i would LOVE to see a demo/pre-alpha version for more people than only a few youtubers maybe for people who donated on kickstarter
@steefm many of us would like this, and it was discussed quite a lot of times.
My personal take on this is, RA might hand out Alpha-builds to some people to help them squish some more bugs though those would not be open to be distributed or be shown to other people. How they would select those people if they would do that… no clue.
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i especialy hoped for a demo for people who donated a certain amount so we could already see what was to expect
Well, this was addressed in the live stream last night. RA doesn’t want to release an unfinished game to the public, and I have to agree,as much as it kills me to do so. They said that if all goes well they may release the beta early, but most likely you’ll have to feed off of the sneak peaks that youtubers (no autocorrect. Not you tub whore) are given.
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the problem is, most people find it difficult to distinguish between alpha and beta testing phases (or even grasp what an alpha build is, or what is required as a part of testing a build)…
if radiant takes the time necessary to coordinate delivery of alpha builds to a wider audience, they would then likely want to receive feedback from the builds… most folks receiving an alpha would simply want to play whats currently available (which would be grossly unrepresentative of the final product) and either complain about its lacking features, or throw their hands up in frustration at the instability of the client…
its typically best to reserve alpha builds for those who are simply using them to showcase whats currently available in the game (marketing maneuver), as opposed to using this stage of development to garner feedback from the community… and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the team is still ironing out major design decisions, and fielding 1000s of requests for feature changes, bug fixes, etc. would simply slow down the development process…
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@SteveAdamo has a valid point. If they release an unstable alpha (pre-alpha, are you crazy?!) release, then everyone will be complaining about its crash-prone self, the features they were hoping for but didn’t find. Of all the things they could gain (more supporters, publicity, bug testing) there would be MANY more negative effects (people thinking the game is crappy).
This is why we have a BETA build. It is relatively stable, and it has many more features than an alpha would. Sure, you have to wait until Christmas, but do you really want to have a Bug-A-Tron 9000 just so you can get it a few months earlier?
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I agree, far too early for a useful Alpha Test or public Demo; there’s not enough game there yet to get useful feedback for Radiant OR give a end users a good idea of what the game will actually be like.
-Will
NO! Please do not waste any time trying to release an alpha! It will distract you guys from actually finishing up the game. For the beta, make sure you have a very good bug-submission and tracking system. That’s all I ask.
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I’m willing to wait for a more complete game. I might be interested in alpha testing, but to get the game to play now would be silly since there isn’t really a game to play. There are just some basic systems cobbled together to demonstrate proof of principle.
I would like to be (or have someone like me be) an alpha tester. I have a low spec machine and this way it would be more likely that the game would be optimized to work on a computer like mine, as well as on higher spec or newer computers.
If Radient was to throw out “snapshot” alpha release candidates with absolutely no claim for support or even help with installing the software, sort of like how Mojang tosses out pre-release snapshot candidates of Minecraft for those who are interested, I would support such a move. It would have to be with the strong understanding that it is what it is, and if it blows up your computer and causes you to reformat everything or even need to replace hardware… that is your own problem and not something Radient should worry about.
That said, there are too many people who are simply clueless about even something with a whole bunch of warnings that it won’t work and then still complain it doesn’t work like a very well polished game. Some will start to complain that their village has been destroyed because of a file format change or that serious bugs show up. Heck, even trying to organize a reasonable method of reporting bugs and getting that feedback to the developers can be a major chore as it takes somebody with a strong stomach to be able to filter out a whole bunch of garbage and find things that really are genuine bugs.
I’m willing to try things that may even require high levels of operating system knowledge just to get them to work, but I am also content to wait and let things develop with the hope that they might have something available by Christmas time. Keep in mind that deadline might not even be met, even though I’m sure they are going to try for at least that date. In the meantime, I am playing with Quibicle and hoping to do some modding when something usable comes out.
The developers addressed releasing an alpha in the latest stream. Tom said that he feels that releasing an alpha version would be cool for us supporters, but ultimately would prove to be a huge distraction as he would have to divert his attention to us and the various bugs we find, as opposed to letting the developers do what they do best…develop!. Their goal is to create a quality beta version of Stonehearth and then we can go nuts and find all the bugs.
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