Ok where to start? Have any of you heard of this game Towns? Long story short, I was thinking to buy the game, so I went to download the demo. And I found I could not play it. I kept getting a Java VM cannot be created error. I searched on some forums, seems there are quite many others reporting the same error and a host of other bugs or errors. The negative feedback has made me lose interest for now.

What I am seeing here is really great. The creator is reading or comments closely and giving us assurances. So I hope LT will thoroughly tested and simple demos will be made available during various phases of the development, so we can point out conflicts with our machines and can get it fixed before release.

I know everyone has a different machine, a lot of different configurations. But if the game does not work for someone, that person either is disappointed, frustrated or worse. Indie games imo has an opinion among players more used to AAA productions, of being buggier, more likely to crash, generally become unplayable. This can be attributed to lack of time, lack of budget allocated to testing, etc.

Some glitches, some crashes can be overlooked. But if the game does not even start, that to me is serious, its gamebreaking!

Ringo wrote:I know everyone has a different machine, a lot of different configurations. But if the game does not work for someone, that person either is disappointed, frustrated or worse. Indie games imo has an opinion among players more used to AAA productions, of being buggier, more likely to crash, generally become unplayable. This can be attributed to lack of time, lack of budget allocated to testing, etc.

Some glitches, some crashes can be overlooked. But if the game does not even start, that to me is serious, its gamebreaking!

Funny, but in my gaming career, I've experienced a lot more glitches and crashes with AAA games than with indie games.

Have you pledged for beta? The more we are, the more chances we have of squashing most bugs.

Hey Ringo, this is a big concern for me as well, what with the custom engine and the reliance on that infamous, piece-of-$#!7 OpenGL extension system.

My primary concern, like you, is booting. If the game starts and everything loads, I think it's all pretty good from there. But I'm sure we're going to see more than one debugging fiasco come prototype time...and I just hope that you all will have the patience to help me work it out. Hopefully things will be smoother for the beta.

But yes, don't worry, it's on my mind and is a major concern, I'm definitely not going to just shove this thing out there and pray that it works for everyone.

Thanks Josh, and Atarun yes I have pledged enough to be in a pre-alpha, in early 2013. I am sure for those who can afford it, they want to see their little ship floating in space, even if there is no place to go! LT is highly anticipated. No doubt it will be successfully funded.

I pledged for the prototypes as well can't wait to test the shit out of it, have a pretty beefy PC too, I hope we get a lot of people with different hardware(low and hi end) to thoroughly test the prototypes.

I upped my pledge today to get the alpha releases and have many different PCs/Os I can test on. funnily enough none of them I would class as top spec gaming machines as I have not bothered much with PC gaming in recent years after being sucked into the PS3 age. If Josh did the early development on a dual core laptop machine, it sounds like we wont have too many problems!

I might pledge near the end, once I got some more cash, but I would also like to test the alpha

PS

as for Towns, they released it on steam in what they consider to be a full working game, sure it got greenlighted, but the game is far from ready to be on steam IMO, I pre ordered it ages ago, but not really looked at it since, but from what I read, there are a lot of issues with the latest release, and they still a long way off to getting the game to a final game quality, as its still an alpha game

Just one question, if you can/want to answer, How far apart will alpha and beta be? 3 months, 6 months? If there's going to be a huge gap and alpha starts February and bets wont be until September I'd probably be convinced to up my Kickstarter Tier.

Skitterin wrote:Just one question, if you can/want to answer, How far apart will alpha and beta be? 3 months, 6 months? If there's going to be a huge gap and alpha starts February and bets wont be until September I'd probably be convinced to up my Kickstarter Tier.

Hey Skitterin, I'm really not saying this to try to get you to up your pledge...but it will likely be 6 months or more between prototype (people keep calling it alpha..but it's really not an alpha!!) and beta. I would estimate more like 9 months, but that's just a guess!

I see... I will probably pledge more then. I like to be apart of things from the beginning. Gives me warm feeling on the inside

Lemme do a fallow-up, Will the "Prototype" be updated until it becomes beta, or something you release then it just stays that way until beta releases?

Skitterin wrote:Lemme do a fallow-up, Will the "Prototype" be updated until it becomes beta, or something you release then it just stays that way until beta releases?

Most likely the latter. The point of the prototype is not to show you everything that I've done so far (although it will give you a taste of almost all the graphics features). The point is to work together to really work out the kinks in a certain system - in this case, combat. What that means is that I'll release something that probably won't have many of the classic LT features in it, but, rather, will focus on combat exclusively, so that we can nail down the mechanics and figure out what's fun. It is unlikely that this will continue to be smoothly transitioned to a beta, because it is distinctly something different.

That being said, it's still going to be pretty and fun ;D

I might just have to pick up the prototype because it sounds fun to mess with.