Closer... Closer...

This past week has been not very productive in comparison to, say, the week before and the week before that. I've only been able to put in maybe 2-3 hours a day tops for the most part throughout this week due to a rather large influx of work at my, well, place of work. It is not common to be this busy. For those of you who don't recall, I am a Security Officer for a hospital. This means I administer medicinal smack-downs as appropriate, so when there is an influx of work, that means things are not going oh-so-well. But hopefully things will calm down after this weekend and I can start putting in more time again. Also, I will be starting the Beta process pretty soon, probably within the next two weeks or so. More on that further on in the update.

Furniture!
Ah, yes, the wild and wonderful world of home decore. With a vast majority of the characters and monsters taken care of, I've turned to producing furniture and such to fill up the various houses and buildings of Aleph. Most of the furniture can be picked up and put down as you like, with the exceptions of larger pieces, such as tables, beds, armoirs, and large benches. These are static objects. All of the smaller items, however, are re-arrangable. This also has an unintended side-effect that I didn't think through originally: you could theoretically fence off areas with chairs or end-tables or whatever and monsters won't be able to pass through and get you. Anyways, here is a 'before' picture:

Pretty spartan. This is one of the rooms in the player-housing area where all of your allies and such not in your party will ultimately hang out. The benches and tables are static. I felt the room looked a bit too sparse, so I went out, chopped some wood, and crafted some furniture. Then I cheated and made myself some paintings and such (you can get them in game regardless):

Now that looks nicer, homelier. Some items serve dual functions, like the clocks which will give you the time of day/night. I still need to work on some of the art and refine it more, but I like how it's shaping up. Being able to customize in-game space always appealed to me greatly in games, which is probably why I loved Ultima 7.

The Aleph

I've spoken awhile back about the general function of the Aleph, to help you locate items, people, whatever throughout the game. I wanted to give a more specific look at how it tends to function once its full ability is unlocked. When talking to NPCs, you will get an occasional mention of a special, magical weapon, armor, or object that will be in a slightly different color:

Any object mentioned that is in that yellow-ish color means that you can use the Aleph to find that particular object. When reading books, you will come across plenty of useable words as well. So, for example, let's say that the sound of the Eye Gouger sword is intriguing and you want to go and find it. So you whip out your trusty Aleph, type in Eye Gouger, and viola:

The Aleph shows you the location of the object. L-16 refers to the grid position. You will have a map that you can look at, which divides the world into a large grid, A-R right to left, 1-22 top to bottom. When you look at the map, you can find L-16 and see what part of the world that is. If the object is in a dungeon, like the Eye Gouger is, the Aleph will tell you the name of that dungeon, and the level it is on. The 023,047 refer to the exact coordinates of the object in the dungeon or in that specific section of the world grid. In this case, the Eye Gouger is 23 tiles to the right, and 47 tiles down from the upper left most corner. You can use the Aleph to find your own position, so you can tell if you're getting closer or further away.

You can type position, or location into the Aleph and it will give you your grid location, as explained above, and your precise x/y coordinate, so you can use this information to close in on a particular object that you want.

Beta
I haven't gotten as much done this past week or so as I would have liked (as stated above). I wanted to have at least 2 or 3 towns full of NPCs, but I only have 1. So what I will probably end up doing is just adding the essential NPCs (shops and such) in time for the first round of Beta. This will make some of the towns rather empty, but that is not important for the first round of testing. I also have a couple of crash bugs that have not yet been resolved that need to be resolved before I begin testing.

I stated awhile back how I planned to breakup the Beta testing phases: 

"The first phase will naturally be the roughest since the game will still fairly be in its infancy. Thusly I would only want 3-5 testers during this phase. The second phase will be more polished and more of a complete experience, and open to an additional 5-10 testers. The third stage will feature the game mostly how it is supposed to be, but for the purpose of squashing any lingering bugs and balancing game-play mechanics, it will be open to all beta testers. It seems dubious to me that anyone would want to test out the same game up to 3 times before playing the finished, polished version, so anyone who wants to participate in Beta at one point or another does not have to participate in all phases, though they can if they choose and are eligible.

Eligibility for Beta testing will be determined by reward tier – it seems the fairest, easiest way to do it. So for the first phase which will need 3-5 people, I will start at top of the reward list for highest backers and offer an invitation. If they accept, then they are in, if they decline (or perhaps want to participate in a later phase or not at all) then the invitation goes to the next highest backer. The second phase will follow the same rules, just with additional open slots for testing."

So in a couple of weeks I will start contacting the appropriate people until I have 3-5 people. The main focus of this first round of Beta will be exploration and combat for the most part. Things like quests, the Aleph system, the dungeon/town raids will not be fully implemented yet. The particular goal this time around is mostly to make sure the foundation elements of the game work correctly and identify any particularly heinous bugs or crashes.

So that will be coming up relatively soon.
I hope you all have a great weekend!