The road to Alpha and new milestones

It's developer update time! Today we are digging into the technical details about Wonders of Aether and when you can start playing!

First off, I would like to give a big thanks to everyone in our Discord, Twitch streams, and our moderators for helping out while we code away! Everyone is positively incredible, making every stream and interaction so much fun! Thank you sincerely!

We are growing!

Not then; what I wanted to talk about today was something I thought would help calm the "let me in!" jitters. I couldn't believe the extensive amounts of attention WoA would pick up so quickly. I couldn't be happier and truly grateful! Thank you! Because of the new pace of members joining us, I've been asked many times a particular question, so I thought it would be good to clarify in more detail here. The question, of course, is, "When can I play the pre-alpha!?" Let me first dig into what a Pre-Alpha is, in case you didn't know.

What is a Pre-Alpha?

Now, this is a term I've seen thrown around a lot, but we use it for a technical reason. Pre-Alphas in software release life cycles are in development milestone versions that incorporate specific sets of functionality to each release. They are in technical terms released in night builds or the latest compiled versions of code for testing. They are not LTS(long-term support versions) as they may get wholly reworked or become incompatible with other updates later. One way to generalize this is to think of a Pre-Alpha as many parts of a whole combined to create the Alpha build.

Why is WoA in Pre-Alpha?

We are recreating the wheel, it seems! As a passionate gamer and knowing the hurdle of building an MMORPG, I decided to build in reverse by starting with the community. I knew what I wanted to build from the beginning but understand that it would be ignorant to assume what other people wanted out of WoA. I was also tired of making software with user-needed assumptions based on some (possibly misleading) data points. Also, that's not very fun, and WoA is a passion project worth more than a few points on a chart. That's when I thought, why not include the community in the Pre-Alpha stage and find people interested in building such a game. The game would be made regardless but could be tweaked and modified early on based on community feedback. This method also increased our flexibility to change and prevents building feature assumptions, creating a better overall game!

What does that mean for WoA?

We are in the process of building our Alpha, or the next step. The true Alpha is a nearly completed piece of software that is being tested as a finished product. To get to this stage of release for WoA, we need to complete our milestone tests during this Pre-Alpha phase. So today, I have released a milestone tracker on everyone's profile here on wondersofaether.com! Please go check it out!

The road to Alpha

The milestone tracker will be updated live before each milestone testing period. If you want to be ahead of the update curve and contribute your thoughts on each release, please join us on Discord! We would love to have you, and I am always there to chat under the name @Waffles! I hope this clarifies some confusion, and I can't wait to talk to you on Discord! Have a great week, and see you next time!

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