How many WIP's are sensible for an author?

[Eiwynn]

@Hannya

But then you get into the thorny issue of whether, once you have released your product into the wild/opened your forum for public use, you get to tell your users they’re Doing It Wrong.

This is getting off topic, so I will give my reply and then if we decide to pursue this we should open our own thread…

A WiP thread’s main purpose is to gather feedback. Part of that gathering process is to direct your testers … in a public beta, there will be those that only desire to express their fan-girl support (or fan-guy?) but an author really should be pro-active in conducting a WiP beta test – open, closed, public or private.

This is not a release of a final product into the wild – that is only accomplished when you publish.

This is not even an “early-access” release like you see on Steam – Hosted Games does not have the tools or the set-up for this type of game release.

These are not even betas in the traditional gaming sense. I’ll find the quote from 5 or so years ago that emphasizes this… brb with it.

Edit 1 -

@jasonstevanhill

Though this is not how these terms are normally used, might I suggest a definition-of-thumb for ChoiceScriot games? Beta should refer to a game for which there is a full draft. It may undergo serious changes, but it is still a full draft.

Alpha, on the other hand, might refer to games that are not yet full drafts.

Better definitions = greater clarity?

With these definitions, we see that staff consider most WiP threads now opened as Alpha threads… I’m not sure I’ve seen actual betas as defined here in a very long time (not even “official CoG” WiP threads were completed drafts yet) …