Devlog - Incoming Beta and Evoker News (Patreon)

First up before we dive into a big Beta discussion: we've met the Evoker goal! Thanks to all of you who have supported us, new and old, we can't thank you enough for making ToA a reality.

We've done some prototyping, but the Evoker development won't begin in earnest just yet. We haven't fully decided yet where in Beta it will fall, or if the Evoker development will be the first post-release content we work on - there'll be a question about this in the feature survey next month. July and August we're finishing up Alpha, however, and after that we have to make sure the monthly schedule gets evened out again, so development on the Evoker definitely won't start in full until later this year at the earliest.

In other news, as we mentioned last time, we pulled forward the remaining idle animations for the schedule, and those are just about done, so if you're tired of those, your nightmare will soon be over - we added the Shopkeep for this coming weekly, and the Innkeep will follow soon after, and that'll be it. We also pulled forward the UI work that was going to be slotted in until October, and managed to get it done as well, so: we're entering Beta in September, it looks like. We'll be adding in the UI work starting in July, with the major additions showing up in early August so we can get them battle-tested for a full monthly release at the beginning of September!

Now, the terms pre-alpha, alpha, and beta both have particular meanings and are pretty vague and hand-wavy in usage. With a small studio like ours, the distinctions are a little muddy, but once the placeholder assets are gone and now that the core features are all in place, we're ready to move into that final phase of development.

(on a quick side note: we've mentioned version numbers before - Beta will be v0.3.xx.x, but there won't be a v0.4.xx.x - the release version will be v1.0.xx.x. So Beta will be the last phase before release.)

In our terms, there's a few things that are going to be true about going to Beta. We'll have a new roadmap that we'll post that will outline what will be worked in on Beta, with the usual placeholders for patron-voted content and the like. We'll be looking for testers to try and iron out any issues that crop or any remaining long-standing issues. And we'll be focusing mostly on new content - finishing up both story and adventure modes.

Another thing about the transition to Beta is save incompatibility, hopefully for the last time. Now, I won't get into the details here, but, basically, we tend to preserve compatibility for save files. If your save worked on v0.1.15.0, it probably still works on v0.2.26.0. However, because of that, we've accumulated some cruft in the save file, legacy parameters and values that are no longer applicable. So we'll be pruning those for the penultimate time (there may or may not be one more final save incompatibility going into the release phase). 

That doesn't necessarily mean all saves will be invalidated, but some will be. Your meta saves will remain intact - progress and achievements and unlocked CGs and all that - but any individual save you have might no longer be compatible.

Beta also means that we'll be easing towards feature lockout. There will be new skills or status effects and stances and such, and systems will be tweaked, but there won't be as many brand-new systems. The focus will be on polishing existing systems and assets and generating the remaining content for the game.

One last thing about Beta and character content: sometimes people talk about "completing" characters in a way to suggest that old characters aren't "finished", but this isn't really how it works. We'll keep expanding content featuring characters as we go, but as far as we're concerned, most of the characters are in a "finished" state - as long as they have unique art, are animated, and have a good number of scenes and outcomes in their encounter. 

Again, that doesn't mean we won't add to them, and we actually do plan to add to basically every character both new art and new scenes, but we don't really have a backlog of "unfinished" characters to work through, and I'm not really sure where that idea comes from. If it's the idea that every character is going to have roughly the same amount of content, that's definitely not true. We aren't going to restrict ourselves from making a ton of content for one character because then that would mean we have to make that much content for every other character - that's just silly. Tifa is going to always have much more going on than Vincent, and certainly there's going to be much more content surrounding Slimes and Dragons than there are, uh, Iron Scorpions (in Dragon Quest, not ToA. Obviously, we will have plenty of that sweet, sweet Iron Scorpion content).

That being said, we do want to make sure that every position has, at least, generic art, with plenty of little variants and possibly animation, and we'd like most characters to have at least two different unique pieces of art to their name, and those'll be some of the main goals of Beta, along with unique art for some of the various scenarios, like brothel work, for instance.

One last thing: Release won't be the end of content for ToA. v1.1 will basically function like an expansion, but patrons will, as usual, receive weekly/monthly updates as we work on it. If you're following closely, it'll be a lot like it is now. We'll basically work on ToA as long as y'all want us to, but we'll also start prototyping out other games once ToA releases. But that's at least a year out, so we'll post about that bridge when we get to it. Just know that v1.1 is a definite if we can help it, and v1.2 is almost for sure as well.

Again, thanks so much! We think you're really gonna enjoy the content we're putting out leading up to and during Beta, so please look forward to it!