Alpha, Beta… Release?

Terms like alpha, beta, early-access, and in-dev are used quite a lot these days. But what do they mean for Antidote? In this blog post we’ll discuss how we do things.

In Antidote, each of these is a “release channel”. We have a few hundred people in Alpha, many more in beta, and (hopefully) billions in the release channel.

At the moment we’re preparing for our first release to the beta channel, which will be available globally. So what’s the difference between them, and should you join us in beta, or wait for the release?

The alpha channel gets the most frequent updates. It’s nearly the latest version of the game, and has the latest and hopefully greatest features. It’s also a bit unstable – it’s the testing ground for game balancing, bugfixes, and early versions of features. We test very carefully, but you might experience annoying bugs, like problems with cross device synchronization or levels being outrageously hard to beat. The upside is… you get to tell everyone how cool you are.

Our aim in the alpha channel is “to be good enough to move it to beta”. That means polishing up all the new stuff till it’s good enough. By good enough, we mean that we can’t find anything wrong with it, and no one in the alpha channel is complaining. The beta channel is very stable, and we encourage you to join it if you’re even a tiny bit interested in Antidote!

So, if the beta is so good, what about the final release channel? That will be for the full, finished Antidote. After several months of bug fixing, playtesting, and gathering feedback from beta players, we’ll move the beta into the release channel -just like we did with the alpha. The release is different in that it will be “finished” with all the features. We have some exciting new features coming, and these will go through the same filter of channels as above, but based on a product that looks more like the full release.

Hopefully this clarifies things a little – be sure to sign up to our mailing list for the latest information on Antidote. If you’re interested in joining our alpha test program, just send us an email and we’ll see what we can do!