worldalpha

This last month has been very interesting for WorldAlpha. The game has progressed on many fronts. There have been marketing initiatives, graphics and videos developed, contracts signed, and a whole new core for WorldAlpha developed. Let me break it down for you.

Fiverr & Article Marketing
The first discovery I made this month was Fiverr. This site has a lot of people willing to work and do something productive for you for just $5. So, I thought I would put it to the test, and paid someone to write about the upcoming MMOs, of SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, Secret World, and of course WorldAlpha. I knew it was a stretch putting my game with the other 3, but generating some hype or buzz, I believe what gaming marketing is all about. So, for $5, I got a very decent article.
So, with a decent article, I used another Fiverr service, and had it promoted to over 700 article directories. The traffic from the actual article was limited, but it did help increase my rankings in Google for both "worldalpha" and "world alpha". I also received some visitors from Google on other keywords.

Concept Art
There was more movement on the graphics side as well. I had my artist create two different destruction views of the city.

City is burning.

Total Destruction of a City

Teaser Trailer Videos
With more graphics to work with, I decided I wanted to create a trailer. At Fiverr, I discovered some quick videos that could be created for only $5. I just had to supply the graphics and wording, and a day later, I had a teaser video. While still having limited graphic assets, I still wanted something. I realized the quality wasn’t as high as I wanted, but it was a starting point. So, here is WorldAlpha’s first teaser trailer.
Shortly after creating this, a fan from irc, Raikage, decided that he would create a trailer on his own. Using some of the WorldAlpha graphics, along with some FanArt he had found, he created the first FanArt teaser trailer. I must admit, it is better than the one I came up with. Thanks Raikage!

Mini-game Progress
We have just about finalized the contract for Golden Gear Games to do our first mini-game, WorldAlpha Sniper. This flash based game will be a traditional sniper game, with some cool WorldAlpha related graphics and weapons. The game will be available initially as a Flash game, and then ported to iOS. It will give players a chance to try the game, before it is incorporated into the WorldAlpha MMORTS, as a mini-game. In the MMO it will be used when the player is in battle as infantry. We hope to release the game early February for beta, and finalize the game by end of March at the latest.
Along with getting Golden Gear games, I had to find another artist, as my current artist is taking until February off. So, I found Igor, from the UK, to start in on the first scene. Here are some of his initial mock-ups.

Military and Politics Gameplay
I have been working hard on developing more of the gameplay for the game. Thinking through how the military and politics will work. This involves coming up with screenshots for each of the different activities. For the politics module, it meant going through and finding out all the possible types of different governments that exists, and seeing which ones might work for the game. Using Wikipedia and a few other sources, I came up with 59 possible government types. From this I have whittled it down to 16 possible government types for the game. This might go down a little more as I make final refinements. I’ll leave the whole process for another DevBlog.

New Core
One major step over the last month was I have decided to opt for a new core for the game. The initial core that was developed was an API-based core, that I abandoned once I started to become the main developer. This new core developed by Robin Hood Technology has a lot of functionality that I should be able to adopt quite quickly. This should make for faster development, as well as more secure code. I look forward to transferring over the work I’ve done thus far, and moving forward on a faster pace.

Looking forward to 2012
Well, WorldAlpha has come a long way since being conceived at the beginning of 2011. It has been a good year. Development hasn’t been as fast as hoped, but that usually is the case. I’m looking forward to 2012, and seeing all the different elements coming together. I’m really pushing hard for a June beta launch, and a full launch by end of September 2012. It should make for an exciting year!

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