Swirve Blog

Now for this week’s episode of the Sean and Brian Blog - as usual comments Here please:

Hi all,

There weren’t too many questions since last week, so this isn’t going to be a very long post. We’ll answer them below, but first of all want to give a general update on progress.

We’ve spent the last week purely on site styling and on deployment onto real servers.

Styling wise, it currently looks very much like the current game, with the same rough layout and same colors. When you see it we think you’ll probably be underwhelmed by the changes. Our plan is to go into alpha with this theme, and look at improving it as we go. We were initially tempted to try to create a look-and-feel that doesn’t look like something from the nineties, but decided that it would cause an unnecessary delay. So we hope that when you see it, you’ll forgive us for not making it as shiny as it deserves to be. As well as improving the design incrementally as we go, we hope to introduce a feature later on in the year that will allow you to choose your preferred theme for the site, which can be either an official or community-made theme.

In terms of deployment for alpha, we’re pretty much ready to go.

The alpha version will be complete, apart from unfixed bugs and the purchasing of credits for premium features (will be disabled). On Monday we plan to start with a very small test group - tools developers, staff and some mods mainly. At that point, these people can get a bit of a preview of the site (and pass on their impressions and screenshots to everyone else, if they like). The server will be up and down for most of the week as we deploy fixes. If things go well, we’ll invite in more testers as the days go by.

Alpha testers will be notified by email about when then can visit the site and sign in. To get in, they’ll need to validate their email address, which is how we’re going to manage the size of the testing group - i.e., whitelisting people’s email addresses as we go.

So, initially, we’ll invite in a small number of people for a kind of sneak look, and expand the group over time as quickly as we can manage. During testing we expect we’ll be working fast to keep up with the bugs that are reported, although we’ll hopefully nail most of the big ones early on before most people ever see them.

On to questions:

Luth: [regarding start of alpha testing] Is this on gen, or some sort of private testing grounds?

The alpha we’re talking about above is going to be a private testing ground, into which we’ll invite people from those that have applied via email. When we think the code is ready for wider consumption, we’ll arrange to move it onto genesis. What this will really entail is decommissioning the old genesis server, and pointing the genesis link on swirve.com to the new server with the new code.

Domain name questions/suggestions

We hear what you guys are saying about the domain name being potentially blocked from some locations by fun-hating firewalls. Our solution to this is that we’ll create another domain that the site can be accessed from, probably something like utopia.joltonline.com, but still keep utopia-game.com as our main domain. This should help people access the site from where they need to. Thanks for all the suggestions for other names, which we saw in the forums. However, we intend to stick with utopia-game.com, because (a) it properly reflects the fact that we’re talking about the original version of the game, not a spin-off, and (b) we want to move on from endless hours of domain hunting. If it’s any consolation, we had considered many of the same names as you guys suggested.

Hurlin: If the monarch had the ability at the end of the inactive period when the account was going to be auto deleted to be given the option to “tick a box” and retain that province and invite a new player to occupy it; that would greatly improve Kingdoms and create a much more solid environment.

Thanks for the feedback. This makes sense, and is more consistent with the existing workflow, so we’ve put it on our todo list. Hopefully sometime during testing we’ll get a chance to drop it in.

Thanks everyone for your continued patience.

Sean & Brian