It’s about time we updated everyone about Alpha Testing. There’s still a lot of stuff to get done before we can start, but we figured we should let everyone know how it’s going to work and why it’s been taking so long.
- How it’s Going to Work -
When testing starts we’ll randomly select around 100 people from our list of people who’ve signed up to help us test out Due Process. We’ll send emails to those addresses ahead of time so make sure to check your inboxes! As alpha testing goes on we’ll continue repeating that process. It’s not likely anyone will get to play in more than one test session. We can only have so many games running at once and we’d like to let as many people try it out as possible.
- Why are so Few People Getting to Play? -
The alpha was always intended to be very small. In general, Alpha testing is not supposed to be very fun. Most of the time it’s glorified bug testing, lots of important features are missing and everything is broken. It’s a frustrating experience, but it’s necessary. We were a small team with very limited resources, a game that requires 8 people to test, and friends who were getting tired of us begging them to play our blocky broken prototype.
And so we started taking alpha signups. We were hoping to get around 100 dedicated players we could call upon every few weeks, usually just for a few hours. Most of our time right now is spent working on new features and so large scale testing isn’t very useful. In fact, it may actually slow down development considerably.
In short the alpha is going to be very small because it has to be. We’re trying to make it a bit bigger by rotating people in, but there’s only so much we can do. There will be a large scale paid beta after that, but we aren’t sure when yet.
- Why is it Taking So Long? -
Most of the delay is due to us paying back some technical debt we’ve accumulated. A lot of our fundamental systems were built badly, and while the game was playable, adding new features was likely to end in us having a broken buggy mess on release. Unfortunately fixing everything meant there wouldn’t be many exciting updates and we wouldn’t have a playable game to test for a while. We’ve spent the last few months completely rebuilding Due Process, and the game is a lot better for it. I’m happy to say that we’re finally almost back to having something playable. Due Process looks really different now and we’re pretty excited to see what you guys think.