The finish line is in sight! We’ve just started our beta testing on An Assassin in Orlandes and all being well we will be submitting to Apple very soon. It’s strange entering this stage of a development cycle especially when it’s for a project that you hold very close to your heart and has been a dream to produce for a long-time.

We’ve already encountered a few hiccups especially when the coder sends out a beta build to the testers which doesn’t actually feature the actual gamebook in it and then promptly (and understandably) collapses after a few days with little sleep! I’m looking at you Ben!

Testing is always an interesting prospect. It’s the opportunity to squeeze out any nasty bugs and gameplay issues as well as, in our case, making sure every aspect of the gamebook narrative works correctly and flows smoothly making it compelling and fun to read. We’ve already had to change a key part of the narrative as I realised that one specific story arc which is integral to the story just was never revealed to reader if they took a certain path through the book. It’s kinda like reading Lord of the Rings and missing the “we have to destroy the ring” part and just thinking all the characters are just simply on a nice stroll through the countryside to get a bit of exercise and let their dinner go down.

So who is testing? Well we’ve had a small team of pre-beta testers playing recent builds to hammer the major stuff and have recruited some keen Touch Arcade forum posters who have been supporting our thread to help us polish. Through this combination of peeps we hope to refine Assassin so that we create a kick-ass first Gamebook Adventures experience and hope to submit soon. We’ve heard rumours that submission times have reduced significantly too  so expect to see it on the App Store very soon.

We’ll obviously keep you posted…. all hail Orlandes!