Release "Alpha"

[msteiger]

The title already says it: I think we should get out "Alpha" asap.

Why?
Imho, the overall state of the game is far beyond "pre-alpha", but the outside world might not see the progress we're making. Upgrading version helps us showing that things are mature enough for sandboxing. We can even set up a permanent server (with auto-save, yay!) for nice gameplay.

Lots of things are not ready / finished, but once they are - many other items will appear on the ToDo-List. If we wait until all issues are cleared, we will never release anything. Surely, it would be nice to have some serious gameplay like L&S, but that might still take a while and can still be done for "Beta".

Why not?
I don't see any reason. Do you?

 

[Marcin Sciesinski]

Well, in its current form Terasology has no gameplay, not sure if it's ready yet.

 

[Cervator]

We're not quite ready, but I believe we are very close

I did some analysis on the topic a little time back, and just now crossed out half the top priority issues (had to install a Xenforo addon real quick to bring back strike-through, heh), with the remaining ones being smaller. Lots more stuff on the list, some are in various states of progress.

A bunch are more about polish and niceties. I think the biggest critical lack left is gameplay, which is relatively easy, just needs effort. Dusting off combat and behavior trees (@synopia is working on a 2.0 there) would be huge wins but not entirely critical, we could fake some of that and still have replayability, like a basic version of L&S.

I want us to do a dev meeting soon with this being one of the topics.

I'm absolutely in agreement with releasing before we fix all the things. Alpha is still just alpha. It then is also a nice milestone to cross for other things (GSOC, early access options, outreach for more Lets Plays, etc)