Game at Alpha after 7 months + time breakdown

Hiya, finally my game has reached the Alpha stage, woo! This means it's feature complete and now we just add more polish ready for the beta testing.

I've kept a log throughout development of my time spent working on the game so that it can be analysed in different categories. If you are interested you can read the breakdown here:

http://greyaliengames.com/blog/my-latest-game-is-at-the-alpha-stage/

Way to go, Jake!!! :-)

Any chance you looking for more beta testers? ;-)

Barney

Thanks! Well Big Fish Games have their own beta testers I'm afraid so they'll be handling that themselves. For my next totally independent game, then sure! :-)

Screenshots?

Are you still working in bmax?

Sorry can't do as I'm under a non-disclosure agreement, so I can't talk about the game.

You bet. I love it and this game has made my framework so much better, I can't wait to release a new framework update.

Well done Jake, quite inspiring. You obviously have to be very methodical to get things done and not waste hours on forums like this one.

haha, I can't tell if you are being sarcastic ;-) But yeah I'm pretty methodical and it really helps, plus I DO limit my casual forum time. A lot of my forum time these days is related to my code you see which is fine. The other "fluff" is like when I have a lunch break or 5 minute break in the morning/afternoon and I fancy a quick read of General Discussion or the Showcase. I don't go to any other forums so that helps a lot too. And I don't play online games like WoW, no way, or I'd never get anything done.

I only bought the 360 at the weekend for "research purposes" so I'm fine.

Actually, I know I'm joking, but the xbox arcade games are actually a very good source of ideas for simple games.

:-D

Not sarcastic - thinking about myself really. This isn't the only forum I visit, and like Andy over doing the 'research'. But I do now have 5 games I wish to write.

I actually put any games I buy onto my accounts as research. Even my Nintendo DS went on there. It's totally valid because I derive my income from writing games. Therefore I claim back the VAT and tax on them so I save about 38%

Your breakdown of your time made for very interesting reading. I must confess I've been delving more and more into B3D of late...

I'm looking forward to your frameworks next release Grey, from your other posts would I be misguided in thinking there may be a breakout element in your next framework release ?

I'd be happy to beta test. All the best with your latest venture!

Goodstuff grey. This would be a must have for anyone who's still doing game dev. Ahh the good ole days...

Thanks guys. There won't be any breakout stuff in the framework but there will be a new TVector class with supporting methods/functions. I actually had to ditch part of my ball bouncing plan because I couldn't get it to work with corners in the way I wanted it. I may go back to it later.

In fact there's loads in the new framework such as a powerful TBitmapFont and existing types have been converted to work with it. Also TScrollBar (this is cool when used with TListBox), and just tons of improvements. I would love to release it now but it normally takes a day to get it all ready and I can't spare a day right now.