Alpha

Alpha today!

The reason I've been working so late and had no spare time the past 2-3 weeks is the run up to our Alpha build which is due.... NOW!

Luckily the dudes are in Southern California, which is about 4 hours behind us. So they don't leave work until 5pm... which for us is 9pm.
So we have another couple of hours, if need be, to sort out the remaining issue before we send it to them.

Alpha means the first full version of the game, there may be some missing art/audio and there will definitely be bugs, but it needs to be in a state that can be tested properly and bugs reported to us that are meaningful. It's been really important to sort it out, the last build we sent them they couldn't play. This incidentally was not our fault at all. The publishers should have provided audio - which they did... then they went and messed up all their files and file names, making audio go missing or be referenced differently. Suddenly stuff that was working was snow broken, trying to play Voice or Sound Effect files that didn't exist, causing it to blow up!

It really slowed us up, me in particular, as my portions were heavily reliant on the audio. I had them all good, and then they broke, and I wasted time tracking down bugs that shouldn't have even been happening.

Anyway - my hardware build for the device has just finished, so I can now do some more testing.