Thursday Report: Gearing Up for Alpha

A quick Thursday Report for today – I’ve just gotten back from a queue for the supermarket after a mad week of work.

But I knew I couldn’t leave this Thursday reportless, as this Easter weekend I’ll be using this lockdown as the perfect opportunity to prepare The Garden Path for it’s 0.0.1 alpha release! It’s going to be a long arduous weekend, but an exciting one too, as if all goes to plan The Garden Path will finally be out of my hands and into the hands of testers.

This first alpha release is going to be pretty barebones, but it’s important to get testing things as early as possible to test the core functionality of the gameplay loop. Progression mechanics will not be included, but instead we’ll be testing the random generation of new gardens, interaction with a set number of NPCs, curating the garden itself, and saving and loading functionalities.

The testing will be closed to a very small number of volunteers for now, as things will gradually open up as the game becomes more and more polished.

The other big news is that I was granted r/TheGardePath on reddit a few days ago. As it turns out the subreddit was, seemingly, just a spam subreddit used to bait search engines – nothing to spicy. It was handed over to me as-is, and I spent some time this week adding a lick of paint and getting it on-brand.

I’m not anticipating a bustling community to appear from nowhere, but it’s important to try out these different platforms and see which ones stick. Perhaps the kind of people that would play The Garden Path hang out on reddit, but also perhaps not.

I’ll be posting any and all updates I have to the subreddit, as well as some additional commentary, as reddit is a better fit for larger content drops than microblogging platforms.

I also invite anyone and everyone to post whatever content and discussion points they would like to share, I’ll be sure to respond to everything that gets posted.

So, if you have a reddit account, head on over and subscribe if you like the idea of The Garden Path being on your frontpage.

That’s it for now! Expect a bigger drop of news next week as things unravel.

Cheers, and have a great Easter!

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