Planetary Annihilation Alpha Information

6th post of this thread.

One way to avoid confusion - though I know it'll add a little work - but how about sending out emails to all backers confirming there level of backing & what they'll get. Doing this before Alpha will rule out anyone’s concerns as to what they’re going to get come the Alpha release & will minimize the surprise of "what!! I didn't pay enough to get Alpha?!!?"

The reason I'd personally like this, is I upgraded my kickstarter backing from Beta to Alpha access about month ago - but if I click on my account it only shows the money I've put in (which is less than the pre-order amount) - I have to click "upgrade an existing order" - before I see what backing level I'm on - also the main pre-order page highlights "warefare" edition - similar to what I was on, I'm going to guess the highlight has nothing to do with my backing level but it's still confusing.

Yep, I was going to suggest just leaving the Alpha banner with a build number beneath it. Let the hype train get some steam on Youtube

But please wait with closing for May 5, as I get paid, becouse i want upgrade to get alpha!

You'll have to PM the Uber team, since that offer is closing before the 5th of may.

How do you know? Is there date somewhere? I cant find

Sorry, I was thinking about the Cosmic Edition. You're fine to buy your way into the Alpha at any time with the Galactic Edition Pre-Order.

My mistake. I apologise.

Will the alpha include Galactic War?

No. It's an alpha, they will barely have the core gameplay up & running. You likely won't even be able to play singleplayer when it starts. In fact, the first time you start the alpha it will have a high likelihood of crashing.

But that's why it's called an Alpha.

An alpha is a very very very work in progress kind of a thing. To put it in perspective most games never do a public alpha, it's usually a closed in-house kind of deal. The level of polish is pretty low, it's the first kind of playable state but it's not by any means a finished product. Beta is even still pretty buggy and not all of the features are in place there either. A feature like galactic war sounds challenging to implement. Though I don't know what they have planned, I'd say it might be late beta before we see it implemented.

Well, i'm a programmer myself and i think since the galactic war is "a feature that sounds challenging to implement" including it in the alpha doesn't seem nonsense because the main purpose of alpha is testing and you have to test complex features. If it will come in "late beta" i don't see how can devs be sure that it's stable and bug-free.

So just to be clear here you would rather we hold the alpha until it was feature complete?

In this case we are looking more to other games like Minecraft and Dota2 which released really before what would be called a traditional alpha. It's not purely about testing, it's also about getting it into the hands of people that want it. If you don't want a partially complete product please don't buy the alpha version.

Here here, don't listen to these naysayers. Get me a playable version of the game and roll out features as they're ready.

Agreed.

Even if they not ready I think those that are testing the game, should test.

darn i booked hols at start of may !

cant wate for alpha !

2nd'ed! Airmech in particular has rolled out many a feature in its time and its continuing to pull in more and more i'm sure. Its a fun journey seeing all the updates and changes as it evolves.

Airmech is yet another good example of what we are going to do.

Get the game in your hands and then keep working on it. If you want to wait until it's done to play then feel free, nobody is stopping you. Free country and all that...

This all sounds fine and dandy but how do you guys plan to keep the company solvent? PA has a very old school swing to it but the old school business model died a decade ago. Free updates don't help anyone.

This will be announced soon.

:O This is good.