Alium Progress Report: Project Stardust, the Maintenance, Roadmap, and the Future of ParksBot
Hi everyone! This is Aiden, co-founder, and COO of Alium Software. It’s been about 2 weeks since my last update regarding the state of Alium. In my original post, I spoke about the change in focus and name for Potatoes Development. I wanted to update you regarding how Alium’s been going and to be more transparent with the small group of people we’ve invited to stay in the know.
I’m very happy to say that we’re doing very well! First off, I want to speak regarding the maintenance break last week and give a better insight into the purpose of this maintenance break. The machine is used for testing Alium services and testing our backend databases and systems, as well as the machine used to host the Discord Bot, ParksBot. That machine’s RAM was upgraded to be double what it was previously to increase our capacity to test on a larger scale.
Now, I’d like to discuss what we’ve been up to. While we’re not quite ready to fully reveal what we’ve been working on, I want to give a better idea of the roadmap for this idea and the progress on it. This project is codenamed Project Stardust.
Project Stardust, we hope, is going to benefit people’s lives to live up to our mission statement.
Speaking of which, here’s our mission statement.
Our mission is to make a world filled with distractions more productive, comfortable, and playful.
Our different projects all fit into this mission statement in many different ways. I hope that in the future, that’ll make more sense.
As for Project Stardust, we’re gearing up to enter internal testing and alpha testing soon. With internal testing, Cory and I will test the server load and test different functions privately. Soon after, we’ll be running alpha testing where we, using an unfinished version of the front-end, run tests with family members and close friends. After the alpha testing, we’ll make the proper adjustments and work to finalize the front-end. We’ll also be completing the necessary legal documents for the idea, trademarks, and business filing. After this, we’ll run the closed beta.
The closed beta will be given to select friends, including some on the Discord server. Anyone who participates will have to agree to confidentiality. Finally, we’ll run the open beta, where we fully reveal what the project is. Anyone in our Discord Server will be able to participate and receive 10 invite codes to give to their friends to try it out. Most things will be finalized, and we’ll need your help with bug tracking to help us improve the product.
Our timeline for the reveal is still 6–12 months, but at the current pace, it may end up being sooner. I won’t give a specific date or time frame when you can expect to know what Project Stardust is, but it’s soon. Promise :D
I wanted to also discuss a few other topics. First, I’d like to give a disclaimer that Alium may not be the final name of the company. Simply, there are a few too many trademarks and taken domains for Alium, so it’d be inconvenient to try to fight for the name. Most likely, the name of Project Stardust (not revealed yet), will be the name of the company unless we develop a parent company.
I’d also like to discuss our past legacy Potatoes Development work, such as the ParksBot as well as the state of our Discord server. First off, we want to separate from being a “discord company”, as that’s simply not our intention. After discussing it, we’ve decided that the Discord server will be archived shortly after the launch of Project Stardust. The Discord server, at this current moment, will be used to update, inform, and run a list of potential beta testers. Everyone in the Discord will be more informed regarding what we’re doing until the discontinuation of the Discord. It won’t be an immediate process, but I do want to be more transparent regarding it.
Second, the ParksBot is the first released project of Potatoes Development and the now released Alium Software. We would love to have the bot run forever, however, this is not able to be the case. The API behind ParksBot, the ThemePark API is going out of date. This isn't helped by the Discord API updating and removing support for the code the current version of ParksBot runs on. ParksBot’s code has already been on life-support and has needed too much effort to rewrite every few months, and we aren’t able to support this anymore. We’ve decided to write one final update for ParksBot which will update it to the newest versions of its API and make a few minor adjustments to allow it to work. This final update will be the final update, regardless of future API changes. After ParksBot is no longer supported by the APIs it runs on, or the ThemePark API breaks, we will stop support for ParksBot.
We will forever appreciate where we started under Potatoes Development but we’re deciding to look forward from here on out. We’re here to create big things and to be honest, we have a lot of work to do. We’ve already done a lot of work and we’re going at a great pace, however, I understand it isn’t as fast as you want. I appreciate everyone reading this and keeping up to date, as well as everyone in our Discord server being patient with us over the last 2 years. I also want to use this time to thank and apologize to everyone who was a part of a Potatoes Development project such as The Studio Network, Project Mario Kart, or Reveria (not officially listed under Potatoes Development but wanted to mention here). I won’t be talking about Potatoes Development in an official channel anymore, so I want to get everything wrapped up here. I’m very hopeful for the future of Alium, we have a lot of cards up our sleeves.
See ya soon!
Aiden
