May as well post this in its own topic for more visibility, even though I posted this in another thread.
Right now based on my current internal schedule...
I should have all of the systems fully specced to a ready-for-implementation status (which includes all the general data entry for them, too) by the end of next Wednesday. Then it will be at least a week before Keith finishes coding all those pieces, but I'll be testing other stuff in the meantime.
Then there's going to be a whole lot of mess to clean up based on first-pass "just get something we can experiment" sloppy UIs needing refinement into real UIs if their mechanics work, or else refactored into something else if their mechanics are less than ideal. That will be pretty light on me in terms of implementation work, because that sort of speccing doesn't take much time at all. It's going to take Keith quite a while to implement, though, I'm sure. "Lots of little things," basically, and GUIs are always painfully slow to do well.
But I won't be remotely idle, because I'm going to be going through literally hundreds of buildings with thousands of stats working on getting those balanced the way that I want. Right now I have a first-pass version of those that feels like it is in the ballpark, but I want to get it a lot closer than that for an actual game release even to alpha. So I'll be hammering the heck out of that, plus logging more bugs and change requests, while Keith is working on the code for his stuff.
Depending on how long all that takes, we're looking at practically the start of March for bringing in alpha players. Possibly a week earlier than that if things go optimistically well, but I'd rather give you guys something more polished than getting a lot of distracting feedback on things that I already know need tuning.
Then from there we're off to the races with the alpha. There will still be some content that needs to be added at that point, including a number of visual things and over half of the victory paths. And pretty much all of the tutorials, I imagine.
This is running a bit later than I wanted, but not disastrously so like TLF was at this point last year. This is also feeling a lot more solid to me than TLF was at this point last year, so the extra up-front time is definitely worth it. Alpha isn't going to be about trying to figure out how to fix large tracts of the game or whatever, it's going to be about refining things to that aspects of the implementation don't get in the way of what the game already is. That's a nice change of pace, heh.
