The Missing Blog Post

Remember when I said I'd write a blog post every week? Yeah, it lasted a month before I broke the rule. I apologize. There wasn't much going on. We got stuck with a few annoying bugs, did lots of testing and I was more busy than usual with private stuff. In future it should again appear weekly with some exceptions like holidays.

‍Weekly Progress

Good news: internal testing is done. And I'm glad that it is, you might not be able to relate to this, but for me it's surprisingly difficult to test my own product. I've heard lot's of fellow colleagues talking about the same issues. You simply can't just play your game, you really need to test in detail while trying to play the game as a "normal" player would. It also creates this weird dynamic when you're testing your own work. It's really repetitive, you already know everything that's going on and you mostly just want to rush it. It's far more exhausting than anything else related to the project and I hope I can stay away from large scale testing for a while now.

‍Public Testing

Next up: Public testing. In this phase I will send a test build to all my interested friends and colleagues to see what they think and if they're able to find some more bugs. Especially hardware compatibility is a huge point of interest. So far the game has been tested on a variety of machines, however in comparison to the vast amount of hardware diversity it's almost untested in that regard. Luckily that shouldn't be too much of a source for errors since we're using Unity, but you never know. I have to admit that I'm super paranoid about crashes or bugs that do not appear on my system.

Want to help test or just try out the game? If you join our discord and ask, you'll most likely get a test build ;)

This shouldn't take longer than one or two weeks, we're not relying on those tests. It's just about more exposure to different players.

‍Path to Release

We're close, really close. It sure depends on what the public testing phase is going to bring but I can tell you that it's looking good. The preparations on the shop site are done, the homepage is 99% finalized and everything is coming together nicely. The promised "this summer" might be over by now depending on how you look at it, but I also have to state that we put quite a bit more into the game than we planned when I first said "this summer". Not talking about content, more about under-the-hood optimization. This will benefit the content update cycle when the game is out.