Alpha 9 is finally out!

New major changes include:

• Software development has been completely overhauled to focus more on risk management and marketing planning than watching progress bars fill up
• Software quality evaluation is now more complex, amount of work done and the quality of that work is calculated seperately
• The amount of bugs in a product are no longer known up front making support tasks and bug fixes theoretically endless and instead hinging on good player planning
• Project management has been completely overhauled
• There is now a clear divide between digital and physical distribution, and the market changes as the years go on
• The player has to pay for physical copies of their products upfront to be sold or produce and deliver copies themselves using printers and couriers
• The player can make other companies subsidiaries when taking them over to keep them in the game and control their funding
• Undo button in build mode
• Noise levels are now calculated realistically instead of across entire rooms
• UI sound effects
• A bunch of UX improvements

Alpha 9 changes the core gameplay a lot. The main focus was to add more player interaction to the early game by requiring more attention and planning from the player during product development and release, while some of the new mechanics add risk and uncertainty to player choices, without being straight up random. Removing the development progressbar could at first glance seem to just be obfuscating information from the player, this is not the case, however. A lot of underlying code has been reworked, which makes the progressbar obsolete, as project progress can no longer easily be quantified to a percentage. The overall timescale of the game has not changed, so don’t be afraid to use your experience from alpha 8, but note that your strategy will probably not be effective in alpha 9, unless you pay attention to the new pre-marketing mechanics. I will continue to monitor alpha 9 issues for the next couple of weeks, before I move onto alpha 10.

Current plans for alpha 10 include:

• Completely overhauled software feature system, to get rid of the "Select all" mechanic and add endless research
• Being able to move your company to a different plot
• Being able to rent rooms in a larger building
• New plot system, that includes plot "chunks" with individual characteristics
• Rebalanced costs, to balance out late game
• Rebalanced hiring and education system

You can see the entire roadmap for Software Inc. on https://trello.com/b/9I286Mhu/software-inc

Finally, a word on the long development time of alpha 9.

Alpha 9 took at least 5 times as long as any previous alpha did, mainly due to the fact that alpha 9 touched core gameplay, which had to be rebalanced, debugged and required a lot of feedback. Most of the alphas have focused on adding new mechanics, which takes a lot less time than working on existing ones. Having to move a long distance, taking my driver’s license, suddenly not having internet and having a knife-to-finger related injury (almost healed up now) certainly didn’t help, thankfully these are all one-off adventures.

[ 2017-09-06 08:36:23 CET ] [ Original post ]