This clearly is by far the longest time Traces of Illumination had between two releases - so I thought it might be a good time to dive a little into the history so far: The last release was V1.0alpha9b, released 2008-10-12. That's about 1 1/4 years. Until then, I had pretty short release-cycles: V1.0alpha9 just two days earlier: 2008-10-10, V1.0alpha8 less than a week earlier: 2008-10-04. V1.0alpha7 again less than a week earlier: 2008-09-28, and so V1.0alpha6, which was released 2008-09-24. V1.0alpha5 had been released just 2 days earlier, 2008-09-22, and V1.0alpha4 just 3 hours earlier that same day ;-)

V1.0alpha3, released 2008-09-15 was just a patch-release of V1.0alpha2, which was released a day earlier: 2008-09-14. V1.0alpha2 is a very noteworthy release because it was the version where Traces of Illumination got its new name.

The very first alpha had been released about a two weeks earlier 2008-08-28 in some sort of crunch-mode ;-) ... I actually intended putting release notes on this blog but only did the forum posting at the Unity forums in my Unity Awards 2008 thread. The major reason I called the version "alpha" from then on was that I had the tutorials finished, and with the tutorials, I had the single-player mode of the game complete. As you may notice from the current version number, I've ditched that "alpha" because it made the version numbers really ugly. Also, I decided to move on to a 3-digit version numbering - which will make things much cleaner in the future. So, 1.0 was "single player Traces of Illumination", even though it already had multiplayer - but the multiplayer part simply was too complex to put it into 1.0, so the first full multiplayer version will be 2.0.

Anyways, back deeper down the line of history: There were also to 0.999 versions - V0.999a, released 2008-08-13, introduced tutorials (but only the newbie and amateur ones, the pro tutorial came with "V1.0alpha"). The tutorials have an interesting story because that was one of the parts of the game where I simply wasn't sure if I could ever get it done the way I envisioned it. Fortunately, I can say I'm very happy with how they turned out. V0.999, released on the magical date 2008-08-08, introduced high-scores and a much simplified user-interface in the "single-player evaluation version". Later that same day, I announced that I'd participate in the Unity Awards 2008 with Traces of Illumination, and I also registed a trade for "internet-based services" in order to officially be able to make money with that game (bureaucracy in Germany ;-) ). OMG - originally I had planned to make 2008-08-08 the release date of Traces of Illumination ... that was not quite realistic, I guess ;-)

Preparing V0.999 took a little while. The version before that was V0.88, released 2008-05-12, so that was a birthday present to myself. As you can see in the release notes, V0.88 was a pretty big release. Just 0.08 a version number, and it took about 3 months, V0.8 was released 2008-02-10. That was the version that introduced power-ups. And at that time, Traces of Illumination was still a baby - only 2 months old.

So ... V0.7, released 2008-01-19 introduced bullet-time (my favorite power-up) and some multiplayer user-statistics (non-persistent back then). Just 5 days earlier, V0.6, released 2008-01-14, was the first version of Traces of Illumination that supported multiplayer. And that was just 9 days after I called Traces of Illumination "a game" for the first time: V0.5 - it's starting to be a game (2008-01-05). Just at the end of 2007, I had released V0.4, which was "the way towards becoming a game". So, you can certainly say that V0.3, released 2007-12-20 was still nothing but a very early prototype. Well, it did add collision detection and walls disappearing after a while. I didn't write an extra blog-posting for V0.2 - and finally, we're at the beginning of time in the Universe of Traces of Illumination: 2007-12-13, release date of V0.1.

Wow, Traces of Illumination does have a bit of history by now ... and that were 1180 hours, which is almost 150 man-days so far. Ready for V1.1.0 - see next blog posting ;-)