I thought I would write up another short progress report for Din's Curse. So far alpha has been going pretty well. Our alpha testers are liking the game and it's getting better every day. A very good sign is that I'm spotting less things to fix and having more fun actually playing the game during our daily play testing.
Another good sign is the size of my todo list. The number of things on my todo list fluctuates a lot. I'm constantly fixing, adding, and balancing things so that I can remove an item from my list, but I or the testers also constantly find new things to add to the list. When I did my last progress report in mid December, I had 250 things left to do. When I announced alpha earlier this month the list had grown to 310 thanks to a lot of early feedback from our testers. Now it's down to 65. Just to give an example of all of this, 2 days ago it was at 67 items, yet I have changed 55 things since then.
Anyways, the game has come a long way during alpha. Yesterday I was surprised when a rescue went renegade and ambushed me. A few days ago I caved in an entire area of a cave doing something foolish (hit a trap next to a support beam and a gas leak). I also found a bunch of unique items yesterday. I'm not sure if it was a good streak of luck or I had a town with some kind of treasure world modifier going (either way it was nice). I really like when things surprise me. :) Considering I'm the one that added all of these pieces, it's cool that I can be surprised still.
