Weekly Update Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sun 7th Feb 2010, 1:10pm

(How annoying! I meant to wake up at like 7:20am and write this, but instead I woke up at noon! That's quite a bit of oversleeping, there. o_O) Today is the day that beta testing will start, apparently! It'll likely start later in the day (or later in my day, anyway; for some testers, it may start early on their Sunday or something), because I've still got quite a few things left to do on the game that I would rather do before release (chances are though that I won't finish them and will work on them during testing), and I'll need to do other stuff too like setting up general security and maybe also some kind of way for testers to easily provide feedback without moving away from the game page... After today, it may be unlikely that I'll be choosing more testers. As of now, there are only 22 testers chosen - not a large number considering the number who applied, but unfortunately so few of you actually met all the criteria... I'd want at least 30 though, so I'll be going through the comments on the other article again, looking for other people to choose. So if you've not volunteered yet and still want to, comment on that article before the end of the day. Hmm... This is rather exciting, yet it also makes me nervous! MARDEK 3 has been in progress for YEARS now and a lot of heart has gone into it, so I REALLY hope people like it and that there aren't any horribly critical bugs that make it unplayable to other people or anything... o_O I'm also rather worried and scared about some of the people I've chosen to be testers suddenly betraying my trust and somehow spreading the game around or giving out loads of spoilers or things like that... Or of some people who like to think themselves 'hackers' trying to find the game when they shouldn't, then trying to spread it and so on... I hope I am just being overly paranoid, but a lot of people have been waiting for this game and some may be impatient, which would mean that I'd end up getting no money for sponsorship if it's released before I can get it sponsored, meaning years of my life would be wasted and I likely wouldn't make any other chapters. So, uh, let's hope it all goes smoothly...! Anyway, if you're a beta tester, you should know that the =β= thing at the top next to your message count will lead you to the special Beta Tester Feedback page. I'll be announcing when it's playable from there, probably in a few hours. And, uh... I don't think I have anything else to mention... But the game is done by February, as the thing on the main page said! For once, I actually met one of my proposed release dates! Gasp! 59 Comments

MARDEK 3 BETA TESTERS WANTED Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sun 31st Jan 2010, 6:11pm

Well, ugh. Here it is. The time that I'm supposed to be searching for MARDEK 3 beta testers, so I suppose I SHOULD since I've finished most of what needs to be finished. I still have some work to do on it, but I'll do it over the next week, and next Sunday I'll upload the beta (hopefully) for the testers I've chosen over the course of the week. I say 'ugh' to this because it's likely going to be difficult choosing testers. I don't trust people, especially when they can tell whatever lies they can come up with to 'win' the position and then break rules where they know I can't see them breaking them. I've had experiences in the past where people volunteer with a lengthy post essentially bragging about how good a tester they'll be, etc, etc, but then they go and either share the game with non-testers when they shouldn't, don't play the game for enough time, quit after a bug, take weeks to report, give insufficient feedback, etc... It's a pain. So, to prevent this, I am going to use THREATS, apparently!!1 : D Anyone who actually GETS beta tester status this time around but does a really poor job of it will have their status removed and their name added to a blacklist, preventing them from becoming a tester ever again for later games. If their offence is particularly great though (lending their account to friends or something like that so then they can play the game early, or spreading spoilers), then they'll be banned. Hopefully I won't choose anyone who will need to be punished in either of these ways, but here's where the trust comes in... It's hard to tell who'll do what. Because of that, one of the main criteria is that if you're new and I don't know anything about you, you have a VERY LOW chance of being chosen. That is, if you intend to create an account JUST to be a tester, you should reconsider; it is not wise to give such 'power' to someone who just showed up out of the shadows. Unless, of course, you have some special reason for you to be chosen that you can back up with evidence... Anyway, there are various criteria that you should meet if you want to be chosen. I'll go over a few. ◊ YOU MUST TEST, NOT PLAY. This is maybe the most important one. Beta Testing is NOT the special privilege of being able to PLAY the game before anyone else. You must treat it like a job, and must actively search every nook and cranny and effectively try to break the game to weed out as many bugs as you can. You must be thorough, and you must look for everything; no *rushing through to win*. ◊ YOU MUST HAVE A LOT OF FREE TIME. I want beta testing to be finished as quickly as possible; I don't want to spend months doing it. MARDEK 3 - including the 'remakes' of the first two chapters - is a 40 hour game, perhaps, and you'll need to play it through AT LEAST once. I don't want you to take months doing this if you're a tester; you must be willing to spend a lot of time playing it. ◊ YOU MUST REPORT YOUR FINDINGS. You can't just happily play along and merely think things without writing them down. You'll be expected to make reports at regular intervals documenting your experiences; either opinions, bugs encountered, suggestions, exploits found, balancing issues, etc. If ever you find a bug, you must report it right away; you MUST NOT, definitely not, keep bugs to yourself if you can benefit from them. The game's BALANCE is in need of testing; it must not be too easy or too hard. You must not be seeking to make the game as easy as it can be for you to WIN it. I will be keeping track of how much feedback each tester gives. If they are giving none, I may remove their beta tester status, and don't think that you can just download the game as soon as you're a tester and then keep playing that even if your status is removed; the game won't function offline and online your tester status will be checked to see whether or not you can play it. ◊ YOU MUST NOT LOSE INTEREST. You must actually FINISH the game at least once! ◊ YOU MUST NOT GET FRUSTRATED AND QUIT. If you experience a bug that, say, wipes your save data after 20 hours of gameplay, you must continue again from the start rather than complaining that you don't want to do it all over again (I've had to play through the game DOZENS of times, so I hate it when people complain like that as if it's SO HARD to play it TWICE)... ◊ YOU MUST NOT FEEL LIKE YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO INSIST ON CHANGES. Though you'll be free to make suggestions, they will be *suggestions* only; if I 'don't listen to you' in regards to them, you should accept that they're not very good or not what I want the game to be like, and leave it at that rather than arguing that you're right and that you know best and so on. ◊ YOU MUST BE FLUENT IN ENGLISH. If you can't read the dialogue or tell me with ease about your findings, then sorry, but you're not likely to be chosen. ◊ YOU MUST HAVE ACCESS TO A PRIVATE COMPUTER. You must not play the game at public libraries, school computer rooms, or anything like that where other people could get onto the computer or watch you playing. This would be useless anyway since you need some computer where the data can be saved. So only people who'll be ONLY using their home computer that they have access to *all the time* would be adequate. ◊ YOU MUST NOT GIVE OUT SPOILERS. It may be exciting to brag about all the secrets that you've found in the new game, but please, don't spoil other peoples' experiences. Anyone who plays the beta must not update the Wiki with data about it or tell other people to do so with information that they've found. Please, PLEASE keep everything secret until the full release. Anyone caught spreading information like this will simply be banned from the site. Other factors I'll be looking for: ◊ INTELLIGENT, ANALYTICAL MINDS DESIRED. I'm not going to choose you if you have a tendency to 'tlak leik dis' or if you skip dialogue or anything like that. You have to understand what's going on in the game in order to make proper reports about it. You must be detailed when reporting bugs, and educated guesses about what might have caused them are ideal; you should try to reproduce any bugs you find if you can, because 'teh gaem broke' is obviously inadequate feedback. ◊ IT HELPS IF YOU HAVE A GOOD COMPUTER. Though it would be good to have a wide variety of different qualities of hardware amongst the testers, it'd help if you could at least run a browser and the game at the same time so then you can report any bugs that you find AS you find them... The game may run slowly on old computers. ◊ FLASH EXPERIENCE IS GOOD TOO. If you understand the workings of Flash, you'd likely be able to give good bug reports. So that's that. Now's the time to volunteer, I suppose... Keep in mind I can't stand people who brag. 405 Comments

Weekly Update (24/Jan/2010) Posted by Pseudolonewolf on Sun 24th Jan 2010, 8:48pm

I said I'd be looking for beta testers this week, but unfortunately I won't be; I'll be putting it off until NEXT week, and chances are I WILL start asking for volunteers next week because I've ALMOST done all that I need to do before that... I've had a huge To Do List that I mentioned making in the last Weekly Update, and I've just been going by that and marking tasks off there when I've done them, forgetting to update the Recent Progress notes on this site... So sorry for keeping you in the dark, or whatever you'd call it. I've been working on the game basically all day every day though and I've done a lot. I have not done anything near most of the things on the list (probably only like a sixth of all the things), but I have done most of the *important* things that need doing before I can let other people test the game; the rest of the changes would be mostly cosmetic, and I can do them during testing. It was meant to take only a week to do all the important things, but unexpected problems have delayed things... Anyway, uh, I'll work on those things for another week, then I'll ask for volunteers to be beta testers. DO NOT VOLUNTEER YET, and also don't ask me about any requirements; I'll say all that next week. During the week after that update, I'll play through the game myself one final time to check for obvious problems, and once that's done (it should take a week, but it may take longer), I'll (hopefully) upload a beta that the testers can, uh, test. So yes... it's getting close now, even if it's not quite as close as I'd have liked. Also, this week I've been developing ideas for other future games that I want to make, though I won't be starting any new projects right now or anything (since I have learned that that's never a good idea); I'll still be trying to do things in the order I mentioned in a news article a while ago. I've been thinking of ideas for the other episodic RPG thing that I mentioned, which I'm planning to do as preparation for FHO. I want to do a four-chapter story sort of like MARDEK in format, but simpler (to shorten development) and in a completely different setting. It'll be four episodes since I want to make two protagonists, with the first chapter following their early life together, the second and third chapters following one of the protagonists alone in two sets of concurrent events, and the fourth chapter being where they meet up again... The setting will be on some alien world (the characters may not be human), which is on the brink of becoming spacefaring, so the setting would obviously be quite different to MARDEK. I'd also want it to lead onto something I mentioned as an idea a while ago also... After the four-chapter games, which I'd release to other Flash portals as I have with MARDEK, I'd want to continue the setting with something that I was inspired to do by watching a lot of Star Trek... I'd make stand-alone 'episodes' following the crew of a starship from this world; either keeping the same characters from the four-chapter game or setting it years in the future and following their descendants, with the four-chapter thing just being the past that led to the race becoming spacefaring. This idea appeals to me because the stand-alone episodes would be simple and quick to make; I'd aim for each one to have maybe an hour of playtime and they'd all use the same engine, and not follow on from eachother, though they'd include the same cast for the most part, with different episodes focusing on different cast members, so then their characters aren't explored all at once anywhere. I could maybe make an episode every month, every fortnight, every week... however long it'd take. It'd be appealing because I wouldn't need to plan grand stories in advance, and if I came up for a story idea I wanted to make, I could do it rather than giving up the idea since there was already a story (many times I've wanted to drastically change MARDEK's story, but can't because there's just ONE story)... Setting it on a starship that goes around visiting other planets would also be a GREAT way to include races and worlds mentioned in the Encyclopaedia which I've yet to use anywhere! It might last a long time or it might only last for a handful of episodes, but due to its nature it would be good practice for FHO, because I'd try to make it so that the engine just loaded in external maps and dialogue and stuff rather than each episode being a stand-alone game (because of this, I'd likely release the episodes only on this site; I WOULD NOT want to wait months for sponsorship with each one AND players on portals would not like the idea of the engine remaining identical each time around). So yes, I'd be able to make an engine that loaded in maps like FHO would, but since I'd be the only one making the episodes, it'd be easier to refine and perfect, rather than it getting clogged up with hundreds of user-created episodes that may need to be deleted at some point. And, uh, after THAT, I'd make FHO using a similar engine, probably... I probably shouldn't be taking about this now though since it probably will be at least half a year before I even consider starting on it, and I feel like I can't concentrate very well right now anyway so I feel I'm being incoherent in my wording... Uh... ANYWAY, MARDEK 3 beta soon! Yes yes! That's all that matters right now, I suppose! o_O I can't wait until I've finally got this out of the way... I REALLY want to work on some other stuff! 49 Comments

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