Okay, 2012. That's a good start! I wouldn't ask for a day, a week or even a month... but what about Quarter? Seems like 1st is probably not going to happen. That said, I'm praying to the dice gods for late Q1 or early Q2. I'm a little selfish sometimes.
These dice gods . . . what do they look like? Perhaps dreadlocked folks with d20 beads in their hair?
Images of these beings have only been crafted by blind seers and hysterical messiahs. The resulting likenesses are so varied that no one truly knows their form. It is best to visualize them as the avatars they sent upon this earthly plane many years ago. I speak of Gygax, Arneson and the rest of the crew, of course!
Straying from the topic of gods momentarily, I want to speculate that Beta must be approaching due to a couple of things I've noticed. 1) Most of the updates on twitter have moved from tutorials, new cards, balances to audio inclusion, graphics tweaking, and GUI functionality. To me, this means that there isn't a lot of big stuff left (or at least nothing that anyone has done enough to to mention), which means that a functional beta is probably right around the corner. 2) It's the middle of February, and they were shooting for December 2011. They can't have missed their original mark by that much. I'm gonna throw up a prediction of beta by end of February to mid-March. Place your bets, folks. (At the expense of this entire message and my prediction and gambling losses due to it, keep up the good work, don't rush the quality, squash all the bugs, and don't. Stop. Making this game. Seriously, if you cancel this now, I'm gonna strangle you. )
Believing~!!! Hold on to that... *ahem* With utmost confidence in the team's abilities, I still must admit to predicting more of the June/July range for Beta. See, this is where Jon speaks up and confirms late March. Right? Right...?
'Coming soon' is relative. Imagine working on something for years and then have only 6 months to a beta, for example. Perspective.
I wouldn't describe what I posted as 'pedantic' in any way. In this situation coming soon has a specific meaning for Blue Manchu. I was trying my best to put it into perspective for Dunkha and any one else that may have been spurned to anger or confusion through the words listed on the front of the site.
The milky way and the andromeda galaxy are on a collision course, so therefore if you look up into the night sky and see andromeda(visible with the naked eye), you're actually looking into the future. Relativity is weird sometimes. Equiped with the right equation, and knowledge of the speeds and distance involved, it would be possible to calculate how far into the future you're looking too(the higher those values, the further into the future you see).
Wow, this game has taken so much longer than I expected... sorry for any frustration that may have arisen as a result. Here's where we are now: - We've pretty much wrapped up our work on the demo we're about to show at PAX. - When we get back from PAX we're going to be focussing on a Beta. I don't know exactly how we are going to run this yet, but it will probably be a closed Beta to start with and then scaling up to an open Beta as we go. We'll certainly let you all know about it here once we've figured it out. - Based on what happens in the Beta, we'll release the game when it looks good enough. I would call us in Alpha now - all the main game features are in and working, but there is still a lot of content to build and a lot of balancing to do. Also, we are very likely to have a bunch of problems scaling the game up to handle real world loads. That's what the Beta is for though.
Demo only for PAX? Disappointing. Here I was hoping there would be a demo we could all play, not just some convention goers in Seattle, which btw is across the atlantic and most of a continent from me, and I'm not paying $1500+(low-balled) worth of plane tickets to try a demo.
Yeah, sorry about that. I realise most of you aren't going to PAX. There will be footage up soon after though and Beta will be following along close behind that.
Yay, demo! And I'm not bummed about being unable to attend the convention thingy: I wouldn't have the time, even if I were to put in the effort. Life is pretty tricky. I'm just hoping to have time when there's actually something available for the rest of us.
Congrats and best wishes for the PAX demo, Blue Manchu. Here's hoping you get plenty of good press, things around here pick up, and the game is a wild success. Or at least that you make it through without dropping all your precious work down three flights of stairs. *goes looking for digital sound effect of knocking on fake background table*
