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Looks like I missed a dev-blog update or two! Let me sum up:

After the last major snapshot build (the one with Bard in it), we started getting a lot more crash reports than usual. Turns out the way we use Unity, the 5.5 version uses more memory than 5.4. Not a lot more, but we were very close to the edge for a lot of computers, and this pushed some computers over the edge. (I believe it mostly affected laptop PCs with video cards that share video-memory with the CPU's memory, but ...

Welcome to the Project: Gorgon Alpha Test!

Whether you are a seasoned video game tester or if this is your first testing experience, this guide will prepare you for the road ahead!

I. UNDERSTANDING EARLY DEVELOPMENTAL TESTING

What exactly is “early developmental testing” and what are you supposed to do in it? I’ll give you a brief overview of the developmental process and help define your role in it.

A. The Stages of Development
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Building Gazluk Keep -- the new group dungeon in Gazluk -- took a lot more time to finish than we originally anticipated. A big chunk of the extra time was spent on basic optimization. This is a big dungeon with a lot of enemies, but still the dungeon had much worse framerate than we expected. We don't do a lot of client-side optimization during alpha, so I was pretty rusty at it, and there were new Unity tools to learn how to use, too. All in all, we learned a lot about how to optimize large-scale ...

Next week's snapshot build will include Gazluk Keep, the new group dungeon. It will be the highest-level dungeon in the game for a while, so we're working hard on making it a fun place. It's intended for groups of five or six level 65-75 players. (Of course, if you have ultra-high-quality gear, you'll need fewer people.) It's a pretty dangerous place, and pretty chaotic, but I'm hoping that it's paced a little better than the other full-group dungeons. We'll see.

This is the third full-group ...

I'm back from my rest, and spent a week-and-a-half working on some bugs, which became the update a couple days ago. I'm working on the next snapshot, which will focus on the new Gazluk dungeon! But that's a couple of weeks away and I don't really have too much to say about it yet. Instead, I wanted to talk about a little side-topic: player-run challenges.

There was a thread on the forum about doing "challenge characters" -- where you make a new character and follow special ...