AVWW Beta 0.923 "Your Mission Description, If You Choose To Accept It" Released!

[x4000]

Original: http://arcengames.blogspot.com/2012/04/avww-beta-0923-your-mission-description.html

This one was certainly slower than we had anticipated on releasing, but PAX East preparations have been really kicking us in the teeth the last few days.  A lot of stuff had to get off to printers and so forth in time to actually make it to the show, and we left some of that until way too late.  Along with other hilarious things like forgetting to order any electricity for our booth, etc.

Now we've got the PAX East prep seemingly in hand now, and now we're back to trying to make as clean a build as we can for demoing at the show.  That's our focus for the rest of today, and in a smaller way tomorrow, and then there's going to be the better part of a week break where we work internally on some new stuff but don't really release it much until after all of us are back in the virtual office fully.

Things have gotten a lot crazier with this conference than we had expected.  I think it will be an enormously good thing for us and the game, but it's just been a time sink even before it's started.  With that, we're thinking about actually pushing our release date back a week, because we're losing a week of work on what would be 1.0.  But no official word on that yet, that's just what we're mulling and discussing with partners.

So, About This New Version Itself?
Oh right!  So you want to actually know about what's new here?  Well, a slew of bugfixes and some balance tweaks.  The draconites are a lot more unique as a player class now, among other changes.

The way that mission failure and abandonment works now is a lot better and matches up more with what players were expecting.

Also, the mission signs that you walk by and see the information about the mission now show you the description text without your having to hover over the mission name.  That was leading many people to previously think there were no mission descriptions, when in fact there were all along.  Having to go into missions with no explanation is not fun!

More to come soon.  Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time.  If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.

[BobTheJanitor]

Things have gotten a lot crazier with this conference than we had expected.  I think it will be an enormously good thing for us and the game, but it's just been a time sink even before it's started.  With that, we're thinking about actually pushing our release date back a week, because we're losing a week of work on what would be 1.0.  But no official word on that yet, that's just what we're mulling and discussing with partners.

I know the desire is probably to get it out there so it can actually start generating income, but I worry (why do I worry about your product? who knows!?) as the deadline looms ever closer that there won't be enough time to get a proper RC out so we can try our best to break it before it gets to the general public. Just as long as we have a little time to do that, release it whenever you want.

[TechSY730]

Things have gotten a lot crazier with this conference than we had expected.  I think it will be an enormously good thing for us and the game, but it's just been a time sink even before it's started.  With that, we're thinking about actually pushing our release date back a week, because we're losing a week of work on what would be 1.0.  But no official word on that yet, that's just what we're mulling and discussing with partners.

I know the desire is probably to get it out there so it can actually start generating income, but I worry (why do I worry about your product? who knows!?) as the deadline looms ever closer that there won't be enough time to get a proper RC out so we can try our best to break it before it gets to the general public. Just as long as we have a little time to do that, release it whenever you want.

Yea, with the deadline "looming", isn't there going to be a feature and balance freeze pretty soon here?
I'm not trying to tell you how to do your job, but historically you started one like a week or so before the final stable build.

[x4000]

Cheers, guys, and thanks as always for looking out for us.  We have confirmed the shifted date now; the main thing was making sure that Valve would actually let us push that date back, and it took them a bit to get back to us.  But we're good now!

In terms of a feature freeze before release, generally we do a week, yeah.  However, in this case we'll probably do some very light content in that period: AVWW is different from AI War in that it doesn't have to have razor balance like a strategy game.  So adding in more elites of enemies, and some more spells that recombine existing mechanics in new ways, is not going to be likely to introduce new bugs.  The key thing is just to recombine existing mechanics in new ways and with new art during that period, not to introduce new mechanics (or revise any mechanics), since that's where the bugs come from.

[BobTheJanitor]

So adding in more elites of enemies, and some more spells that recombine existing mechanics in new ways, is not going to be likely to introduce new bugs.

Look at this guy, taunting the dark gods of gamebreaking bugs. Quick, someone sacrifice a text adventure game on an altar to placate their anger!

[tigersfan]

So adding in more elites of enemies, and some more spells that recombine existing mechanics in new ways, is not going to be likely to introduce new bugs.

Look at this guy, taunting the dark gods of gamebreaking bugs. Quick, someone sacrifice a text adventure game on an altar to placate their anger!

*Sacrifices Colossal Cave*

[x4000]

 

[zebramatt]

So adding in more elites of enemies, and some more spells that recombine existing mechanics in new ways, is not going to be likely to introduce new bugs.

Look at this guy, taunting the dark gods of gamebreaking bugs. Quick, someone sacrifice a text adventure game on an altar to placate their anger!

*Sacrifices Colossal Cave*

I don't know how to 'sacrifices' here. Maybe I can try something else.

[keith.lamothe]

Yea, unless the release plan involves tying Chris to the main mast while the rest of us row through the last week with ears plugged, I expect to see stuff added up to the last 24-48 hours or so, when it switches into actual "just moving the files, working with distributors, etc" work

[TechSY730]

Yea, unless the release plan involves tying Chris to the main mast while the rest of us row through the last week with ears plugged, I expect to see stuff added up to the last 24-48 hours or so, when it switches into actual "just moving the files, working with distributors, etc" work

More software development methodologies need a "tie the product owner/manager/requirements giver/whatever up" stage to them.

[keith.lamothe]

More software development methodologies need a "tie the product owner/manager/requirements giver/whatever up" stage to them.

In practice, most do have one.

[x4000]

On the flip side, we have a couple of warring things:

1. As soon as we hit 1.0, people will start having to decide if that content seems like it is enough for them, and reviewers will start commenting on the amount of content.  If it's too low, we get dinged on reviews and our metacritic score goes down and that's not something we can call a do-over on.  That permanently hurts us in a very tangible way.

2. Even aside from that, we've got staff who can't just be sitting around for a week doing nothing during working hours; kind of a waste of money.  Especially when we have goals for post-1.0, AI War, and so on.  Granted we could dump all our excess hours into AI War during that stretch or something, which wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, but see point #1 at the same time.

3. But as we know, having stability and lack of bugs is also hugely important at 1.0 (or any official release).  So making changes that are high-risk right up until the end is stupid.  That also causes us to get dinged on reviews in a way we can't take back, and leads to bad first impressions with players, etc, etc, too.  So hence the focus on really low-risk enhancements that don't touch much of the codebase except to add some extra art and data (which is all an enemy really is, if you consider they are just subscribing to whatever behaviors and other functionality exists in the actual sim logic; that's true of AI War and this).

[BobTheJanitor]

we've got staff who can't just be sitting around for a week doing nothing during working hours; kind of a waste of money.

This is when you have them work on the day 1 DLC! Quadruple jump for only $5.99! Also some sort of major story character, only unlockable through DLC.

[x4000]

Ka-ching!  Sounds great!

Actually, that's what we'll be doing in a lot of senses, with the slight change of giving it away instead of charging $6.

[Penumbra]

Man, if you guys had charged 99 cents for every ship in AI war.....