![]() So it serves as not only a good tool for maintaining player engagement, but is also just a good cure for boredom. This also has the pleasant side effect of preventing players from becoming idle. The pre-alpha experiences give players something to do in the interim. We need a way to capture and retain players throughout the development process. It's going to take between now and launch with us continuously reaching out and growing the community for us to hit our target numbers.īut all the outreach and evangelizing in the world is useless if players come to the site, see the game is in-development and then immediately bounce. ![]() But a grass-roots game like Chronicles of Elyria requires a slow, rolling boil. For existing intellectual properties or well-established companies it's still difficult, but possible, for them to gather that critical mass of players within the few months leading up to the launch of the game. For an MMO to be successful it requires a certain 'critical mass' of players. The key is finding a way to get feedback from players before development progresses too far!Ī slightly less obvious but equally important reason is community engagement. Obviously, the sooner we get feedback from our target audience, the more likely we are to be able to make changes in a timely fashion. Perhaps the most important reason is the opportunity for early feedback. Let's look at them a bit shall we? Why have pre-alpha experiences? This has many advantages to us (and to you) beyond the obvious. Put plainly, Pre-Alpha Experiences are opportunities for players to jump into some form of the game as early as possible - even before pre-alpha, to provide feedback. ![]() With the vast number of new, never-before-seen features and the re-imagining of several well-established ones, it's extremely important that we have an opportunity to change tack on anything which could jeopardize the overall fun of the game. But Chronicles of Elyria is anything but typical. In a formulaic game that sticks close to the typical features of a genre, this is generally a safe bet. Aside from cosmetic, easily-altered items or things so game-breaking that the game would be lost without it, modifications to the core design are often viewed as too costly to change at this stage of development. The problem is, by the time a game hits pre-alpha it's often too late to make any significant changes to the design of the game. At that point, all that remains is implementation of the remaining features and iteration on the current ones until they reach a state of quality that the studio feels comfortable calling them complete. This 'Pre-Alpha' milestone is an indication that, while the game isn't yet feature-complete, its overall direction, features, and visual style are more or less 'locked in'. Once production begins there's generally still months (if not years) of early development to get to a point where they feel comfortable showing it to the world at large. In most modern MMOs the developers spend a non-trivial amount of time in research and development experimenting with different engines, taking their existing engine and re-purposing it for a new game idea, and creating tech demos to verify the validity of their ideas before even beginning production. Given that our last DJ was on Kingdom Management, and that we first mentioned our Pre-Alpha experiences back in June of 2016, it should be no surprise that in this DJ we're going to dive into those Pre-Alpha experiences in greater depth. While it has been a while, the time has come to return to our origins and once again spend some time talking about what we're doing differently in Chronicles of Elyria and why it'll make for a better overall game. The last Design Journal we had was back in May of 2016 and was over 4,000 words! Well, sit back and relax because this one is longer. Welcome to Design journal #19: Pre-Alpha Experiences.
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