An unfortunate goodbye/inactivity

Kamdroid

hyperPad has been an amazing game development tool and community. I've loved it ever since I found GamePress. It really sparked my interest in programming and technology as a whole.

Though sadly I've been growing up too fast for hyperPad to handle, discouraged by the long waiting time for new features and bug fixes. Missing the core features which should've been implemented a very long time ago, like prefabs, more if statement options, proper functions & parameters, performance improvements, etc.

That being said, it definitely is slowly becoming viable, with the things like object referencing finally introduced. It definitely can create advanced games, but just feels too hacky with needing to make your own solutions to missing features.

When I'm free, maybe I'll finally finish that hyperPad web scraper, using Heroku or something to avoid needing to use 3rd-party CORS bypass.

Anyhow, it's been a very fun time and I'm sure to come back as more crucial features are released. If you wanna chat with me, feel free to join my Discord server: https://discord.gg/zDMnVzt

I hope everyone enjoys hyperPad as much as I have, see you soon.

Murtaza

Sorry to see you go! You've been a part of the community for a long time, so hopefully you can find some time to pay us a visit :).

Also sorry that you're feeling discouraged on waiting for new features. We have a release cycle of 4-5 months for major release updates. We do this for a few reasons.

Users don't update as often when we do quicker updates. They often skip updates. This causes major issues, or false bug reports and slows down our progress and also makes them have a bad experience since they're having bugs that have been fixed.
If we do major feature changes very quickly, this could potentially cause issues with existing projects. As you all have probably realized when creating your own projects, fixing one bug or adding a new feature adds 10 more bugs ;). While the hub and public facing part of hyperPad is in-active, we do have schools and "pro" developers that require this type of stability. Sudden changes are bad for these users, and since this is where the majority of our use-base sits, we have to cater to their needs.
Most often there are work arounds for bugs. For any bugs that are critical, we usually release an update a month after the "big one". And then subsequent critical bug fixes after that.... As long as they are reported. We have a major problem where a lot of bugs do not get reported.

Now, that being said there have been major underlying changes with the hyperPad behaviour system (as you've noticed). We've shifted from developing major features to developing tentpole functions that will support the future. This means we're building the core support and functionality. While it's not pretty, it does make the behaviour system more robust. By adding things like arrays, dictionaries, object references, and attributes we've opened the the behaviour system to be extremely powerful. You may not realize it, but you now have the freedom and power to create almost anything in hyperPad (sometimes a bit tedious, I know!)
For example, while developing some of these features, one of our previous engineers essentially created a behaviour system within hyperPad....
Once these tent pole features are in place, we'll focus on simplifying them and making them more accessible. This means adding things like functions, robust sharing and collaboration.

Any ways, I don't want to make excuses (we know we've been slow, especially with the last update), or change focus on your post. It was great having you part of the community, and we really do hope you pay us a visit from time to time!