General Project Thread & Feedback

I don't think the Tails sprite could be any other way to me, anyway, this is one frame in an animation. I wonder how that'll look.

 

In lieu of going the route that worked so incredibly well the last time, we've decided to give you guys an update on the status of the alpha release in a different way. Namely without all the pomp and misplaced hype.

The alpha will not be ready by the end of this month. One of the staff is in the process of moving across the country, and another has been having health issues for the better part of the past month. LOst also found a couple fairly nasty bugs in the engine that we thought had already been taken care of too, so he's working to iron those out. As you might expect, progress lately has been slower on account of those.

When we are ready to make the alpha public, I'll be announcing it here and on Retro's front page with no more than a 24 hour window between the announcement itself and the download link. It will be the only major announcement we'll be making before the alpha is ready.

 

Is alpha really still the best name for this? Sounds like it's going to be pretty polished. Just without most of the levels... Not that I have any suggestions for that. Oh well, no big deal.

 

The naming scheme varies depending on the dev team, but a game usually doesn't reach beta until all the features and assets are locked in and only testing/bug fixing remains.

 

Hmm, that's a shame. Well, I'll enjoy waiting, and receiving updates.

Good luck with the bugs.

 

Yeah, I'm no developer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about . I'm just so used to "WARNING: This is alpha software! May be unstable and full of bugs, etc. etc.!". But I suppose not all alpha software must be like that (Minecraft was still pretty amazing in alpha).

 

That's what Alpha software is supposed to be. Buggy and broken. Then it's tested, either internally or externally, for potentially game breaking and engine breaking bug, and the people who find bugs send them in to the dev team, who can (hopefully) replicate them, and proceed to fix them.

If they're going to sit there and not release it until every single bug they can find is removed, it's not really going to be a public alpha build. It's more like an alpha "demo". Something you'd show off at a convention to the media. It's still obviously early code, and potentially buggy, but it gets presented in such a way that we can only touch what is 99.99% guarenteed to work.

Besides, after everything this project went through, if they released the demo and it had some blatantly game wrecking bugs, I'm pretty sure everyone would lose complete faith in them.

 

We're calling it an alpha release because it will be the first publicly playable version of the game and because it will be incomplete. Those who have followed the project for as long as they have deserve a polished experience, and we aim to provide it. Will there be bugs we can't anticipate? Sure, but we'd like to hunt down as many as we can first. And even if the engine was perfectly stable, it wouldn't have sound; we brought Saxman on board to help out with that specifically, and he's working hard on it. So if alpha demo works better for terminology, by all means consider it as such.

 

Can I ask why all the now-obsolete guideline and contribution threads are still up? I haven't noticed anyone attempting to follow them, but it's still conveying the wrong impression.

 

Yep, it's just confusing. This is what frustrated me so much before. Would be lovely if a little clean up could be done! For everyone's sake - especially anyone new to the project.

 

We're working on it. Vincent and I had a meeting with Tweaker and ScarredSun about that last night. What we're planning to do is pair down the number of threads: at least one for general project discussion, and potentially another for releases and bug tests. There's more to it than that, and more changes will be coming in the near future to clear up the confusion. For the time being I'll be closing off the other threads and just leaving this one up until we've got things sorted out. If more than a few people want the concept thread re-opened, I'll go ahead and do that, but it's been gathering a lot of dust lately.

 

Sounds good! That should definitely help.

 

So. What's been going on lately. Talk sort of died instantly when all the other threads closed.

Must be something new in the last week or so?

 

With no new news, the only way this topic can go is ohhh'ing and awww'ing over the aspect of a eventual release of the alpha. I'd just prefer to wait, rather than think their is an update, when people are just asking "Is it out yet?".

 

The last week has been a very quiet one for us. There's nothing we have to announce right now besides the fact that work is still ongoing. Seems like most of the real questions have already been asked, so I'm not surprised to see a downturn in activity here for the time being.

 

Well, even the smallest changelogs are nice and get people talking. I'm sure you are saving some information to later dates, but there is still quite a bit to changelog about.

 

Very true, and we still have a few of those planned -- one of which is in the early stages of being created as I post this, so stay tuned.

 

The problem with something like that is progress can't be measured based on how much time one has spent on any aspect of the project. It's like if we were programming physics for the game but they weren't complete. How do you put a number on something that involves hundreds of lines of code just to make it function in the first place? It's like you can't get beyond 0% without first getting to 50%. Some things are just like that. There's work going on, but I don't think it does anybody justice on either side to give figures when they're estimates that could move forward or backward.

 

They could just post news about the stuff that has been completed, then.