As the launch looms ever closer we finally have people lots of people playing the game! The beta is now available to all of our supporters over on Patreon! We have already gotten a ton of feedback from people who have been playing it before I could write this announcement.
We will be having weekly balance updates for the beta each Wednesday using the feedback and stats we collect. As well we will slowly be turning on more features for you guys in the beta that aren't on yet such as goo gangs, custom profile icons and leaderboards. The plan is as well to open up the game to some more people who want to get involved as the beta goes on.
I'm so excited to share this game that we have been having a blast playing internally and seeing what kind of strategies you guys come up with. Do let me know if you have any questions and I will see you guys next Wednesday with the first round of Balance updates and bug fixes!
Here I am, back with another update on Shardpunk's development progress.
In general, the work is going well. I am working on creating another build for another round of playtests. The previous round gave me LOTS of feedback that I was able to forge into actionable items, and I definitely want to repeat that.
To add some variety to the stuff the player can do, I've added more world interaction to the game. I tweaked the triggers/scripts code I've created for the tutorial level, which allowed me to use it for creating custom in-combat events.
Here's a minor custom event at the tutorial level - the character reaches a certain area which triggers a 'cutscene' in which they say something and receive stress points - which I then use as an excuse to show a tutorial about stress:
Here are the characters spotting a larger battle scene which can be investigated for extra rewards:
And here's the beginning of a quest about a bunch of civilians trapped in the sewers:
These special events are randomly added to a level, so they might vary between playthroughs.
That's it for this entry. If you want to make sure you don't miss out on the next round of playtests, do visit our Discord channel!
