Hey guys,
So you may have noticed that the alpha has been stagnant in the sense of what we've been releasing to players since the 29th. There's just been so much changing, all at once, all across the board, that there isn't really a good point to say "okay, here's some more stuff to test" at the moment. Here's what is inwork at the moment:
- We've pretty much completed the revisions to the AI side of things so that they now way outmatch you numerically and have sub-fleets and so forth.
- However, their AI routines have not been fully updated to take advantage of that yet.
- We currently have 9 new "abandoned hydral technology" items that you can find during battles and activate for various advantages that the AI doesn't get. Those are coded in, but not fully balanced.
- Tons of changes have been made to the racial flagships, making them way more varied and interesting.
- Tons of balance work.
- Tons and tons of artwork.
- We have 26 different player-only special abilities designed, although not yet implemented.
- We have (so far) 5 different AI-only turrets designed, though not yet implemented.
- I think we've implemented 2 new AI-unique ships, although it might be 3, I can't recall.
- We've designed, but not yet implemented, 8 new racial-unique ships that both the player and the AI can get, but only under certain circumstances.
- The interface for the larger metagame is coming along to the point where hopefully we should be able to share that with you very soon.
- We still have some design and implementation work to do to really get the new asymmetrical battlefields feeling fully right, in the sense of having a sensible layout that the AI exploits and that the player can size up and exploit.
That's basically the stuff that we are working on for the next alpha version, and the state of what has been done with it so far. It is a _lot_ of stuff, as you can tell. We are actually really far along with it in the main, and I expect that hopefully we can release the next alpha version on Thursday or so. My hope is that that will have the metagame in there, and most of the new battle stuff, although probably not the new AI to really take advantage of the new battle stuff yet. So the AI will probably be numerous but stupid on that first release. I imagine we'll be able to have that sorted out by sometime on Friday.
Anyway, so I expect to add in a big batch of new players on most likely Thursday and Friday, and possibly Monday and/or Tuesday next week as well. Things are actually moving on at a blazing pace behind the scenes, but in such a way that us pushing out a "partially complete" version of the next alpha version wouldn't really serve any purpose for those testers we already have. Once we get past this current big clump of additions to the game, then we'll be back to mostly daily updates for the alpha.
Cheers!
Chris
