Doctor Who: Worlds Apart July Developer Diary
Hello Whovians,
We know how interesting game development can be, especially when it involves Doctor Who!
This short diary is a way to give some insight into what our developers have been up to in the past few weeks. We’ll aim to release a diary entry each month.
We are excited to be at a stage where we are moving from game design/concept to actual implementation and testing. Recently we implemented our core system design and set up a build to test on. Our current focus was on merging multiplayer networking with the game code, to allow our internal QA team to start testing the build. We’ve been happy with the results of this testing and it’s so exciting to play a version of the game, even an early one. We currently have around 31 tutorial cards to play with.
This early build is, in the words of the dev team: “nice and ugly”, just how you want it when testing the core features of gameplay. Visual effects and sound effects are not enabled, as these are irrelevant to current testing. Naturally the user interface will be polished as we move forward.
We can’t wait to open up the game build for Pre-Alpha and Closed Alpha testers to get your feedback. We’ll be opening the Pre-Alpha to our Founders Token holders soon, then to our wider community. Stay tuned for further details on this via our newsletter.
Separate to the game, we continue to work on the website and the deckbuilder, feedback from the Community has been as invaluable as ever, providing bug reports which have led to fixes and improvements on all platforms.
We have also made a move to a new platform (PlayCanvas) which will improve Collection loading on desktop. One thing that has been noted on the deckbuilder is minor errors in card text, this is a low priority issue for us currently as we are focused on the foundations of the game rather than small details but of course, these issues will all be resolved as time goes on.
We are continuously striving to improve, so if you have any feedback at all, please don’t hesitate to let us know via our social channels. We are a group of very friendly Cybermen who would love to upgrade your experience…
Our next pack release is the Time Lord Victorious pack. We are really looking forward to seeing the community reaction to this pack. This is scheduled for August and contains brand new cards and frames.
One thing that we have to manage for every release is getting approvals for cards. In some cases, we even have to get approval from the original actors, if we are using their likeness! We have recently improved these processes to try and streamline, so that our designers and game devs can implement new cards quickly and to schedule. Looking ahead, we also created a ‘vision brief’ of potential future card frames, so as to streamline the design-approval process even further.
Later this month we’ll be introducing a new member of our team to you. Adam Mottram will be taking the position of: Head of Studio. Adam will ensure everything is delivered to a high standard and to schedule otherwise he’ll refer us to the strangely metallic human resources department for exterm… evaluation.
Our head of Human Resources isn’t the most friendly.
That’s all for now. See you next time!
Jake, Julius & the Reality Studio team.
