We are very pleased to announce the Alpha is live! It has been a longer road than we expected to get here, but we are very excited about the release.
Getting Started:
To get started here are a few important links:
The game app is live at:
The app and contracts are live on the Rinkeby Test Net, for more information on Rinkeby go to:
You will need a browser Ethereum client or plugin such as Metamask:
The documentation can be found on our official wiki at:
The official issue tracker for the Alpha can be found on github at:
What’s Next:We have been REALLY busting our butts on this one… So we’re taking a short break on development (don’t worry just a couple weeks to breathe a bit). So no further development will occur until the 19th of April. During this window we will still check in, respond to some questions, and do some moderating of the issue tracker, but we’re trying to unplug for a couple weeks to come back fresh so please keep this in mind.At that point, we will begin nailing bugs/issues that have been identified by the community, and getting the Alpha to a state that is smooth running so that further extensive testing can occurWe will occasionally release patches to the Alpha, these will result in a database wipe if they require any changes to the back-end contracts. (purely front-end changes are non-breaking).We will occasionally adjust balancing of the back-end to make combat fair. This will only come from watching how things progress with the community. If fights are proving to be unbalanced we will correct.Once we’ve nailed the top critical issues, we’ll begin planning out the Beta development roadmap while continuing to fix minor issues on the Alpha.We will then release the plan and schedule leading up to Beta release.Known Issues:
Here is a list of a few things to be aware of going into the test (for a full, and up to date list of known issues, please see the issues section in the github project linked above):
After every transaction (creating a warrior, upgrading, starting events, etc…) you should be prompted to pay for gas. If you are not, check the (MetaMask) plugin, it may be hiding the prompts.There are some bugs/quirks with polling events. Please see the documentation wiki (mentioned above) for full details, so you know what to expect. We need your testing and input to help us nail this one down, so please push through this minor frustration so that we can make BattleDrome better!The UI is not 100% complete, it’s a rough UI for now which just gives the basic functionality. It will be significantly improved in future versions.The UI does NOT include the graphical spectator engine, this was not planned for this phase, and is planned for a later releaseThe UI is a bit sluggish. We are aware it’s a bit clunky, right now this has to do with some limitations in the underlying frameworks. We are expecting a future patch to Web3 and Truffle to allow us a much more elegant way of fetching/syncing/updating UI elements from changes in the blockchain.Gas prices are high. We know this, we’ve optimized them heavily in many areas. The big one is in the spectator/polling of events. This is compensated in the polling reward, but we do want to reduce the cost in order to improve the overal economic efficiency of the game. This will come in future versions (in some cases due to underlying technology improvements, in other cases due to further optimization passes we undertake)Currently the dialing/balance of the combat/economics are not fully tested. This is a “first draft”. We expect to tune these parameters throughout the Alpha and Beta in order to achieve a much more balanced set of mechanics for the final release.We are aware that the graphical rendering of the warriors has some minor glitches. Again, this was meant to be a basic html interface, without any graphics in the original scope, we wanted to add a bit more flair, but the fine-tuning of rendering was low-priority for alpha. We will be refining leading up to beta.
Keeping these things in mind, please get into the game, try it out, and have fun! And don’t hesitate to send us your feedback via github!
Again to re-iterate please report any issues or general feedback!
Please submit them through our github project issues tracker:
