The latest Hearthstone patch (23.2.0) brought significant technical changes which broke my normal patch/update flow. All in all, this turned an already complex patch that would normally have taken me about 10 hours of work into a patch that required me to review and rework a lot of the foundations I put together a long time ago before I could even get started working on the patch.
After about 30 hours of work, I was able to get everything up and running locally and (hopefully) update my flow. However, I won't be releasing a new version today as I've just learned there's a new patch coming out tomorrow (meaning more work). Fingers crossed it's a simple one this time around.
As with any patch, I've been away from forums, email and social networks in order to focus my time and efforts into getting Hearthstone Access back up and running and not on responding to comments and/or direct messages.
Rather than reading through everything and getting back to people individually, a friend of mine was kind enough to compile the most common comments, questions and messages so I could respond here in a more accessible format people can refer to.
Some of these are driven by frustration - and I fully understand that. Even so, I'd like to thank all incredibly supportive and understanding players. Hearthstone Access continues because of you and I hope you continue to enjoy the game.
Over the past 7 days I've dedicated around 30 hours of my free time to work on Hearthstone Access. Please bear in mind this means doing 30 hours of (unpaid) work on top of an actual job, family obligations and enjoying free time like anyone else.
It's also worth mentioning that I've always been fully aware (from day 1) that any given patch could require me to spend hours, days or even months to get everything up and running again - all the way to not being able to repair things anymore in extreme cases.
Rest assured I'm as commited to Hearthstone Access as I've always been. I simply don't have as much time as I once had - which is why I prioritize keeping up with patches in lieu of new features and/or game modes.
I've already said this countless times, but Hearthstone Access is (and always has been) open source. I'm more than happy for people to contribute, but I'm also very aware contributing to a project like this is not by any means easy.
Willing to help is unfortunately not quite the same thing as being able to help. Patching a game in the same way Hearthstone Access does is extremely complex compared to working on a normal project for which you have access to the codebase.
For reference: over 20 developers have contacted me over the past few months and every single one of them gave up once they've realized how much effort is involved - and I don't blame them as I'm fully aware of how much effort is involved in doing something like this.
Hearthstone Access is not a mod - it's a patch. The projects you're thinking about are likely mods, which is a significantly different (and much simpler) problem.
The project on github is all that's needed to build Hearthstone Access yourself provided you know what you're doing. Please don't take this the wrong way, but if you don't understand how or why, I'm afraid you simply won't be able to contribute.
I've accepted donations for a while in the past as an exercise to see how feasible it would be to work on this and other games full-time. However, while I think it was a worthy exercise, I quickly realized a donations-based model in which donors get no benefits over regular players wouldn't work.
For clarity since I've been asked about this multiple times: after about 5 months of donations from about 100 different donors, I managed to gather about $3000 (before taxes and expenses) for about 1000 hours of work. Most players are not donors though. Some players have singlehandedly spent more than $3000 on the game themselves.
I've never said I wouldn't let Blizzard and/or any other company hire me and I certainly never said I wanted to keep the project to myself. In fact, I've always said I'd be more than happy to help and/or hand everything over if they were to implement things natively.