I've finally entered the polishing phase of the game development process. What this entails is testing, making notes, fixing, then rinsing and repeating. I ended up with nearly 40 items to fix or change from just playing through the introduction of the game, and it's taken me all day just to mark most of them off (I've still got nearly ten items left). I can't imagine how many problems I'll spot after actually managing to play the game all the way through.

But that's just today, for the rest of the week, I've been prepping myself for entering this polishing phase by doing up the GUI elements and making an icon for the game.

I'm very proud of how the icon came out. It took me an entire day to make it though. It resizes nicely as well.

The polishing phase is all about prepping the game for Alpha testing, where I have someone else play through the game while I watch and make notes. So I need to get it to as good of a standard as possible, since the person I'll have do the Alpha testing, can only play through the game for the first time, once. (And he probably wouldn't want to play through it a second time anyway.)

After fixing the problems identified during the Alpha testing, it'll be onto Beta testing, where I send the game to someone I know for them to play it and report back any problems they encountered.

Then after fixing those problems, it'll be onto the release.

The biggest uncertainty is the Beta testing phase, since people are busy doing other things, and will get around to it when they get around to it. But I'm hoping to enter the Beta testing phase by the end of this month.