Book III has been officially Greenlit on Steam. We really appreciate all the votes we’ve gotten from you fine people. Thanks so much!

With summer drawing to an end, we’ve gotten a lot of messages asking when Book III will be released. We apologize for not doing a Book III progress update sooner.

We just finished testing “Alpha 1” and are fixing the problems that were uncovered during that session. We’ll be testing “Alpha 2” October, with semi-public Beta testing in November.

Right now, Book III is scheduled to be released before the end of 2013. Our confidence is high that we will meet this goal. We should be able to drop an accurate release date when Beta testing begins.

Need help with Eschalon: Book II? GameBanshee has posted an exhaustive database of Book II information, containing everything you might ever want to know about it, including a full walk-through. Really impressive stuff!

Link: GameBanshee’s Eschalon: Book II Content Overload

Click on the YouTube link on the left to see it. Be advised that it does contain a couple spoilers, in case you are one of those kinds of fans.

Also, don’t forget to click ‘Yes’ on our Steam Greenlight campaign.

We’ve made a Steam Greenlight page for Eschalon: Book III. If you want to see Book III on Steam (Windows, Macintosh and Linux) be sure to click the link below and give it a “Yes” vote!

Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=169792578

Spread the word: the Drunken Lizard Pub is back in business!

New user registration is disabled until we can get some new security in place. If you really want to join in on our grand re-opening, send us an email with your preferred username and we’ll create an account for you.

The old style is no longer usable, so we have to deal with the bright and cheery style for the time being. The Pub will slowly return to it’s dank old self in time.

We Tweeted earlier:

Getting closer every day. Doing alpha testing in August. Possibly beta testing by Oct. Patience, more info coming soon!

This led to us to receive several messages asking what’s the difference between Alpha and Beta testing? Well, each developer may answer this question differently, but for our own internal usage, we define these two stages as:

ALPHA stage: The main quest is completable start to finish, but several side quests are missing. Many maps are still missing details. Some secondary NPCs are not in place yet. Testing at this stage allows us to gain feedback on things like estimated play-through time and how the testers feel about the progression of the storyline. Major bugs are often uncovered which will need patched before Beta. Some early balancing takes place during Alpha testing. Not all developers actually test the Alpha version like this, but we have found that the feedback we get in this early stage is very, very helpful and can shorten the length of time we stay in beta.

BETA stage: The game is complete and not much will change before the release date. Testing at this stage is more about catching all the last minute bugs and spelling errors. We will focus more on balancing now, making sure the game is neither too difficult nor too easy for the testers. We can usually put a solid release date in place at this time, based on the response from the beta testers.

Our forums (the beloved Drunken Lizard Pub) are down. We updated the forum software, ran into some problems, fidgeted with some code… and now it’s a big pile of broken. Last backup was 24 hours ago, so we shouldn’t lose a bunch of posts unless we run into a problem with that.

We will need to reinstall and restore everything. Could take a couple days to get it back to normal. In the mean time, follow our Twitter feed or visit our Facebook page. We’ll also keep you up-to-date right here.

GameBanshee has a new wiki-type page for Eschalon: Book I. It looks to be incredibly detailed, with all the information that you will need to get the most out of the game, including a full walk-through. They say a Book II site is upcoming, so we’ll let you know when that is live.

Link: Eschalon: Book I Overload on GameBanshee