I don't want to disappoint people by missing a specific date, so I still can't be specific. I will say that the progress in the last 3 weeks has been enormous - with all of our critical pieces complete that we've been building for nearly 2 years (items, abilities, enemies, systems etc) we're finally at the fun part, where we can quickly construct playable levels out of our big pile of content. It's coming together really fast, and it's super gratifying to see the gameplay gel up. With game development you never REALLY know if you're making a lemon until it's close to done - you can have a lot of interesting parts, but its not until the whole thing comes together when you finally know for sure "yes, this is actually going to be fun to play". Now that we are building/testing the game as a whole, complete with the leveling up process, the growth in power, the introduction of new enemies/equipment/skills... I tend to be my harshest critic, but I'm very enthusiastic about how its shaping up. At the rate we're finalizing dungeons/quests, I think I can say with some confidence that we'll ship in April.
You know I got so excited for BH2 as it was so close I forgot about this for a couple of weeks there. Really can't wait to get it though as no matter what games I have I'll be playing this instead.
I need to change my pants after watching that video! Here's my gratuitous " I can't wait for this to release" comment!
We're currently sending weekly builds to friends/family, at the moment we're not planning to expand that list.
I'm a new user and hadn't heard of the game until I registered, but it really seems to be promising. Waiting for the first version in a couple months, so!
While I understand the need to limit/contain beta testing, I'd also caution that limiting to too small a base can often be detrimental. I've been involved in a lot of alpha/beta tests over many years, and a very common thing to happen is that the voices of fanboys tends to drown out those who present legitimate gameplay concerns. The other related problem with a stagnant test base is that developers will naturally tend to make changes based on feedback of what becomes an "unrealistic" user base, and forget that there are a wide variety of different styles of gamers out there that may end up alienated. Unrealistic in the sense that they have done so much testing their experience and expectations are completely skewed. I remember joining a beta test once and entering the forums; it literally felt like everyone, developers included, was speaking a different language. They had all simply lost the ability to relate to a new player coming to their game.
Oh yea, you can definitely get that echo chamber effect if you only ever show the game to fans, in fact that's mainly why we don't solicit excited buyers for our testing needs. Fear not, our testers aren't afraid to hurt our feelings, or suggest something drastic. We also have a pretty good spectrum of users on our list, ranging from my mom (not a hardcore gamer by any means) to other developers/industry buddies who aren't going to cut us any slack.
Nothing huge to report. The game is still growing steadily, as new levels/quests get completed daily. We're finding/fixing small bugs and doing lots of playtesting to tune difficulty and the relative power of skills. At the rate we're going we should finish up in April.
It'll be a full game by anyone's standards. We also have some additional content in mind that could be cool, but won't be in the first version.
