Tag Archives: Tester

General

Only in Alpha: Temporary Home Streets

b3achy stands on a sunset Roobrik street, surrounded by icons, musicblocks, and other items.

Hi, I’m Scarlett Bearsdale, another lucky alpha tester turned guest poster! This will be a series of posts about things that could only happen in Alpha.

Something I’m keeping an eye out for in early Alpha are things to do and ways to play that just wouldn’t be possible at any other time. These differences in play are caused partly by the areas of the game that are not yet implemented on the alpha servers (like no instanced locations) and partly by the nature of alpha itself (for example, few players mean generally solo play.)

For now, (but hopefully not for much longer) we don’t have any access to proper housing, so we’ve been camping out all over Ur itself. These temporary home streets are the first thing about the way we play right now that made me think, “only in alpha!” Playing this way hearkens back to the long, long, ago – we essentially have no storage beyond what we can carry in inventory, except that there are no houses to buy. We have been taking over mostly dead-end streets and fellow alphateer Artemis has been keeping track of who’s where. In this way, we have a spot to dump our stuff at will – well, for some it’s more willy nilly than others.

A glitch stands in the mines of Pollokoo. Most of the ledges and platforms are covered with an assortment of items.

I meant to take better care of the place! But I ran out of places to put my stuff. It’s just like my old treehouse used to be, but with fewer convenient bushes to hide things behind. As usual I set up for a party on the middle platform.

One of the things I like about the temporary home streets is that although we may not run into one another much while playing, we can still leave gifts for other players. For me, play can sometimes feel a bit aimless once you’ve learned all the skills (again) and done the quests (again) because there aren’t very many long-term projects to work on. (That will change once we do get housing because that brings a lot of bigger, more time-intensive projects.) But right now, I’ve found that looking up and then hiking out to someone’s street is an enjoyable way to spend a play session and makes a productive and manageable goal for the day.  Along the way I can interact with trants, NPCs, quoins, and do other things that make the devs happy. It’s also nice when I unintentionally run across a campout as I roam across Ur. It can be fun to guess whose site you’ve happened across before checking the list. Whenever I find traces of other people’s activities in Ur I’m reminded that I’m not alone, and our paths are overlapping even though we can’t always see it.

Camping out in my temporary home street, Timtim Timm, is quite nostalgic for me personally. I feel a really strong connection to this street as it has been my true home in the game since almost the beginning. I discovered ‘Tim’ just after I joined, way back when the game opened after the first Beta.  I found there a great group of other miners and over time we claimed it as our own and made it our headquarters, party room, and base of operations. So “living” here during this stage of Alpha feels like quite a privilege to me because I know I could never camp out here like this during normal play, nor could I claim it to be just for me. In other ways, it does feel like it should echo a bit to have it all to myself! But ultimately, this space makes me feel more secure because it’s basically unchanged from the beforetime, even if the rocks haven’t been QA’d yet. So I haven’t really considered moving anywhere else – this is my spot and I’m sticking to it.

A snap of a glitchen standing on a mountain peak, surrounded by ledges containing a large amount of crafted drinks and meals.

Artemis says, “From when I lived at Zatar Matar and I cooked enough food for the army in Mulan. They’re not gonna turn into a man on an empty stomach.”

For other alphateers, like Artemis and b3achy, it’s the ability to pack up and move on at a moment’s notice that’s particularly appealing about the current system. After all, temporary’s right in the name! You can decide on a whim to move to a frozen Grumbla region because you’ve been chipping away at a lot of ice for drinks, and then after another reset you find you’re exploring the firebogs and tending the herb gardens instead. There is a certain freedom to  squatting on public lands that is also combined with a heightened level of mutual trust that is very alpha.

A glitch stands on a street in Jethimadh, beside a cliff with a large bottletree in the background. She is surrounded by musicblocks, gems, and other items.

b3achy says, “I’ve now had four temporary home streets in very different parts of Ur – Shimla Mirch, Roobrik, Massadoe and now Jethimadh. I get bored easily!” (PSST that’s also b3achy’s spot in Roobrik at the top of the post.)

Lots of alphateers keep their musicblock and cubimal collections at home both to get them out of inventory but also so that other players can pick them up and get the respective trophies. It’s this kind of trust and lack of possessiveness that were hallmarks of the game that was, and are particularly encouraged by alpha and facilitated by this makeshift system. We’re a small enough group no one is going to just up and take your stuff, and in any case we aren’t going to be able to keep it for long before the next reset comes.   I imagine that in the future we may keep our collections similarly on our actual homestreets for sharing when they are eventually imagined on our server.

A snap of a countryside in Salatu - there are a row of icons and an arrangement of cubimals floating in the air in the shape of a tent.

SmallChalet has made an art of cubimal arrangement on Dhab Habit.

We all can agree that there are both bonuses and drawbacks to these temporary home streets. Artemis pointed out that it’s nice to have a vendor of your choice and a shrine right at hand. However, we’re all struggling a bit with the organization which is negligible at best; finding a way to keep your piles straight is key.  Our camps also take up one of our teleport slots which, as alphateer Fidgety puts it, is quite a pain in the rear! Both of these drawbacks make things feel quite a bit like the old housing, but without the convenience of a cabinet. Some players are sure to pick a street with lots of ledges so that their piles and bags are somewhat sortable. Others use somewhat different criteria when choosing a spot to squat.

A glitch stands in a dingy basement, next to a group of 12 garden plots illuminated by a grow light. She stands in the midst of a large pile of different kinds of produce.

Fidgety says, “I live in a meth basement. It’s not so bad, really, once you get over the terrible smell. Sometimes, Rube comes to visit, and we watch “Rooking Rad” on GlitchFlix. I do a lot of gardening, and I’m thinking of branching out to the empire business.”

Fidgety, for instance, has set up in one of Ur’s more unusual locations. She’s been calling this dingy basement in Egret Taun home for a while in order to take advantage of the plots located under the grow lamps. And while no one has been living in literal Bliss, Ariaste was floating about May Soup in the Vortex of Random for a while. That’s an area that’s so beautiful I’d be glad to have an excuse to spend more time there! Maybe I’d finally figure out how the physics work.

But the best thing (in my opinion) is that for at least this short, nostalgic time, I get to live in Ur again and feel that a particular place is my home – where it both belongs to me and I belong to it. I’ve lived on Sini Shake and Lorme Rush, and now I can say that I’ve lived in TimTim Timm.  Not only that, but going forward I’ll always feel an even more enhanced sense of guardianship of this street due to having actually lived right here, among the sparklies we once named Old Faithful and Big Lick. I’m not trying to open up the new-vs-old housing debates – I love the homestreets system and I understand why we can’t really have links from homestreets to Ur directly.  That just makes this particular bittersweet aspect of “Only in Alpha” something to cherish while it lasts.

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Behind the Scenes

How Not to be Overwhelmed by Ancestral Nostalgia: A Friendly Guide (Part 1)

Hi, I’m Troy McClure Fidgety. You may remember me from such previous Glitch usernames as “girlthulhu” and “elfskinned”, my tower (“H.P. Lovecraftables”), or the person who handed out random Cubimals to strangers. I also clogged up Global with an inexhaustable stream of Simpsons quotes, and I once told somebody that they needed to fight Triangle Man in order to obtain a Teal-White Triangle Key (sorry about that). But if you don’t know me, that’s fine, too.

A few of us Alphateers have been given the opportunity to share our Eleven experiences thus far. I consider this an honor because not only does this allow me to combine my two great loves — writing and Glitch — but I’ve been entrusted by the devs to not cause their blog to spontaneously combust. It’s a responsibility that I’m taking very seriously, which is why I’m choosing to post a series of entries outlining a few salient points at a time instead of publishing an entire novella all at once. This will undoubtedly continue until my WordPress privileges are revoked.

First and foremost, I’d like to reassure my fellow Glitchen by quoting a song of my people — my people being ’90s goths who were never quite able to part with their black nail polish and Doc Martens. I cannot think of a better way to convey the good news when Peter Murphy phrased it so perfectly:

The little foxes were safe and sound
They were not dead,
They’d gone to ground.

When Ur was unimagined in a howling cacophony of imploding lines of code, we were all convinced that we’d never see our beloved second home again. Sure, we begged and pleaded on the forums; we left messages in proverbial bottles and lined our favorite streets with our heartbreaking notes, knowing full well that they’d disappear, too; we did our best to contain our grief in one form or another. And when none of that seemed to work, we would cry during private moments when we were sure that nobody could hear us. I was there, and if you’re reading this, then I know that you were as well.

I’m sorry if I’ve caused that pain — a very real, tangible pain that has knotted itself up in the space right behind your heart — to come rushing back to the surface; if I know this community as well as I think I do, I’m fully aware of the mourning each of us still carries. But that’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you:

It all lives on — all of it. Every paranoid Bubble tree, every chattering Cubimal, every curiously shaped mushroom in Groddle Forest (ahem, Kukubee). Every Giant, every hipster crab. The Rube, the Rook, and Uncle Friendly’s (Questionable) Emporium. And, yes, even the little foxes. They’re all safe and sound.

Well, sort of.

I deal in Cosma’s realm of airy and silly things like words and crazy ideas, not the solidly palpable domain of Tii, composed of math and programming and code, a confusingly logical language unto itself. So, as a non-tech person, I’ll try to explain this the best I can: The Eleven team came into possession of the original Glitch code and assets. Technically, everything still exists in that jumble of if-then loops and commands. Unfortunately, and for whatever reason, a few thousand lines are simply missing. Not only that, but at this moment in time, they’re running all of it on a very small and extremely temperamental server. In addition, this is all being done on a strictly volunteer basis; everyone has jobs, families, and otherwise important and pressing responsibilities. There’s only so many hours in a day, and even though they’d like to work on the Eleven project full-time, they simply can’t.

But what they have managed to get done is nothing short of impressive. I don’t know where to begin conveying my awe and gratitude. With each code push, Ur springs back to life, piece by glorious piece. What was fairly unstable and somewhat dead in January is finally starting to breathe on its own. Of course, some things are still missing or don’t work — the aforementioned foxes, for one, and housing; we still can’t overload the poor server with too many butterflies, and sometimes Helga doesn’t move as she should — but that’s fine. In fact, it’s better than just “fine”: It’s hopeful, it’s joyful, and most of all, it makes me tear up and sing all at once.

Right now, I don’t like to imagine that the Giants are growing restless and drowsy. No, I like to think that they’ve finally had their coffee, and they’re all sitting down to talk about the crazy dream that they all shared. “Was that real?” Grendaline would ask, and Alph would just smile sadly. “What about the Glitchen?” Friendly would offer. “Do you remember every one of their names?” “Oh, I do. I certainly do. Let me think for a second,” Lem would counter.

Eventually, Cosma will pipe up “Hey, let’s do that again.”

Someday. But until then, Tii is hard at work in the other room, pulling it all together and harnessing the beauty of imagination in stark lines of code. And everyone must be patient.

Author’s Note: The song mentioned at the beginning of the entry was “The Passion of Lovers” by Bauhaus, and it’s about the narrator falling in love with a banshee, but the relationship not working out for obvious reasons. It’s sad and haunting and beautiful, which is why it’s long been one of my favorite songs. If you’ve got a few minutes, I highly suggest checking it out.

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Behind the Scenes, General

OMG, OMG, OMG – What Will Your First Day Be Like in Game?

KaiyonAlatar graciously asked a few of the alpha testers to be guest bloggers to share some experiences from our point of view. Hope you enjoy our articles from the “other side”.

I have to say, I distinctly remember when one of the Alphateers entered the game for the first time, and I was chuckling with glee as they posted to global (and frankly was also shocked at the time that the game did not crash since global was still being a bit persnickety at the time). The global chat box was filled with OMG’s and Squee’s at the total excitement of this new player. I think I enjoyed it so much because it was it was exactly the way I felt the first time I entered Eleven, but I did not vocalize it to the group. Truth be told, it is how I feel whenever there is an update with new stuff for us to test; except now, I am trying to be a bit better at sharing it with the other players and developers (devs) in global (which, by the way, is much more stable now – the game has come a long way in a few months).

So to write this article, I pondered back to my first day in the game. I remember choking up as the loading screen displayed and I heard that familiar tune. First, I was floored that I was a second round draft pick in Jan 2015. Since I did not really know this dev team, I honestly did not think I would be chosen until maybe closed Beta at the earliest. Second, I still could not believe that the game was being rebuilt. Third, I was excited beyond words since in a few moments I was going to experience the game again.

While waiting for the game to load, I remembered the “’Two Years Past’ or ‘Welcome Home’” blog by KaiyonAlatar that talked about being able to “roam a single street”, “having a long way to go”, and “the most minimal of functions” when they allowed the original alpha testers into the game in Dec 2014. So I thought when I got into the game, I would just see Gregarious Grange and that would probably be it. Maybe, if we were super fortunate at this stage (only a month later), they might have all of Groddle Meadow rebuilt. I remember being a late Alpha tester for Glitch and all we had was Groddle, Ix, and Uralia. So, being in early Alpha for this rebuild, I was expecting that we would all be predominately running around the one street, and just happy to see the game working and having fun with the other testers. It would be a big bonus if we could interact with the various items in game, and huge if we could roam around all of Groddle Meadow. I was nervous because I did not want to be disappointed with my grand expectations.

Holy moly!! Did I completely underestimate the progress this dev team has made – silly me. I could not believe that most of the persistent part of Ur was available to us to run through – not just Gregarious Grange, but ALL of the main map and the Ilmenskie areas. WOW! And then I had my own first day OMG and Squee moments…

OMG, I could change streets, and explore most of Ur again!

OMG, I could water trees.

OMG, I could pet trees.

OMG, I could harvest trees.

Squee, there were cool sounds (some that I didn’t remember) when harvesting trees.

OMG, I could plant seeds in community plots.

OMG, I could dig for peat and scrape barnacles.

OMG, the vendors were around, and I could purchase things from them.

OMG, bags, bags and more bags…and toolboxes too!

Squee, I could jump!

OMG, skills.

OMG, upgrade cards.

Squee, I could make food and drinks!

OMG, mining worked too!

When I started, we were not able to collect quoins. Oh how they taunted us. Hanging there so pretty. We could jump, but it did not have any effect since “collisions” were not implemented yet.  Eventually with one of the updates, the quoins did not taunt us any longer, and we were able to interact with them, along with various other portals. It was amazing to see how many things were interconnected based on the way we interacted with them in the game.

Squee, I could jump for quoins again.

OMG, I could now jump into the Big Hole to Ix.

OMG, I could climb the ladder to Groddle and get into Groddle instead of being stopped at the top.

OMG, I could now jump into the snow storm and enter the Wintry Place.

OMG, the dust traps now worked…which meant…Squee we now had herb seeds!!

In the early days of testing, we did not have animals (so sad), and the devs would drop us resources in Gregarious Grange. There were piles of meat, milk, and bales of grain that had to be regularly dropped off so we could test out recipes. Boy, we hated bugging the devs for more stuff to be dropped off since we all knew they had more important things to do to get the game running. At one point, they provided us a tester tool and one of the menu choices was “items” which provided us a stack of that item (meat, milk, grain, emblems, fiber, etc) into our inventories. Finally, the devs no longer had to babysit us for our perpetual resource demands. Eventually, when animals were added to the game, it brought a whole new set of OMG’s and Squee’s.

OMG, I could pet piggies.

OMG, I could nibble piggies.

OMG, I got bacon as an alternate drop to meat from piggies.

Squee, I could squeeze chickens.

Whoa, I could butter up chickens (when did that happen?).

OMG, I could massage and milk butterflies.

Squee, I can pet the helikitties!

Aw, the helikitties purr when you pet them!

However, even though we had animals, we were not able to interact with them in the ways we were used to because we still had some issues with the skills trees. So, the developers provided the testers a special option on our tester tool to be able to complete formerly uncompleteable skills (long story for another blog post maybe). We are now able to learn the higher level animal skills, and even more OMG’s and Squee’s were introduced.

OMG, I could name a whole street of piggies after famous Bacons – Kevin, Sir Francis, Nathaniel (yes, that is usually me).

OMG, I could name the butterflies “Flutter By” again (guilty).

OMG, I could name the chickens evil names because they still will not incubate our eggs yet.

OMG, I can finally get snails by feeding metal to sloths!

Squee, the sloths spit snails again!

There is so much that works in the game now. I cannot really begin to list everything. I still marvel at all the things we CAN do. In just the past few months, so many more things are working than when I first got into the game. While there are still many things for the devs to implement, they have come a long way to piecing Ur back together again for all of us. It is a glorious sight to behold, and they have done an amazing job to get Eleven to where it is today.

But, I am just wondering, what do you think will be your big OMG or Squee when you get back into the game?

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