Month: October 2017

Looking For a Few Playtesters

Update (28 October): I just invited the next group of playtesters, and have a good number of people in reserve. Thanks for your interest!

We’ve been testing and tuning the game for a while, and are ready to ask for a little more help.

What we need from you:

iPhone or iPad

While we plan to support other platforms, we are currently using TestFlight to manage testing. So you’ll need a device running iOS 9 or later.

Time

We’re hoping to find testers who have enough time to play the game. We’re still trying to get a sense of how long it takes, but QA is reporting at least 12 hours for a complete game. (We don’t need you to win, though it’s certainly helpful to get the full picture.) The more you can play, the more we can learn.

Feedback

The more you can tell us, the better! You’ll be able to send bug reports from the game (which include a wealth of information), but subjective feedback is crucial too. We need to hear what doesn’t work, as well as what’s fun.

Discretion

We still don’t know when we’ll be releasing, so we ask our playtesters not to discuss the game in public.

Patience

We’re still tuning the game, so we don’t need a lot of active playtesters at any one time. We might hold off inviting you until we need more fresh eyes.

What we don’t need:

Experience with King of Dragon Pass

Although a lot of the game is similar, we need to make sure it stands alone.

Knowledge of Glorantha

Like King of Dragon Pass, Six Ages is set in the fantasy world of Glorantha. But we hope it is self-contained, in terms of giving you enough information.

Experience with games

If you’re interested in playing an interactive narrative that has both story and clan management, you’re eligible. The game is very different from just about everything other game, so familiarity with any particular genre doesn’t help.

Overtime

While the more you can play the better, we don’t expect you to play obsessively for weeks and weeks. (You’re welcome to, but don’t feel like you have to beat the game on every difficulty level or earn every achievement.)

How to volunteer:

Send us email to bugz «at» a-sharp.com with the subject “Six Ages Playtest.” Include the type of iPhone or iPad you’d be testing on — we are mostly interested in game play issues, but it wouldn’t hurt to have a variety of devices.

Where We’re Going

It’s been a while since we hit feature complete. That shifted game development into a different phase: making everything work. This is both a matter of finding and fixing bugs, and balancing and tuning the economic game and the overall story to make sure things are fun. There’s usually not a lot of interesting things to say, which is partly why there hasn’t been a development blog post in a while. We found bugs, we fixed bugs. Day after day.

We did notice that two of the story themes could intertwine a bit more, so Robin Laws wrote two scenes to deal with that, and another three that deal with individual leaders. Those are now coded.

We invited a small number of outside playtesters to give their feedback, and have been trying to improve and clarify things based on that.

It’s possible to win the game without encountering bugs: one playtester said, “I’m embarrassed to report I haven’t found an obvious bug yet. Did complete a play in easy.” But there still are a lot of issues we need to fix. They may show up only when you get two scenes in a particular order, or have a specific combination of advisors, or choose a play style. Any one player won’t see them, but they need to be fixed. It’s hard to know how many of these there are. And analyzing them can be tricky. Did someone run out of cows because the game is broken, or because they made poor decisions, or because the user interface let them trade away more than they intended?

Between QA and playtesters, we’re still finding enough issues that I don’t think the game is high enough quality to ship in the near future. And a few areas aren’t completely tested (such as making sure every achievement can actually be earned).

the goose peopleThere’s another complication to figuring out a ship date: we’re moving. After five years in Philadelphia, A Sharp will be returning to the Pacific Northwest next month. (We’re heading to Tacoma, mostly for family reasons.) Coordinating this and physically moving across the United States is going to take a fair amount of time.

Without a reliable completion date, and with relocation thrown in, it doesn’t make sense to try to release the game this year. (“This year” would realistically mean “before the Christmas holidays,” so there are only 2 months left anyway.)

So we are moving our guess at a release date to 2018. We want to make sure the game is done right, and we want to have some lead time to start marketing.

I’m disappointed that we aren’t done yet, but I think the project is in good shape. As a complex bit of software that’s in alpha, the number of bugs feels reasonable. And one playtester wrote, “I have been spending waaaaay too much time playing this game. I am every bit as addicted to it as I was to KoDP the first time it was released, and I thought I was over that kind of behavior.”