Hey, gang!
Two great announcements for you today!
First, we just crossed the line of $3 million in crowdfunding! Add that to our investment funds and licensing money and it puts us right at $10 million in project funding. Both of these are huge financial milestones for us, and we will be forever grateful for your continued faith in our team and in Crowfall®.
Second, we have successfully started our first persistent world test! This means:
- Expect the servers to be up for days at a time (instead of hours!)
- Size of the world map has increased dramatically
- You can log in and out of the game, and then pick up from where you left off from the last test session
- Skill training (and equipment) are persistent between game sessions and test windows
- You will continue to advance your skills even when the game world is offline
- Skill training can be changed from the lobby any time – even when the game world is offline!
This is a huge step forward for Crowfall. Our first test run, last Friday/Saturday, went off without a hitch. This test had relatively low concurrency (with only 250 people invited) but the server stayed up for 27 hours without interruption until we decided to take it offline.
Our second test, which started last night at 5pm CST, brought the total number of invites up to 800. We did a game update this morning, and sent out another round of invites – bringing the number of invited players up to 1600. The test group now includes ALL backers with the Pre-Alpha1, Pre-Alpha 2 and Alpha 1 reward (in other words: Sapphirepledge packages and above).
We’re going to extend the time window on THIS test by 12 hours because we also made a significant change to combat movement (with the Myrmidon) this morning, and we want to collect additional feedback. The current test will now continue until 11pm CST tonight (11/02/2016).
Next Test Window
Our next test will run for 50+ hours. It is scheduled to start on Friday night, 11/4, at 5pm CST and to end on Sunday night, 11/6,11pm CST.
Our current plan is to invite the Alpha 2 Kickstarter test group first (~3,000 people invited), and – subject to server performance – we will look at adding the rest of the Alpha 2 test group folks during this same test window.
Everyone in the Alpha 2 and 3 test groups should be in by the next weekend, 11/11 (unless we have some kind of development setback). Problems in development are to be expected, so don’t be too distressed if that happens. Every problem we find and fix now is great for the future stability and scalability of Crowfall! Remember: we want to invite people as quickly as we can, but that is limited by the performance and stability of every test version.
We’ll continue doing mid-week tests, followed by weekend tests through most of November. Your skill training and inventory will persist between tests**.
Exciting times! As always, we appreciate your help as we create and iterate on Crowfall, and we can’t wait to see you in game!
J. Todd Coleman and Gordon Walton
Co-Founders, ArtCraft Entertainment
** unless we have a development need to wipe the database, which will happen from time-to-time. We are still in pre-alpha, after all!