In April we changed our plans to incorporate support for a continuous release strategy, where we could provide updated versions to the testers as incremental updates. When we first laid out our milestone plan it was assumed we were going to complete all work for two milestones at a time, and then ship a playable build to the testers which they could provide feedback on. In the interest of updating those who do not have access to the Alpha test, I wanted to take a quick moment to talk about how our Alpha testing has evolved and progressed. That all said, it's time to talk about how the Alpha test is progressing and where we are in development. Moving forward, we're going to commit to quarterly updates regardless of where we are in the development cycle. Those things combined resulted in an extended period of silence.
Unfortunately, Milestone 2 stretched on and on as we continued to iterate on our backend architecture, Entity Component System, and goal-based AI.
#Chronicles of elyria alpha release date update#
We decided it was most important to keep the Alpha testers up to date and committed to providing a public update after we finished each milestone. This cycle eventually settled into a consistent, two-week process, but was all-consuming none-the-less. The cycle consisted of working like crazy to develop the anticipated features and improvements for the next release, doing builds and internal testing, launching the test and gathering feedback, planning the next release, and then starting the whole process over again. With the release of our "Alpha test as a service," we found that the work of providing regular updates to the Alpha testers, in addition to reading the submitted feedback and implementing changes in time for the next release, was an all-consuming development cycle for our tiny little development team. The fact that this coincides with the start of our Alpha testing is no coincidence. If you don't have access to the Early Access section of the forums then it looks like we went radio silent, aside from the newsletter we sent out in August, beginning in July. The third experience, called Kingdoms of Elyria, was focused on the domain, settlement, and land management mechanics such as government, laws, research & technology, architecture, building construction, and regional economics.Ī recent screenshot of KoE showing container contents Why the radio silence? The latter part of that timeline was also spent developing the world generation tools necessary to construct our four, unique game maps: Angelica, Luna, Selene, and Oceanus. The second half of 2017 through 2019 were spent focusing on this, along with the development of a new client to support it. This, along with the third Pre-Alpha experience, was intended to take place over the 50 years before the events of The Awakening.
The second experience, called ElyriaMUD (and later Vo圎lyria & Prelyria), was focused on the multi-player mechanics such as communication, contracts, trade, and organizations. From a development time-line perspective, 2016 and the first half of 2017 were spent on Prologue: The Awakening. This, being the events surrounding the town of New Haven, and the nearby village of Silver Run. The first, called Prologue: The Awakening, was focused on the development and testing of the core adventuring mechanics such as character creation, combat, crafting, movement & locomotion, etc., all the while telling the story of events that occurred just 20 years prior to the state of the world at CoE's launch. In summary, each Pre-Alpha Experience was intended to allow for development (and testing) of a specific subset of CoE's mechanics and world-building, with the integration of the three experiences culminating in the release of Chronicles of Elyria.
You can read more about that in DJ #19: Pre-Alpha Experiences. So, as a quick reminder.Ĭhronicles of Elyria is such a large game that we split it up into three separate, testable game experiences back in 2016. If you're just tuning in after a long period away, the fact that much of this “State of Elyria” is focused on something called Kingdoms of Elyria, might come as a surprise to you. As the calendar is about to roll over from 2021 to 2022 and development of Milestone 2 of Kingdoms of Elyria is almost complete, it's time for us to present our annual "State of Elyria" report to our backers and community members.
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