First, good news.
20 testers requirement is handled.
It turns out I was verified. One point checked out.
Polishing
I am officially transitioning into full-fledged polishing phase. It shows mainly by character of my task.There are no more game-crashing errors or obvious logic disasters. Instead, I add reminders.
“No research active.” Or “a planet has empty queue.”
It also means I’m transitioning more into testing role.
And from testing comes balancing. The costs, damages, hp values, even descriptions: all of them are being iteratively improved every week, sometimes even every day.
Icons. Windows size. Text size. These were 5-minute fixes.
And through testing I realized that AI is the most important when it comes to adding fun to the game, which I will also work on.
And one more thing: yesterday I won the game without errors. This might sound funny now, but I’m starting getting consistent runs of the game without any errors, which is a good sign.
Mundane Things
Radar is implemented, which was a main pending feature before polishing. It’s heavily text-based rather than visual, but it does it’s job.Errors were still fixed, like bad planet icon. The character of detected errors says that I’m really polishing instead of adding features.
Other errors were split-fleet-error, which was happening only when a single-ship started movement during automove phase at the end of turn. It turned out it had invalid selected ships in left menu.
And so on, and we’re getting to 1.1.0 build (which means 100th build as it’s about 1.0.97 at the moment).
Now the most important part will be playing game. Over and over again. Sometimes I play 4 times a day, but will probably not maintain this. The things are going well anyway.