19 August 2011

Release Candidate 1

King of Dragon Pass just hit a pretty important milestone. I just sent out a release candidate to our testers.

Different studios define “release candidate” differently, but in general it’s a build that you wouldn’t be ashamed to ship. There may still be bugs, but they are rare or minor enough not to be a problem for the vast majority of players. Typically you just fixed a bunch of bugs, so you need additional testing to make sure the fixes haven’t introduced new bugs. It’s common for a game to have multiple release candidates.

Also, this is the first release build we’ve distributed — there are no more debugging aids (like the incredibly handy log file). This alone might introduce subtle bugs.

The point is, this still doesn’t give us a release date.

Once we’re satisfied that the game really is in good shape, we’ll submit it to Apple for approval. That can take an unpredictable amount of time, but they actually seem to have really caught up, and the odds are as good as I’ve ever seen them.

Of course, this doesn’t mean we’re done. There’s still testing to do, and we need to work on the marketing. And there’s some stuff I’d like to add in an update.

4 comments:

  1. hey i heard about this project a few days ago,so it will have a windows version too?

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  2. KoDP 2.0 is for iOS. And right now, Windows for phones is not exactly taking the world by storm.

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  3. This is fabulous news. Looking forward to the return of KoDP!

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  4. Marvellous news! It's feeling pretty slick at the moment - looking forward to pimping it wildly all over the Internet.

    One minor suggestion I haven't got round to reporting as a bug yet is: in the Lore screen (which is much improved having it be 'one-click', cheers) - don't call the Empire of the Wyrm's Friends the EWF in the lore entry relating to the Dragonkill Wars. The tone of the game is so beautifully consistent in its use of language and word-choice that having an acronym really stands out oddly. Calling it just 'the Empire' would work fine instead.

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