I am officially back from my vacation! As I am the only one left on the AirlineSim “team”, I still took care of a baseline level of support over week 32 and 33, and I launched a new Quimby without much fanfare as well. I might have to find a solution for this for when I am actually on vacation, not just taking time off at home 
As expected, week 34 started with a day of catching up, dealing with all the non-urgent tickets and emails that piled up over the two weeks before. But I dove back into development right after that.
My current main priority is preparing the “preview game world” I have mentioned here and there before (you can suggest a potential name here). The idea is to have a game world that has all the upcoming in-development features enabled so that players can have an early look at them before they get rolled out to production game worlds. While this could technically be achieved by “just” starting a new game world like any other, I decided that this one needs a little bit more care:
- A more obvious way to highlight updates (currently, I post change-logs to the forums and I only do it for actual releases, so it probably flies under a lot of people’s radar)
- A clear view of which features are enabled/disabled and how configuration parameters differ from their defaults (currently this is more or less limited to free-text description the game world listing in account management)
- A way to transparently block access to a game world (because the preview game world will require a premium status to access it)
All of these will be beneficial to regular and/or exclusive game worlds as well. But I guess you can see how they are almost mandatory for a preview instance 
Last week was primarily about laying the groundwork for these things, namely more work on the API (in particular getting it ready for actual use, with auto-generated documentation and API clients) and extending my change-log tooling in a such a way that the release notes can actually be consumed and delivered by the game itself. I also got started on actually showing the release notes in-game…but that’s where I got a bit stuck and you’ll be able to read more about “why” in next week’s issue of the devlog 
lol