Keys now going out to testers

So it’s finally happening; the first round of closed pre-alpha testers are now receiving Steam keys to test the Milestone 12 build of MMORPG Tycoon 2. I’m looking forward to finally seeing somebody other than me playing the game on Steam!

For those in this initial, extremely small testing group, please check your emails for instructions. For everybody else, stay tuned; I’m going to keep updating with the latest activity here on the blog, and on the forums.

The next round(s) of testers will be coming from active folks on the [forum], and from folks who have signed up for the extremely-low-traffic MMORPG Tycoon 2 Announcements mailing list.

Some of the stuff done in the past week:

• A lot of fixes to the game’s tutorial sequence, to better match the way the game works now.
• Fixed some fiddly behaviour around view modes, when selecting and unselecting something which changes the mode. For example, selecting a quest-giving NPC puts the game into “Edit” mode, so you can more easily see where the NPC’s quests are sending people. When you deselect that NPC, it was previously putting the game back into ‘Map’ mode, even if you’d been in ‘Edit’ mode before selecting the NPC. Now it all works as you’d expect.
• Smoothed out camera movements when switching between view modes.
• Adds “story zones” and “puzzle zones”, where players can go to learn backstory or solve puzzles. Note that each subscriber will only spend time in each of these zones once, no matter how many new characters they create, so these make more financial sense when your game is young, than when it has gotten bigger and older (since those older players will tend to ignore them and just run past to other content)
• Revisions to the window transition effect. Which seems weird to point out, seeing as nobody but me has actually seen the previous version of the effect. But I did some revisions to it just the same.
• All editing tools now show the cost of an action before charging you for it. It’s only fair.
• Added tools for buying and selling of regions. Buying regions costs money. Selling regions doesn’t give any back, but does mean that you don’t have to pay the daily upkeep costs any more if you’re no longer using that region. Think of it more like turning the server off temporarily, rather than actually selling it. (Maybe I should actually theme it that way)
• The game now includes clickable buttons which will open the game’s [forum].

And webdev stuff from today:

• Fixed embedding of comments in blog pages, if you first loaded the main web index, and then a page with comments.
• General improvement to the blog styling, to look a little more like the forum.
• Set up site to support non-comments-enabled posts. In case someday I want to do that.