This is just to fill my curiosity, but how early in the development of the game will the alpha be release? And the beta? (like say, 50% of the way through completion or something? After you have a few units complete? Nearly the whole game complete?) And if you are really willing to tell us a lot, and ff you already have a fairly fixed plan of when things are going to happen, what month can we expect to be able to start that? Again, I know Uber might not want to release that info yet, but it would be nice to know. I do have friends that don't really want to wait a year till they get what they paid for, and they might be more willing to donate if they can expect to actually get into the game soon.
Well that trailer you saw was a "visualization", IE, not gameplay. It was a little movie they made to show what the game might look like, nothing more. In other words, there is no game yet, so it'll probably be a little while before we get anything.
"Est. delivery: Jul 2013" That what they say on Kickstarter, so I would assume alpha and beta like a month or two earlier. Maybe even three, who knows.
back in my modding community we had a saying: "It is done, when its done." we never gave a release date, just to avoid stress. but here in commercial land, they have a budget(for a limited time) to work with. When the kickstarter gets funded for 100% that time is expected to run out in Jul 2013 (is my guess) it is as it says an estimate, In any way, don't expect sooner when going for the stretch goals, the release will be definitely later.
Depends on how early on they want to show the alpha builds... and well, on the # of programmers, etc They might have an alpha with only a dozen units, but I suspect that won't be the one they open to alpha-testers... but what do I know.
I already know all this, I didn't really expect an answer about exactly when the alpha/beta would be released (which is CLEARLY not going to be at the same time as when the game is expected to be released). I was hoping to know when the alpha/beta would be released relative to the work completed (ie. why I put in the %, to make it a little more obvious of what I meant). This is EXACTLY what I'm asking about. Are they willing to tell us when they will release the alpha/beta? After they have half the units done? After the engine is running? When they are basically already done?
any idea how long SMNC's development took? and how much did they have to start with from MNC? coz that also makes a difference
The first alpha build sent out to players was september 30th I believe, of last year. The devs had the alpha build since august of last year, so SMNC has been a WIP since pretty much a year ago.
It's not really a % thing, it's more of a when will it be useful to have more feedback thing. Alpha basically means it has all of it's fingers and toes but that they are broken and look ugly. At this point having more testers giving feedback can help quickly focus the team on getting ready for shipping and finalizing any last minute large changes. Beta means the game is pretty much done and just needs some testing to catch the weird stuff. So for example esoteric bugs related to specific hardware, balance issues, translations not finished etc. Of course these definitions are fluid because the way we think about game software has changed over the years. Since we can continue to update the game post-release the difference between beta and release is really just a label.
