Response to Beta #3

Awesomeness and bugs, over 9000.

So that wraps up our 3rd closed beta weekend!  We hope that everyone had a wonderful time.  Again, we thank everyone for participating and helping us weed out bugs.  As usual, we had a lot but we’re now incredibly focused and actually have a bit more time to fix and improve things overall.  We’re very excited about the possibilities that await us during the 4th beta weekend coming in about three weeks time.

Check out some screenshots from this weekend!

Omg those particle effects... drool.

 

More after the jump…

The biggest thing that happened this past weekend was that we had several journalists and podcasters come in and try out the game.  Some of the developers, including myself, led everyone through the game that you’ve all been enjoying and showed them around.  We had Gamespy/IGN, Indie Game Mag, and Gameinatrix’s Girl Gamer Radio just to name a few.  We all had a great time even in the mess of bugs.  That’s just the nature of being an indie, it’s hard to get QA people in to catch bugs and it’s even harder since we’re trying to do something online.  So yes, everyone who partakes in the alpha, whatever, is actually doing us a huge service in terms of making the game better.

 

Here are some highlights from this weekend:

  • Average hours in a match: 1 hour
  • Average match time: 13 minutes
  • Most components repaired by player: 2013 components (best engineer EVER)
  • #1 Gun Kills: Flak Cannon with 150 kills
  • #2 Gun Kills: Missile Sling with 114 kills
  • Most popular ship: Goldifsh with 316 uses

Just to give everyone a short preview of what we’ve talked about so far:

  • Prioritized all the bugs that you reported
  • Removing the opacity from the repair game and making it function more intuitively
  • More maps, more game types for existing maps
  • Further weapons balance (new homing code for the missile sling super OP lol)
  • Matchmaking improvements (no brainer here)
  • More skills and skills customization UI

That’ll be all for now.  Need to get back to work and stuff!!!