I was just going to post about this today, actually, but no: we're looking at the second half of April now, basically. The reasons for that are twofold:
1. There's a
ton of games coming out in March, not to mention trade shows, and it would be marketing suicide to release our first alpha in this month, we discovered. I don't want to repeat the Tidalis mistake of releasing at the wrong time, even for alpha.
2. We have wound up increasing our scope for alpha rather substantially by the addition of multiplayer, shadows, and some other components of that nature. The result is that the first alpha version will be even more polished and functional, which is great, but it also means that our project timeline gets shifted around a bit outwards.
But, never fear that we're going to see an endless stream of pushbacks on the date with the first alpha. In terms of what we initially set out to do, we are actually a bit ahead of schedule; and the scope additions were well-considered things based on overwhelming player feedback to the early screens/videos/descriptions, rather than just general scope-creep because we felt like it. In other words, early player comments have already helped to shape what our vision is for the first public alpha is, and that's good all around, but it is larger than what we had originally planned when we were thinking about this in isolation before showing you guys anything.
All in all, things are going really well, though. We'll be seeing that first public alpha somewhere in 5-7 weeks from now, and my god is the game going to be bigger then compared to what it is now.
