Update

            At RenWerX, we constantly reevaluate our operations looking for ways to improve, or just adapt to changing conditions within RenWerX. Over the years, this has taken us from a group modifying the Tribes Series of games, to a team working on Ascension - a complete, free game. During our April 7^th meeting, we decided to make several changes to improve our current development program.

As many of you know, we have run an internal alpha program for a few months. We have used this program to sort out the various difficulties that we might encounter during our closed beta program. Between the feedback we have received and our own observations, we have identified several changes that need to be made so that our closed beta program will operate smoothly.

Replacing our developer blogs is the first change we have made. The blog posts were often overlooked by our community, and occasionally the blog system would eat someone’s post or attachments. We will now use a set of sub-forums that operate similar to the blogs, but allow the developers greater flexibility in their posting and responses to comments.

            To allow us to make changes to the balance of the game faster during the beta testing period, we are going to separate the balancing from the bug reports/fixes. Instead of updating the beta client balance when we push our patch out of the developer copy of Ascension, we will be updating balance independently. This means that we can make balance changes more often, allowing us to test more values within the beta program. I will be in charge of making these adjustments, so I look forward to lots of long discussions with all of you in the future.

            The last major change we made was a reprioritized list of features for the beta program. In the interest of making visible progress, some features that will require major modifications to our code, engine fixes, or (in the interest of timely completion) purchasing and integrating third party assets have been placed on hold. This list is relatively small. The remaining features consist of mostly mandatory features and a small set of “maybes”.

            These changes will allow us to better interact with our beta program and focus our attention on the core Ascension behavior while still being aware of features to be implemented later in the development process.

 - TT