so we’re keeping names homegrown for now. But expect more fun things coming down the pipeline!

What improvements are being made to the development process, and is that going to affect Blaseball’s Season schedule?

One of our big goals this year is to successfully run Blaseball without long hiatuses and without crunch — it’s something that improves the quality of everything we make as developers, and it definitely improves your experience of Fans too.

In the last Q&A, we talked about our work on the game engine: rebuilding the foundations of the sim so that we can host more complicated interactions with less difficulty, which frees us up to plan ahead and prepare what’s next before we need it. That’s one improvement to development process that may not be very flashy, but absolutely pays off in unseen ways!

The improvements being made during this current development time include tightening up the pillars of the game and laying groundwork for longer-term improvements to core gameplay interactions. Which are things that are very hard to do when Blaseball is live because that’s we need to focus on launching, operating, and hotfixing all the exciting Season-to-Season content.

So the big question Fans probably have left is, what is happening to Blaseball’s Season schedule? That is a bigger design topic we’re eager to tackle in more detail in the future — we really want to take you through the How’s and the Why’s first — but what we can say for now is that we are guided by that big goal stated up top: more sustainable Blaseball with fewer unexpected stops and less time with no Blaseball at all!

What would you say are the biggest differences between developing the current era and developing the previous eras?

For this question, we went around to assorted departments that survived Discipline and Expansion to ask how things have changed.

Leadership shared that more than anything, our focus has shifted to prioritize making Blaseball something we can keep running.

“This era is more of a reboot than a sequel. The previous two eras were not designed for longevity. Had we continued on our previous trajectory, it would have been extremely challenging for Blaseball to become a sustainable project for the company. We still have to prove that all our new work will pay off, but it’s an attempt to turn this game from a once-in-a-while burst of energy into a lasting endeavor.”

When asked for comment, Game Design said, “we’ve never had this much time to design Blaseball which is both an absolute blessing and a horrid curse.”

Engineering said the following:

• Modularization, we are building the systems and the tools to make things reusable and therefor sustainable and easier to build
• Observability, we have more insight into how the sim makes decisions, and that means we have more control over how we can tune it.
• Stability, we are creating a more stable infrastructure. While this is always a constant struggle as our tech evolves, we are creating a more available system.
• More power to the designers, we are trying to make choices that give game design flexibility!

In response to engineering’s answer, our producers said, and this is a direct quote, “modularization! big big bi gb ig big.”

On Community’s end, we’ve worked to establish much clearer lines of communication from Fans to devs, in a way that results in action and discussion. We could pass on feedback in the past, but now we have a polished, efficient way to make sure what we know translates into meaningful changes to the game. We’ve also gotten much more efficient in how we moderate, which means we can focus more on fun projects for the audience and help design new mechanics with our community front of mind.

The team also noted that developing Blaseball now compared to 2020 when Covid was beginning has been a huge shift — in energy, in our Fan’s time, in how Blaseball fits into all of it. A lot has changed in three years. Beyond that, this is the first time we’ve truly had: a Marketing team, a QA team, a Product Design team, and an Art team, which changes the game completely, literally.

Will we be seeing more of the Blaseball Roundup? Because that helped me a lot in getting me people interested in Blaseball.

Great question. We also love the Blaseball Roundup. The short answer is: “Yes.” The long answer is: “Whats up everyone! Yes, you will see more of the Blaseball Roundup in the Coronation Era.”