Busy Week news

In case you missed the announcement, Desura is a digital distribution app for games and mods. We are currently running a private beta, and will issue beta invites to those that email us or post a comment here. Time for our first status report, we will aim to post these on a semi-regular basis from here-on-in, so please track this group to be notified, or follow us on twitter.

Behind the scenes

While releasing Desura to the public is top priority, the past month has been hectic due to the Mod of the Year and Divinity 2 Competition we are currently running. Top this off with a trip to the GDC in March which needs to be organized (get in touch if you want to meet) and it is fair to say we have been keeping very busy.

The team

Mark aka Lodle, is the lead application developer. Scott aka INtense! is the lead web developer. We also have a legion of testers and editors providing help during the private-beta phase.

Mod support

At the moment Desura only supports simple installs of mods (i.e. mods that are contained inside a single folder). The problem with this approach, is this only works for around 5% of mods we host on ModDB. This week I (Mark) have been implementing ways in which we can support more complex mod installs. This is proving quite a challenge as every game is different and there are many painful "edge" cases to consider.

Controlling your release

Releasing content on Desura is a little different from releasing content on ModDB. All mods / games must go through a 5 step publish process, to ensure a high-level of quality and control. This 5 step process is mostly complete, and free mods / games can be released right now. However controlling a release (i.e. setting release dates, price, branching releases, restricting betas to certain members) is not yet available. I (Scott) am currently enhancing the 5 step process to allow more granular control, this should be a two week job.

Next steps

This will be a mammoth update so we expect to be working on this functionality and testing it for the next few weeks. It will be a major step forward, and a key one which needs to be done before Desura can go public. At the moment we are aiming to release late March / early April. A few more significant milestones still sit in our way, which we will tell you more about in the coming weeks.

As I said above, gamers email us for an invite. Developers, we are welcoming mod / indie teams that want to release on the platform, so please get in touch if that is you.