It's been rather quiet around Halcyon HQ the past month, as we focused on addressing Pre-alpha test bugs (of which there are many), and a couple of them being quite difficult to resolve and even replicate. But progress has been made, whilst there's still a few open issues.
Late August we launched the Pre-alpha Stage 1 test. This presented numerous problems right out the gate, with a huge number of bugs we just didn't see in development and players simply not able to log in or join galaxies. These were resolved, and then our "lead" playtester (who has reported all the bugs - Herb) basically reported around 15-20 bugs, most of which have been fixed.
There's been some really odd race condition problems with our Timewarp engine which we're still looking into. As mentioned the last few months, this test is all about our underlying architecture for the game and the core systems that will run the entire game, so it's ultra-important that we get it right. Unfortunately, these last few problematic bugs have been really hard to get right. We'll write a fix, notify the relevant testers and find it's still not behaving as we would like. So that work continues. Lastly, some of the code I've written I'm not especially happy with, so I need to re-work those solutions to ensure they're robust and stable into the future.
In other news, we're looking at some surprise features which we'll announce closer to launch, but work on those have begun. Additionally, we're scheduled to have our designer look at the main Infrastructure screens in the next few months, so our next test should see an updated UI/UX for those screens.
Finally, due to getting stuck on a few bugs more game design has been executed with many more game mechanics fleshed out further, including more development for the main tech tree for the human faction.
I've gone ahead and updated the Roadmap based on this month's struggles, essentially pushing out some of our objectives the next few months by a month or so for each.
Not as much to report on this month, but progress continues and will continue to do so.
Until next time, Travellers.
Adios!