Shroud of the Avatar executive producer Starr Long posted a lengthy — and significant! — update to the game’s official forums, outlining the early release (read: alpha testing) schedule for releases of builds of the game that qualifying backers will be able to play.

We are incredibly excited to get Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues on your desktops very soon! As you have seen via our updates and progress videos, we have been making steady progress since our successful Kickstarter earlier this year. We have built out sections of the world while also developing housing, combat, crafting, conversations, AI, story and inventory. As our backers, you have a critical role to play in our development by providing feedback on design and soon the game itself.

As a crowd funded and crowd sourced project, we feel it is incredibly important that we provide our backers with information and access well before game studios would normally do so in a traditional development model. Traditionally, the players are given information and access only after the development team has already decided exactly how things will be done and even after it has already been implemented. By the time the public has access to the product, there is usually no time to meaningfully react to the public feedback.

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Our strategy over the next few months is to provide you with focused and iterative releases of content. Your feedback during these releases will be critical to making the final product the best it can be and we appreciate that you are all so willing to devote your time to helping us. With each release we will have specific tests we will ask you all to make. As we get closer we will send instructions on how to download, install, report bugs, etc. The first few releases will be very tightly scoped so access will be confined to a few days. After each release we will review the results and reevaluate the plan including the duration of availability of each release. With Release 4, we will have a representative game loop and we will increase access time. Please note that game data will be wiped periodically during early access.

So…when are these early releases happening, and what will be the focus of each? Long goes on to explain what Portalarium has planned in this regard, which is excerpted below:

RELEASE 1: December 12 – December 14, 2013

• Character Creation: Players should be able to create and customize their character. Creation / Customization options for Release 1 will include: name, gender, head shape, skin tone, hair style, hair color, and eye color.
• Single Player Online: All public releases prior to commercial launch will be online only. For Release 1 and 2, it will be constrained to single player online only.
• First Town: Our first town (perhaps Owl’s Head) will be open for business. This is important for testing purposes so we can better tune our performance metrics on real user machines. For Release 1, exiting the town will just funnel you back into the same town (anyone see Groundhog Day?)

RELEASE 2: January 24 – January 26 2014

• Shopping: Shopkeepers will be open for business for selling and buying.
• Town 2: An additional municipality (likely village sized) will be open for business! Exiting one municipality will take you immediately to the other municipality.

RELEASE 3: February 20 – 22, 2014

• Open Multiplayer Online: FINALLY we will let you see what the other players look like BUT we’ll be taking away your house for the month as we prepare housing to have persistence in the multiplayer space for Release 4.

RELEASE 4: March 20 – ?, 2014

• Hidden Vale: A hidden island north north east of the mainland with numerous biomes to explore via the overworld map system
• 10 Hidden Vale Scenes: With the opening of the overworld, we need something to do between the cities so we will be turning on the first 10 scenes including wilderness, caves, and dungeons.
• Quests: Players will be able to participate in quests that will send them around the world and even change game state in the scenes based on quest flags. Testing this early is important because our quest system operates differently than the current standards (e.g. no exclamation points or convo trees).

There’s more than just this; click on through for all the details. It all gets started soon; those of you who backed the game should be getting your first real taste of it next month!