Sorry, but I have been a little busy for the past two weeks. Too busy to blog I guess. I have been aiming for a code freeze on the Doofus game and it’s been hard work getting all the bugs and issues in. I’m going for the final push this time around to get at least the coding issues out of the way. The good thing is there isn’t too much left on the coding side, so I may be able to push out another beta by next week. Hopefully it will be the last and final beta before (; wait, don’t get your hopes up) at least one release candidate before Doofus goes gold. I guess there are still a sizable amount to levels to be completed.

Unlike release cycles of other software, Doofus game release cycles are a little bit different. I devised a new method after we initially found the old method to be rather monolithic for this particular project, and because of obvious constraints we have as a small team (unavailability of testers at specific times and things of that nature). Traditionally, you have a set of alpha releases of a product where each alpha release is tested in-house by both the developers and/or testers. Bugs are filed for specific releases and fixed during bug-fixing stage, whenever that maybe (, generally differs from project to project). Beta releases are pushed out when alpha releases get stable enough for “general consumption”. Beta releases are generally widely accepted as “almost complete” versions of the product. So a beta release often signifies a “feature-freeze” of the product. A bug fixed beta release can become a Release Candidate if the dev team feels confident enough which eventually turns Gold when everyone is confident enough.

In the case of the Doofus game, things are a little bit different. A beta release signifies a “feature freeze” for “a particular set of” features. Let me explain. When we started developing the game, the O2 Engine was the first to come (, before we started on the actual game code). The name “O2 engine” comes from the repository branch of my older game that was never released because it had too many flaws! I guess a lot was carried over including primitive libraries and some design decisions and implementations. Anyways, since the new project was a bit complex and our testing team small and working part-time, we decided to have specific release milestones having only limited set of completely complete features. When I say completely complete I mean “feature frozen”. Each beta release addressed different features. The first was for engine integration with geometry. The level structure was finalized and resource management was put in place. The first release looked really ugly because the renderer was partially finished.

The second beta addressed collision systems, basic gameplay things like triggers activators and integrations with third-party modules and libraries. The third was for rendering sub-systems, when those screenshots were posted. This release, the fourth, will be for AI (NPC) and Physics and that marks the end of the game features. The beta still has to go through a bug fixing stage before I am confident enough to even look at a RC, but it does mark and end to any major code modifications to the game code. Many would say the betas are actually alphas, but there are 2 reasons I call them beta releases. a) They are feature freeze releases. No features are added or removed to the already tested features. b) Our testers are no full-fledged project member so white-box testing responsibility falls on the dev team, mostly. That said, the beta testers are not just kids beating at the keyboard and have been instrumental in testing the product.

I guess this release has got me a bit exited, and I am working on the website/s at the same time. I have actually started on quite a few blog posts in the past week, but haven’t had the time to polish and/or finish them yet. Maybe this week will see more posts on the blog, I hope.