First Wander Alpha Version Released

We're excited to say that the first alpha release of Wander will be available today! If you have already signed up, expect an email in the next few days with details on how to download the alpha. We will be releasing it to a small group first with a few different test systems and then making it available to more people each day, as we expect to find some small bugs early on and don't want to make everyone hit the same bug. The main purpose of this step of alpha is to test in the multiplayer part of the system is working correctly. The game mechanics are very limited at the moment, and many parts of the game are still to be added. We really want to make it clear that Wander is far from finished yet, and there is more stuff on our todo list than on our done list but that this is an important step. The main technical stuff is done and now we can focus on the overall experience.

What should you test in this stage of the alpha:

• try find each of the character unlocks, there are 3 in the alpha: Elf, Griffin and Azartash
• try to find where a shelter is, in case there is a storm
• try and find one of the flowers and pick it
• fly somewhere
• look at the waterfalls
• chat to other players

If you have a multi gpu system (SLI/CrossFire) we'd love if you could tell us your FPS with all gpu's active and with some disabled

Known bugs:

can't look around with the mouse while flying
some rocks are missing collision meshes
performance is pretty terrible
you can walk through trees
tree rendering bug with water overlapping

We are not the kind of game that requires you to sign an NDA and not talk about anything during alpha testing. We'd love if you posted any screen shots or videos of Wander any where you want and you are encouraged to discuss your ideas about the game. Please make sure to mention that it's from the early alpha release and isn't what the final game will look like. Also if you're running on anything but the best settings, please mention that. The alpha is missing a lot of important stuff that will be in the version released in July, but we think it's important to get feedback from players now.

When you find a bug, or have any feedback, please post in the appropriate part of the forums. We will be adding sections for each.

Thanks to everyone who is testing Wander and everyone who has supported the game so far. We're really excited to hear your feedback. 

Wander is brought to you by:
Aaron, Anjay, Alex, Birrin, Chris, Daniel, David, David, Elaine, Garth, Jack, Joe, Justin, Loki, Sarah, Shelley, Sinead, Tadgh, YueYue

Demo of flight mechanics, first stage of alpha testing starts this Friday

Things are fantastically busy for the Wander team at the moment, but we are getting a lot done. A short demo of the new flight mechanics & character morphing UI is available here: http://youtu.be/JEECJgKHtV4  It's silent for now, but the sound team is hard at work!

I am very excited to say that the level design team have been busy and the planet has some exciting new features, my favourite of course being waterfalls!

We've also been making a lot of progress on modelling and texturing, including this beautiful work from Sarah, using Shelley's pictograms:

 The first stage of alpha testing will start this Friday. If you haven't yet signed up, click on the sign up as a tester link. We're going to be release to a few testers first and then expanding from there.

Unity Editor, Flight and HUD

So we've made some wonderful progress over the last week, and tomorrow we will be uploading a video showing a few of the new things. It's only a few weeks until the first stage of alpha testing so we've been testing a few new things internally, including making sure Wander works on all three platforms, getting the new flight mechanics and UI into the game and making a giant amount of progress on make the planet look better.

Things haven't all been perfect though. The source control we were using turned out to be problematic, and the alternatives we have found so far seems also to have some issues. I'd love to hear if anyone has a good solution for source control in an environment with a lot of large binary files. We've also had some nasty issues with the Unity editor crashing on loading the project. Hopefully we will work out the solution to those soon so that the effect team member can get back to being productive.

Tomorrow, new video and some screenshots. :)