Swirve Blog

Here is the latest Wednesday Blog from Sean and Brian - as usual please post comments in the forum.

Hey All,

Thanks for all the feedback last week. It was nice for us to be able to finally show you the something. We were also really encouraged that there were a lot of positive comments.

The initial alpha testers have been doing great work during the week. A few bugs have cropped up (nothing too serious) and we’re currently working on those. We’ve just started ticking the game (no longer in freeze mode), so soon a lot more features will come available. We expect a new crop of bugs to come out of this too.

This week, we’re going to be working on bug fixing and performance. The current alpha testers will soon find the most obvious bugs and at that point we’ll want to start loading more players onto the server. Again, this will raise its own challenges.

We can’t go into all the questions from last week, but here’s some general comments on the topics discussed.

The new navigation side menu: Some of the names, such as “Send Armies” and so on, are actually placeholders. We don’t expect to keep them. A lot of small things like this may change during the alpha. In other cases we have split out items into multiple links. Typically, this relates to a division of function which allows screens to be cleaned up. The grouping of menu items, particularly as you move further down the list) is also likely to change. Wizards training has been moved into the “resource growth” section along with building, military training, exploring etc… Mystics is for using you wizards, as Send Thieves is for using you thieves and Send Armies is for using your military.

3rd Party Tools: The third party tools developers are going to have some work to do. Obviously not all the screens are identical to before and even small changes can throw these tools off. For this reason we’ve made sure that the 3rd party tools developers were included in the first batch of alpha testers, thus giving them as much time as possible modify their tools.

Old bugs: Our aim has been to very-closely replicate the existing functionality of the game. In many cases this includes unwittingly replicating bugs. A few bugs may have disappeared along the way, but in general don’t expect things like Paper bugs to be fixed. In more positive news however, once this code is up and running we’ll be able to kill these bugs off without too much fuss.

Integrate IRC: Yeah we’d love to do this right now, but it’s going to have to wait. We are working like crazy to get the re-written game ready for you all. As developers one of our favourite things to do is dream about future features, but the reality is they have to wait until the current job is complete.

Brian & Sean