Ultima Online: Samurai Empire Designer Diary #3
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The Alpha Milestone was a huge accomplishment for the team, and a bit of a melancholy one for me. Alpha is the beginning of the end of the pre-release development cycle. It means the base components of every system are built and ready for integration; a "design meets code" phase. It also meant we had moved past the creation stage of development. The big-ticket items were all finished in their basic form and no others would be introduced, no matter how much you wanted to sneak them in. Alpha is a mental shift from creation and a move into the polishing phase. Sometimes the boundary between design and polish is quite blurred, but there is a definite shift.
