Hello everyone and welcome back to the Hearts of Iron IV development diary series. Now that we are officially at approved alpha, and are now moving forward towards a beta milestone in the end of the year.Last week we had an event in Old Windsor in England, where 20 different journalists and youtubers had a chance to play the game together with us. Their experiences can be seen in various articles, podcasts and videos that have been linked in the forums this week.From our end, it was very scary in the weeks before it.When we had originally committed to this event, the game was supposed to launch on June 6th, so we had been counting on having a fully finished game for them to play. But during the late autumn, and early winter we realised that this was not going to be the case, as I was not satisfied with the project, and we had to postpone alpha submissions to redo features that just didn’t cut it.We still had the event scheduled, and when we reached the point of no return for planning, we had a late Q3 release in our minds, so it would work out like the EU4 multiplayer event.Except we fell further behind…Four weeks before the event everything with units and equipment was entirely in flux, the game crashed regularly, and the multiplayer went OOS pretty much instantly.Not looking so stellar… and very much a big worry.Except, when the going gets tough, the Hearts of Iron IV team kicks ASS!The version we brought to the event had only a crash every 50 hours of playing, and we had not a single out of sync issue while playing multiplayer with 20 to 22 computers for two full days.I am so proud of what we achieved so far, and the game we had, while still rough around the edges, was more playable and fun than HoI3 ever managed to become.As you noticed from the articles from the event, we had changed some things the press had seen at PDXCon in January, and even more has changed since our original announcement. This is the nature of gamedevelopment, where you sometimes have to change things that do not work our well. Back in the old days, we never changed features, nor iterated on interfaces, and basically sold the game as soon as we had finished working on all things.For Hearts of Iron 4, we are now reworking naval transportation, air management, & peace-resolution mechanics amongst other things we are not happy with. Of Course, we’re doing quite alot of balance and interface improvements.Next week there will not be a development diary, as friday is the most holy of days of the year, as we celebrate Midsummer here in Sweden. Then as we are Swedes, we’ll have to spend a few weeks relaxing when the Sun is up for more than a few hours a day, or we go crazy and start building boats and go axe-murdering & pillaging our neighboring countries.So we’ll have development diaries at the 26th of June, 3rd of July, and 14th of August, but after the 14th, we will have weekly development diaries until Christmas.In the next development diary, we’ll be talking about how to design and build your armies.And here is a screenshot of my glorious planned invasion of Da9l at QA’s Germany just now in this afternoons MP test.15 divisions will advance north towards the Rhein, and cross it to take Frankfurt, while another 15 divisions of brave french soldiers will show elan as they sweep aside the teuton defenders on their way to take Stuttgart. After Stuttgart falls, they split into two pushes, one towards Nuremburg, and one towards Munich.