How does the alpha stage work?

[Frenchy]

I have done the previous stages, with oustandin quality, but as soon as I get to alpha my workers have written up to 1 million lines of code. I ended the Alpha there and my game ended up with horrible quality.

[Ninjadude501]

Well, I feel like I remember hearing something about (possibly) the score going *down* after you get it to be too complex. Be sure to do some outsourced peer reviews at regular intervals during the alpha stage (I typically do one at 50k, one at 100k, one at 150k, and have always released shortly after 150k) so that you can tell when your software is at a good place. Another thing to remember is to make sure that you're doing beta for long enough to wipe out the bugs.

[76561198365493244]

You can over-engineer it if you have people who are poor with code and the specific categories (system, 2D, etc).
Make sure to get your software reviewed by another team or outsource it as often as you can afford to make sure you aren't driving your quality down.

[Frenchy]

Originally posted by jabak.dev:

You can over-engineer it if you have people who are poor with code and the specific categories (system, 2D, etc).
Make sure to get your software reviewed by another team or outsource it as often as you can afford to make sure you aren't driving your quality down.

Originally posted by Ninjadude501:

Well, I feel like I remember hearing something about (possibly) the score going *down* after you get it to be too complex. Be sure to do some outsourced peer reviews at regular intervals during the alpha stage (I typically do one at 50k, one at 100k, one at 150k, and have always released shortly after 150k) so that you can tell when your software is at a good place. Another thing to remember is to make sure that you're doing beta for long enough to wipe out the bugs.

It was actually pretty much the opposite of over-engineering. I went to take a shower and forgot to pause my game just to find I was at 2.5M lines of code and outstanding quality.

[cfranks007]

You can do a review with your founder and get a ballpark estimate of how complete the project is. Once he is trained, he seems to be as good as the ooutsourced reviews.

[Czikenos.]

Originally posted by cfranks007:

You can do a review with your founder and get a ballpark estimate of how complete the project is. Once he is trained, he seems to be as good as the ooutsourced reviews.

When you're just starting out, knock about half of the "Overall" score off for a rough estimate. Once he starts estimating ~6 I normally get an Outsourced review.