Rust GameDev: Newsletter Changes

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Hey everyone, it’s been a while! As you’ve certainly noticed, the newsletter has been on hiatus for some months. The reason was mostly maintainer burnout, which is also why the newsletter of August 2023 was not published until a few days ago.

We’re back now though! A couple of community members, Jan Hohenheim (@janhohenheim) and Thierry Berger (@Vrixyz), have led the revival of the newsletter. This includes making changes requested by the community, and improving sustainability for the long term.

Schedule Changes #

Thierry Berger (@Vrixyz), has come up with a new monthly schedule that we will try out:

• 3rd of the month: Newsletter starts. A call for submissions is made on social media and community Discord servers interested in receiving it. At the same time, last month’s newsletter is published.
• 3rd to 28th of the month: submissions are collected and the newsletter is written.
• 28th of the month: Submissions are closed. New submissions go into the next month’s newsletter.
• 3rd of the next month: The newsletter is published. Any submissions not edited in time will be moved to the next month or removed entirely.

This more strict schedule should help with the issue of late entries and reduce the pressure of editing by having a dedicated time for it with no incoming submissions. The goal is to be more consistent and reliable in our publishing schedule.

Community Survey #

This restructuring is also a good time to improve the content of the newsletter. We’ve got some community feedback on the Rust GameDev Discord already and would like to hear more from you. It would be great if you could fill out this survey to let us know how we can improve the newsletter going forward. The survey closes on the 28th of May 2024. We will be evaluating the survey results in an upcoming blog post, so stay tuned for that.

Future Steps #

Based on feedback we’ve already gotten, the steps for next months are:

• Add an email subscription option to the newsletter
• Setup a system for how to edit entries that are not ready before the newsletter ships. We are currently looking into either hiring a part-time editor, using generative AI to add a few sentences where needed, or simply removing these entries.

That’s all for now. Have fun reading!