Post-Alpha (Patreon)

almost a week without updating-- blobsweats... but y'all know where i been. i appreciate the discord because i don't feel quite so distant now even if i don't immediately have things to post.
not that i am trying to leave anyone not on there behind...

so i'm declaring alpha finished! beta is either going to go up tonight or today depending on the apps and how much i want to procrastinate. 

speaking of the apps, if any of you folks with veteran accounts (as opposed to supporter, i.e didnt have access to alpha) want to get in for beta testing, just submit an app and let me know who you are on here. i am not as aware of whose forum accounts matches whose names as i am with the level 5+'s (and even then who knows what i remember) but i will give some preference to you there as well-- it is also not a guarantee since slots are limited.

marcello and i are in agreement that this alpha has gone just about the best that we could've expected it to go. we were cautiously optimistic after the relative lack of inactions in the supervised/internal tests, but the jump from 8 testers to 65 testers (woah, hi guys!) is a steep one, so we were also prepared if a bunch of jank suddenly reared its ugly head a la E17 testing period. 

it didn't. so that's great. we had a few inaction (the most widespread of which was actually caught in internal-- but the fix for it was broken (same goes for revive errors)), but really nothing unreasonable.

this is somewhat expected because in E17 we handled some core stuff and all the moves that are most common. in e18 aside from item usage we've mainly done the rest of the moves, all less common, so it makes sense that some of them might only appear in trainer battles once in the entire game-- or some not at all. so it makes sense that the errors wouldn't show up in such force, if at all.

that also means that it's possible inactions may trickle in over a longer period of time instead... particularly in the community and public releases. however, given their relative infrequency that also means they're affecting players' experiences that much less... it is probably acceptable. E19's long development time may yet serve to give plenty of room to catch all of those in. 

everyone knows marcello's help is pretty integral to the project at this point and that was predictably true for the test, but i also want to give a shoutout to Lia, Cass and Kanaya for helping out during Alpha as well. The last two have only just joined us recently-- huh, I guess we have a female majority on the dev team now. neat-- and I've also only gotten Kanaya more involved lately as well, but they were all taking some initiative in addressing the report errors during alpha on their own, something that hasn't really happened that way before. It's a significant relief to me to know that, for instance, if there's a fatal error, someone won't necessarily be kept waiting until I wake up for a fix even if it's simple.

i am going to be making another post similar to the ones for supervised/internal testing about some of the bugs we found this alpha and explaining them, but that (and probably the beta ones as well) will mainly be available for the level 5+ folks since they are the ones who've actually had a chance to play the game, and then i can talk about it in detail.

and for everyone else, i realized i still have a couple things from E17's development that i've been sitting on, so we'll probably get those posts up during beta and community. 

but we are blazing forward. we in this.
and we're only gettin' beta.