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johnzim

The vernacular is wanting

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Thanks for setting up this forum! This is my first post on the idle forums: I'm an indie dev in my spare time, living in London and I build server software for a living.

Anyway for a while it's bugged me that there are a few stages in the development of every game that could seriously use a fitting label. I find a lot of devs describe these same distinct stages in their games and I think it'd be fun to come up with some pithy appellations for them.

The stages I'd like words for are, in particular:

1) The long wandering period when the game is mechanically coming together but is just not fun.

Some tend to describe this period as 'Alpha' but borrowing terms from traditional development like this tends to lead to imprecision - most enterprise/consumer software have clear features set out before or during early development and games can still be a lot more fluid. Far more 'polished' game projects have been completely transformed during this period (or have never left it)

2) the point at which a game suddenly tips into being enjoyable.

Everyone recognizes this as one of the most sublime moments in development, yet we don't have a word for it. I'd love to hear what folks can come up with for it.

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I don't think it's entirely universal - I've heard of devs who rigorously prototype their games to ensure that they're fun before they start committing any resources to them.

 

It's definitely not alpha, though - that's the point at which the game is first ready to be shown to outside people (and why, from a consumer perspective, alpha seems to run the gamut from 'basically nothing' to 'basically solid').

 

Beta is when you've gotten enough feedback from your alpha testers that you're ready to put it out to a cross-section of your actual customers, confident that you're not going to get the same feedback from them. In games, this has been co-opted by marketing to also mean a pre-release version with no substantial changes between the beta and release.

 

Traditional development has the release candidate, which is a beta version that, if there are no major problems with it, will become the released version. I don't think I've ever heard game developers use 'release candidate'; vice versa, referring to a version as the 'gold' version doesn't occur in traditional development.

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I don't really use words like alpha or beta, I just say "it's not done" if it's not, because it bugs me how nebulous those words are.

 

There's a good HL2 mod that describes itself as being in Omega, which I guess is before Alpha, but it's kind of just a device to make sure your expectations aren't super high going in

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So what really is the difference between alpha and beta? That's something I've never been clear on. And it doesn't help that recently 'beta' has come to mean 'multiplayer demo'.

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I've always seen it as Alpha just being even less ready for release than Beta. Beta is getting closer, and something you could probably show to a potential buyer without being totally embarassed by it, whereas an Alpha I always thought was more of a "this is kind of like what our game is going to be, it's really not ready yet, bear with all of the stupid bugs and unfinished shit"

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So what really is the difference between alpha and beta? That's something I've never been clear on. And it doesn't help that recently 'beta' has come to mean 'multiplayer demo'.

I used to take 'beta' to mean more or less feature complete software that still needs polish and bugfixing, whereas alpha is the stage where features are still being revised and added. No one follows that though, even 15 years ago mods called their releases betas when they were what I'd call alphas.

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They are pretty nebulous terms, but in general for me alpha has meant core gameplay feature complete (bugs allowed) and a certain percentage of content in, and beta has meant all features complete (no crashes or NMAs) and all content in (even of some of it is going to get revision). These definitions are very publisher-oriented though - you'd probably want entirely different definitions if they were just for yourself.

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Maybe terms that actually sound like what they mean should be used. Such as "feature complete but unfinished" if that is what you mean by beta, or "playable but not feature complete" if that's what you mean by alpha etc. A bit too long terms for them to catch on perhaps, but at least you don't need to worry about people misinterpreting what you mean.

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What actually defines alpha and beta isn't the state of the product, but the testing pool you're using: alpha testers are people who are in the core demographic and will be relatively nice, who you use to confirm your vision and your design is working. Beta testers are closer to the general population, you don't care if they're mean, and they're finding bugs and breaking features. If you don't have a graduated testing pool, for instance if you are selling your unfinished game to all comers or are doing a pre-release weekend as a promotional exercise, then 'alpha' and 'beta' are basically self-defined milestones.

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I've never heard alpha and beta defined by the testing pool before. I've always heard it as internal milestone definitions, going back to Apple II software I geeked out over in elementary school.

That's not to say my internal definition is correct or there aren't competing definitions, but defining your software state by your testing pool seems backwards to me, unless you happen to be a tester.

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At companies I've worked for:

Alpha = Feature Lock. All of the primary systems have been decided upon, even if they aren't implemented. Some things may end up getting added (rarely) or removed (more commonly) later on, but this is the stage where you know what game you're trying to make. Basically, you have a complete v1 design doc. Pre-alpha is prototyping to "find the fun".

 

Beta = Feature Complete. Everything (systems) that's going to be in the game is in the game, although it might be janky and broken. In theory, all that's left is fixing bugs although severity of the bugs may range from "typo on this menu page" to "game crashes immediately" or "level 2 doesn't exist"

 

There's a "content complete"/"gamma" milestone that we've used internally at times meaning, basically, everything is in, but bugs remain (so no "level doesn't exist" bugs). But it's pretty gameplay-dependent whether that even makes sense. "First Playable" is a pretty common term as well, on the earlier side of the spectrum.

 

In my experience, Beta is pretty universal, but alpha varies from team to team.

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I've never heard the definition of alpha and beta by a testing pool either, CLWheeljack's definition maps to what I think of. Beta is definitely pretty much always agreed upon as feature complete. The idea of alpha as feature lock makes sense, I've always thought of it as a more nebulous "resembles the final product in structure and some content, but doesn't have all of both yet". I'm also speaking from a general software background though, and not a video game background.

 

The distinction the OP makes about stages of a game being enjoyable or not doesn't seem to map to the traditional idea of alpha and beta as based on features at all, I think that's an entirely separate distinction. Plenty of games that are deemed alpha are enjoyable (like the most recent trend of early access stuff, or just like, minecraft from a few years ago), and some games that are finished and released aren't any fun at all. I think whether a game is fun is subjective anyway, so trying do define a game's state by that seems difficult.

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I'd guess it's competing definitions. We used 'release candidate' for pretty much every project, and only referred to 'alpha' or 'beta' versions if they were given to internal or external customers pre-release. This is in Microsoft solution development, it may have peculiar to our company but given that there's at least three definitions in here I'm guessing everyone has their own ideas of what it means.

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