The fire is heating up here at Halcyon HQ, with an immense amount of effort and time being spent on the game's development. Delays leading to the Pre-alpha Stage 1 test were due to a range of reasons, and there's a lot to talk about.
Pre-alpha stage 1
Our first round open to playtesters went live only a couple of days ago, when it was scheduled for early August. The reasons for this are many:
- Issues with initial deployments
- Bugs found immediately in the new test environment
- Problems with client-server communication
- My own perfectionism (more on that later)
The good news however, is that the test round is now live and playtesters are getting their first feel for the game, albeit a very small slice. This round has a seemingly narrow scope (account and colony management features), but that scope covers almost all the architectural systems that will support the game in the future.
Issues right out the gate!
As it turns out, getting a game even of this scope out the door without teething problems is impossible. There were constant bug reports (big shoutout and thanks here to Helb who has reported a bunch and provided good detail around the issues reported!), issues with authentication, problems with updates not being received from the server, the list goes on and on...
Of course, this is all to be expected - we're not even at an alpha stage yet, and so there are bound to be a lot of problems. However, many issues reported I never saw locally and really should have, so it's highlighted an issue with my approach to QA and testing, as well. All of this will be resolved as we go, and I am learning a LOT about game design and development that really is very different to app development.
Big changes required
One of the main problems identified was that state between the client and server was almost always out of sync. I knew of this problem, and thought it could be an easy fix that I could resolve in the next week, but as it turns out - a lot of the logic that determines game state on the server, really needs to be present on the game client, as well. What this means, is that the couple of months of development I spent on game state in respect to colony infrastructure on the server, also needs to be written for the game client - and oh my, that's quite a bit of work.
Regardless, like the work done over the last few months, getting this right means that future game mechanics and game state management becomes easier, so it has to be done.
The result is that this play test round is likely to be open and active for a couple of months, as I work on bug fixes, architectural improvements, few feature additions and a few other aspects, to ensure that all the foundational game systems are working as intended, and working well.
One small step for man...
It has honestly amazed me just how long it's taken to get the very first interactive screens working for the game (Infrastructure), because the game systems required to support building, upgrading and destroying structures, are the very same systems that will be used to manage fleet movements, colonisation of various celestial bodies, research, combat - literally everything. Of course, each game feature has its own set of mechanics and systems that it also needs, but they will all sit atop this glorious mountain of architecture, so it's crucial that we get it right - and that's what our first test round is all about.
Every step I've had to take to push the game forward, has almost always been met with a huge amount of work to support it. To give you an idea, getting client-server communication working so that game updates could be properly sent to the player, took several weeks to get right. The hexmap on the infrastructure screen continues to evolve, but has had months of development time to put into it, to get it to a place where it now feels like a proper strategy game. The client itself has had weeks put into it to ensure we can also deploy it as part of an installable application (in the future).
To give you an idea of just how big this month has been, the codebase for the game has seen over 20,000 lines of code added to the game. That's nearly 3x what was achieved last month! 🫨
Wasted time*
In addition to those absolutes, there are things I've been working on that could have waited, but I wanted to "get it right". A perfect example is the construction menu, which now looks like below:
I could have waited on this, but the way it was working previously was driving me nuts, so some re-coding, and re-styling took place to get it looking absolutely mint (and this is before my designer takes a look at it! eeep!) The end result however, is something I'm now proud of, and from a user experience perspective is starting to feel pretty close to what I want for the game, and how it feels.
Moving forward
With the Pre-alpha Stage 1 test now in full flight, bug reports, issues and suggestions are coming in that will help to polish the game's foundations. Once we resolve this and move toward the next test round, the game's development will begin to move much more quickly, as those foundational pieces are now mostly in place. As a result, I have updated the roadmap to give a better sense of where we're at, where we're going, and what's next.
Halcyon Online continues to make great progress, and is speeding up. We're currently on track to have most of the game's features in place by the end of 2024, and head into our first closed beta tests sometime in early 2025. This isn't far off my original timeframe that I set early in January 2023, and that is quite an achievement in and of itself.
Until next time, Travellers.
Adios!