TGEA Beta wrap up - thoughts and thanks

Hello everyone. As you all know, we recently released TGEA 1.7.0 and have been very happy to hear some of the positive things people have had to say about it! We hope as you spend some quality time with this release that you let us know your thoughts via the handy survey link provided within the documentation, to help us better understand your needs and concerns as the end-users of this product.

One of the things we wanted to bring about with this release was to try to really include the community more in helping us track down bugs and submit feedback regarding the documentation as well as the various beta releases as they were handed off for you to bang away on. We got some great feedback and some really nasty bugs were found and squashed.


This Bombardier beetle represents a nasty bug quite nicely, no?

As Matt has stated previously in his own blog, you guys really came through in spades and we could not have done it without you! People submitted bugs in a well written, easy to reproduce format, and it paid off considerably when it came to adding them to our bug tracker and going through and fixing them. We are definitely going to continue working on improving this process of communication, sharing and collecting bug reports from you, and releasing regular betas and updates. I look forward to future betas and working again with all of you!


*Simulated GarageGames community member pointing out a couple of bugs.

I mentioned a while back that I would be coming up with some prizes and other goodies to give back to certain members of the community as a way of saying 'thank you!' for helping us to track down and squash bugs among other things. Initially, I had planned to come up with some metric or method of determining who specifically gets what. Well, that didn't happen this time. Due to time constraints I was pretty heads down working on getting this release into your hands as quickly as possible.

So, how did we decide who gets what? It was a pretty non-scientific process, involving talking between Matt and myself, going over submitted bugs, reading some tea leaves, and rolling some 12-sided die's I dug out my Dungeons and Dragons stuff in my parent's basement. In the future, I'm guessing we will have a little more time to dedicate to making the process a little more 'transparent' to the community.

So, this time around, we have decided to award to Rene Damm one commercial upgrade to TGEA (an $1195.00 USD value)

...and to Mike Rowley a cool $100.00 USD worth of merchandise of his choosing from the GarageGames store. Congrats guys, and thanks for the help with the TGEA beta!

Lastly, I want to reiterate once again what a big help all of you were in helping us to release this version of TGEA. Thank you!