Cheers folks, thanks for all the kind words!
I've made up a handy little spreadsheet on google docs that gives the roadmap between now and 1.0:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AtdOj7epD2gRdGlKU2VwbUpOWGNmMmVNYXFGeTFFekE#gid=0- To hit 1.0, all those items have to turn green.
- To hit beta, all of the orange items have to turn to any other color.
- To hit private alpha, we're pretty much down to monster code, the last of the interior generation, and the last of the strategic macro-game passes.
General predictions:
- I am hopeful that alpha will start on Thursday. This will likely mean a shorter alpha than we'd planned (but a more polished one from the start), so we'll probably do slightly larger batches of testers than we otherwise would have.
- I am hopeful that we'll be hitting beta "sometime next week," and at this point I'm feeling increasingly confident about that unless major stuff crops up during alpha.
Caveats:
- The line items in that roadmap spreadsheet are pretty broad, so some of them represent dozens or more of hours of work of course.
- There's a good chance that I've also forgotten to put some things on there. We have a variety of to-do lists that we're working from, so nothing is going to get completely forgotten, but in terms of summing it up in a small list like that, that can be challenging to do without the list just exploding in size in an unhelpful fashion (so we arrive right back at the size of our original to-do lists that the "summary" was made from!).
Final notes:
- I am super, super excited about this game. Usually at the end of any project there is a general weariness from just how long the whole thing has taken. But this one has come together fairly quick as far as games of this scope go (thanks to all the foundations from the first game), and so that hasn't set in. Instead I'm just really excited to actually be able to play the game, not just playtest bits and pieces of it. Once we hit that point is when we start the private alpha.
- Going along with my excitement, there's a ton of stuff that we've added or tweaked or improved since the last time I described the game in depth to you. So expect some differences, but they are all really pleasant surprises. Mainly we found little things we could add in quickly and easily that would augment what we were already doing, to make the game (including the exploration elements) feel richer and more satisfying. However, I think it's more fun if you discover all this sort of thing as you actually play through, rather than having those spoiled in advance, so I've managed to keep my mouth shut for once. It has been
hard.
None of this is earth-shattering stuff, it's just little accent pieces that add a lot to the game when looked at in toto.
- I am still terrified of people's expectations for this game, I have to admit. I feel we've made a far superior game to the first one, but I'm really worried that people have built up expectations such that we could never live up to them. That's another big reason I've been so quiet (aside from being crazy busy). I've been really wary of doing or saying anything that would increase expectations more than they already seem to be around here. I'm not mentioning this because I'm looking for comfort or bracing comments about how you're sure things will be fine, but more as a glimpse into how it feels to be at this point of a project like this if you've not been here before. I know from talking to other game creators even of extremely successful games that there's always a moment of terror right before releasing where everyone wonders "what if they don't like it?" I think I was a little bit arrogant with AVWW1's beta, coming off of the critical smash hits of AI War and Tidalis, and so I just overstepped things. This time around I've kind of swung to the opposite extreme, and hopefully that's for the better. Time will tell!
Anyway, bottom line is, excitement and optimism is running really high here, but we're trying not to get run away with ourselves and we're also in heavy crunch mode. Cheers!
