The long journey enters stage two

With my actions completed today, Zombies at War enters, finally and officially, a closed-alpha state.  What does this mean?  Well, if you already have an account - nothing!  If you don't, then go sign up for one!

The "closed" part of the alpha means I'm limiting the number of new accounts.  I need to make sure that my servers can handle the traffic.  The "alpha" part means the game's far from finished.  But as a developer, I can only see so much.  I need you all to find the little bits that I haven't found yet.

One of the big reasons this took an extra month or so is because of my apprehension on releasing it.  It doesn't matter how much work or love you put into something, you're always worried everyone is going to hate it.  (I just hope some of you give me helpful tidbits instead of just hate!)  And, with enough people playing, in a few months (end of summer perhaps), I can open the alpha up, and move into beta.

Things are looking good, and I hope you all have fun!

Closer, finish in sight

I had a semi-productive two weeks.  The tutorial is now finished, and all should work well.  It's probably not the best-looking, as it needs pretty pictures and font enhancements.  But I'm at least making progress.  A few days ago I thought up a great way to code the closed-alpha system for limiting the number of players and controlling it. I had forgotten it up until that last sentence.

Can't stop to talk now, much to do. Hoping (deeply) that I can get the closed alpha released before the next two weeks end. I'm going to do my best.

DAMNIT, and I forgot about user profiles.  Gotta find time for that, too.

Switching gears

With work ramping up, taking away from the little time I have to work on Z@W, I've not had much progress on the 'final' polish.  Some work, yes, and while everything is working and functional, some things are ugly and are in need of added love.  Also, it's been brought to my attention by a friend and tester that I'm in dire need of a tutorial.  So with that, I have decided to downgrade Zombies at War from pre-beta status to alpha status.  Also, this development cycle is going to be focused on creating a tutorial and short intro-adventure for new players to get a grasp of the game and be pointed firmly in a direction within the game.  The idea is to make the first intro-adventure take 5 days of casual play, less if you are REALLY bored and more if you play less than my estimations.

With all of that being said, the game will also be closed off to new players.  When I am finished with the new code, the game will be opened up to 100 new accounts and no more.  Initially, anyway, this closed alpha will allow me to (assuming I get 100 players) focus on the little things I didn't see.  Hopefully some of these players both try to break my game and tell me how they did it, but it's my hope that most of them just _play_ the game and report to me what they honestly thought about it.  Best case, I have 100 players that like my game and everything goes great.  Worst case is I now have 100 players that never will play my game again and I'm back to square one.  Time will tell, and I've a bit of work to do.

The final push

So I just realised that I never actually posted an update over Christmas about minions.  that's unfortunate, for I was fairly proud of my minion code and how it turned out.  Essentially, minions are little fighters that you can find my converting humans into zombies.  You have limited space for minions, and you can get more (easier) as you level up and raise your wisdom to it's cap.

Minions can be trained on their own and fought with other minions, and they are used in fights.  Your minion fights your opponent's minions, and the winner of those two goes on to fight with it's master against the opponent.  Meaning that if your minion is better than the zombie you're fighting's minion, your minion will fight with you against the other zombie!  Meaning that a player with a stronger minion has a MUCH better chance of winning in a fight.  I have big plans for minions, stay tuned on that front.

This cycle provided little new for the average user.  This update was mostly administrative in nature, and on my end I have more control over the forums and other little bits of the game that I'd normally have to go directly to the database to do.  Such a hassle, but no more!

I won't bore you with the other details of that update but instead push to the final push, the final update before I (hopefully) can consider the game (officially) in beta.  Yes, I test the game at beta.zombiesatwar.com, but that's only because I was too lazy to create alpha.zombiesatwar.com and then change it later.  It's a beta, it's just more of an alpha-ey beta-ey ... thing.

This cycle is all about polish.  Images will be moved around, text will be changed and moved around, little bits of debug code will be cut, things will be polished and fluffed up so the game looks good.  It's been getting a bit dirty with the changes I've made, and during build phases I'm not too good at keeping the beauty in there.

Also, if I have time, I'm going to implement the ability for users to sell weapons and armor on the market.  And more administrative, but that's more for me and not for anyone else.

I'm real nervous, and I hope people like the game in a few weeks when I start to actually tell people about it.  Fingers crossed!