The following documents list all of the bugs, suggestions and news items that occurred during the Betas.
This archive helps show the development process of this software package.
Many hundreds of bugs where corrected and new enhancements were made to the toolkits through the course of the six betas.
I have also included comments on each beta to shed some light on their development.
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Pre-Beta Work
March 4th, 2002 to December 5, 2002
This begining time was the initial design and creation phase of the project.
How to organize the database, layouts of the forms, creation of the reports and many other considerations.
The storyteller toolkits where the first toolkits to be made.
I needed a clean way to enter in all of the abilities and charms, so these were a necessity.
Development of the charm tree logic stands out in my memory as being a very hard problem to solve!
Mike and my gaming group patiently waded through all of the buggy code I showed them.
Without Mike's constant feedback, the Toolkits would never have gotten past this embryonic phase of development.
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Beta 1
December 6, 2002 to December 26, 2002
The first beta had the Solar Toolkit and Dragon-Blooded Toolkits.
This was an exciting time for me because it was the first time people outside my gaming group where shown the toolkits.
I was of course worried about how people would respond, but that proved to be an unnecessary worry.
The response was extremely positive.
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Beta1 Bugs
Beta1 News
Beta1 Wish List
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Beta 2
December 27, 2002 to February 26, 2003
Beta 2 was the Lunar headache!
Charms based on attributes and beastman gifts made this a lot of fun because it was so darn hard to get it to work!
The first storyteller toolkits were included at this point.
Toolkits for abilities, charms, beasts, spells, backgrounds and gifts where added.
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Beta 2 Bugs
Beta 2 News
Beta 2 Wish List
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Beta 3
February 27, 2003 to May 10th, 2003
Beta 3 was all about customization.
Many of the testers used customized point costs for character creation so I needed to come up with a way to allow this.
The point template schema replaced the old hard code and gave the users what they wanted.
This turned out to be much harder then I first planned, but was well worth the effort.
My friend Andrea Smith lent her artistic talents in the first upgrade of the look of the toolkits.
Its amazing what twinking a few pixels and changing some fonts can do!
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Beta 3 Bugs
Beta 3 News
Beta 3 Wish List
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Beta 4
May 11th, 2003 to June 30th, 2003
In Beta 4, the Abyssals came to life and the much asked for Artifact Toolkit was added.
The Abyssal Toolkit was rather easy since they were so similiar to Solars.
But there was a tough spot: Liege.
The Liege background was a major pain in my side.
But thanks to the patience of the testers and many detailed error reports, I was able to hammer out a Liege that finally worked!
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Beta4 Bugs
Beta4 News
Beta4 Wish List
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Beta 5
July 1st, 2003 to September 7th, 2003
Beta 5 was the polishing phase.
I received a very detailed letter concerning the look and feel of the Toolkits.
The gentlemen wrote that the toolkits were 95% there, but weren't quite at a professional level of quality.
Nothing short of 100% would be acceptable on this project so I sat down with Andrea Smith once again.
This time I brought my dev pc to her house and she directed me on what needed to be changed.
"Move that textbox over a few pixels, no, more to the left. Perfect!"
The fine tuning of a interface can be a very difficult time, but in this case I believe the results speak for themselves.
As an afterthought I threw in the Mortal Toolkit.
It had been on the wish list since Beta 1 so I thought what the heck!
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Beta 5 Bugs
Beta 5 News
Beta 5 Wish List
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Beta 6
October 16th, 2003 to February 13th, 2004
After taking a short break, I got back into it by upgrading the look of all of the Storyteller Toolkits.
There were a dozen ST Toolkits at this point so it was no small task to change all of these to the current look.
After that came the allowing of abilities and attributes to ten.
This had to be completed before I started on the Sidereals since they have charms that require a six in an ability.
The Sidereals were the first core rulebook that required this so I needed to have it working.
After that, nothing really stands out as being extrememly difficult with the Sidereals.
I had already done so many bizaar coding stunts on the previous betas that the masters of fate turned out smoothly.
The Weapons and Armor Toolkits were added as a late addition.
People had been asking for them since this whole thing began so I felt it would be a nice wrap up to this project.
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Beta 6 Bugs
Beta 6 News
Beta 6 Wish List
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