Hello there! This is Mark Della-Croce, the Product Owner, Lead Developer, and general gopher for Lore Link. I’m taking over the newsletter this month to give you an update on the current status of Lore Link. As you’ve seen over the course of the last several month’s worth of newsletters, we’ve got grand plans and ideas for Lore Link. And those are only some of the cool plans and ideas we have for Lore Link. The beginning of this year has brought us into an exciting phase for Lore Link, which is the beginning of our public alpha. What this means is we have to switch gears from developing new features into polishing and supporting all the features that we have developed. It means making sure our communication channels are established, testing (both automated and manual) is ready, and our development pipelines are running smoothly. This means that if our alpha testers find a serious bug that needs to be fixed immediately, we know that they’ll be able to communicate that us, we’ll be able to make the fix without fear of breaking something else, and then be able to get that fix to the alpha testers without interrupting and losing work on features currently in development.
So now that is in place, what’s next?
We’ll make improvements and keep releasing new features till we and our alpha testers feel like we’ve reached the point where we have a complete, stable, usable product, and enter the beta phase of our product’s lifespan. That means releasing fun features like Templates and Custom Fields, Interactable Maps, a Resource Library, and one very special feature that we consider to be the piece that pulls everything else together. Plus, entering beta means we’ll finally go from taxiing around the runaway to actually getting this product into the air in a serious way!
Lastly, we have to pay attention to what’s going on in the world around us. While we love games here and understand the importance they play in our lives as stress relief, social engagement, and, yes, escapism from the real world, we understand that they have their time and place. Sometimes we have to take a step back and be respectful of the tragedy and sacrifices others are making in the world. That is to say, we here at Lore Link 100% support those defending their homes and their lives in the Ukraine, and urge every one of you to look into helping and supporting those who are being affected by this senseless tragedy.
So, hopefully, next month will find us all in a better place. The next newsletter in April will find us at Lore Link partway through the alpha test, which means we will be able to give a status update on that, with comments from our users. We’ll discuss more about the future of the alpha test, and probably have some sneak peeks of some of those fun features I talked about above! Till then, may you schedule your next game day on the first try!
