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May 5th, 2004 - WITP reach Gameplay Beta . . . . (Page 1/3)

A lot has happened in the past 2 months since the last development update. We've met a major milestone on War in the Pacific by reaching what we call Gameplay Beta, and we've started outside Alpha testing on Gary Grigsby's World at War.

What is a Gameplay Beta? This means the game has all of the final rules included and mostly working. We may be missing the final art, but we aren't planning on adding any new rules. Does this mean we won't be changing the game before we release it? No. As testing continues, many formulas will likely be tweaked. Currently we've noticed some issues with Coast Artillery and we are likely to make changes here (larger guns are doing worse than smaller guns, and larger ships like BBs and CAs are not getting shot at, but DDs are getting creamed). But few rules are likely to change between now and when the game is finished.

So what's left to be done before we can claim that War in the Pacific is ready for primetime? We still have some art that needs to be finished. Steve is still working on the aircraft artwork, Iain is putting the finishing touches on the map, and Marc has to deliver a few new buttons. All of this should be done by the middle of May. Five people are working on finishing up the scenarios. There are a few scenarios that still have quite a few basic OOB errors, although these should be cleaned up within the next week. Most of the scenarios are still being tested in order to balance their Victory Conditions. This work is likely to take most of May, although it's unlikely that the scenarios will keep us from being finished by the end of May.

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May 5th, 2004 - WITP reach Gameplay Beta . . . . (Page 2/3)

The manual is being worked on and we should have the first draft any day now. As much as I enjoy producing a good manual, I'm not really looking forward to reading this draft through, as it's likely to be 150 pages or more. We're hoping to have two manuals on the CD. One will be a normal manual and the other will have all new text that was added to the original UV manual in italics so those of you that have already played UV will be able to quickly pick up on the new items in War in the Pacific. Mike Eckenfels has a lot of work to get this manual ready in time for production, but hopefully he can make the schedule.

As for programming, the list of items to be done has been bouncing between 10-25 items for the past week (split between 3 programmers). In my experience with over 100 games, it's the programming that delays 99% of the products. The odds are good that if we haven't gone gold by the beginning of June (have a CD ready for duplication and sale), it'll be because testers have found more bugs than we can fix, or we're still stuck fixing a major bug or two that we can't get a handle and can't ship until we fix it. We're still hoping to be finished by the end of May, and I know that Matrix would very much like to be selling copies of the game at Origins in late June.
Keith Brors of 2by3 Games will be at Origins along with a number of Matrix personnel, so if you are there, be sure to stop by the Matrix Booth and say hi.

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May 5th, 2004 - WITP reach Gameplay Beta . . . . (Page 3/3)

As for World at War, it is now being tested by about a dozen playtesters. There isn't much to report as yet, but we hope to hook up the PBEM feature within the next few weeks. By then our testers should be familiar enough with the game to try playing against other human opponents. At that point, you should start seeing some AAR's in the Matrix World at War forum. We still have a lot to do to complete this game. There's quite a bit of artwork that is still being worked on, and we are really just at the beginning of testing and improving the AI. We'll keep you posted how things are going, and be sure to check the Matrix World at War forum as that's the best place to find out more about the game.

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