Hey everyone, Ash here! We’ve had our heads down these past couple weeks working on Chrono. While we’re still actively squashing bugs and adding features to our Pre-Alpha, we’ve also been taking a step back to really define what it means to be in “Alpha” or “Beta.” But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s talk a bit about where the Pre-Alpha stands right now.
When we first introduced the Pre-Alpha to players, the game was in an extremely buggy and unfinished state. That’s fine, we knew what we were handing to you. A concern that came up is that it seems many players who requested invite codes didn’t know what we were handing to you. This resulted in many players booting up the game, being disappointed with the state it was in, then likely uninstalling the game or clocking out until another major update such as our Alpha release.
So what that taught us is that first impressions matter. We liked the idea of giving players a very early build of the game and allowing them to see it grow and change into what will someday be a 1.0 version of the game. In practice, while some of our players liked this approach, it also turned away some players. We still want to remain open to our community, so while we aren’t going to shy away from streaming and sharing images of the game with you, we’re no longer interested in opening the Pre-Alpha to everyone. It will continue to be accessible only by invite only. We won’t be having any more mass invite waves, but we will still be giving out invites to some.
In the spirit of first impressions, I’d also like to talk about our bug-fixes for our Pre-Alpha! So for the past two months we’ve been pushing updates to the client pretty much as soon as we’ve had them ready for you. This resulted in us releasing bug fixes multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day! We’ve reached 280 bugs fixed! (Actually, today we’ll be pushing another patch that should put us over 300). The downside to rapid patches was that sometimes we would break something with them. It’s important to us to start putting a better face forward, and it can look bad to a returning player to log into the game and have the game be in a worse state than it was before. We fix the game-breaking bugs as fast as we can, but still, it’d be better if you never saw them in the first place. So from now on, we’ll be posting patches for the game once a week on Fridays. This gives us more time to make sure we didn’t break something before sending it out to the players. It doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be less bug fixes and features, it just means that the individual patches will be larger instead of being spread throughout the week.
Now, onto something bigger: What does “Alpha” or “Beta” really mean for Chrono?
We’ve been talking a lot about this internally. We don’t want to slap a new label on the game only to surprise players when certain features are still missing. Right now, we’re hard at work on several major systems that go beyond what we can ship in our weekly updates. These features are key pillars for what we envision Chrono to be and once they’re in place, we’ll be ready to step into a new phase for the game.
With that being said, here is our roadmap leading up to our 1.0 Launch.
We’ll be happy to answer any questions regarding this on any of our socials. I’d also be happy to hear your thoughts on this month’s Chrono Connections.
Thanks again to everyone who has been helping us with bugs and everyone else who has been supporting us. As always, you can follow us on any of our socials below and we’ll see you again for another Dev Update!