Previous devblogs: January - February - March - April - May
Hey guys! We have another batch of updates for you and also some information about the second upcoming alpha test. Some of you have told us you're having withdrawals so we'll get right to it! Delay of customization
When customization came around we had planned to get started as soon as possible with our current animator, but he was working on larger projects and wouldn't be able to keep up the pace we needed. We decided to leave him just with first person weapon animations, and we've brought a new character animator on to the team, Craig Eickhoff.
We spent some time getting Craig up to speed, and we're just now making our way into the new rigs/animations. We've also been building an animation test project to speed him up so he can quickly preview how the animations will act and blend ingame. This puts us way too close to when we hoped the next alpha would be out, so we've decided to push customization into next month with melee. We have made many gameplay changes, so we will still be doing alpha2 without customization.
Note that these animations won't be in game for alpha 2
Changes to the game
During the first alpha not only did we keep an eye out for feedback but we also both played and watched live streams quite a bit. We saw a lot of imbalances among other things that we've addressed.
General
Weapons
Ships
Beta testing branch
About 5 days before the next test we'll make an announcement about a 'beta' (not an actual beta though) branch that you can opt into on Steam. This will help catch any major bugs before we launch the next alpha weekend shortly after.
Expect the worst with this branch, we'd suggest not even bothering trying to stream it and just wait a few days. The pretest on the Steam beta branch for alpha 2 will only last about ~12 hours and will be a single server. If all is good we'll launch alpha 2 later that same week. Music
We've shifted our music design a small bit since alpha 1. Originally a full epic track would play and then there would be 3 minutes of silence before another, but this sudden stop in music gave even us a hollow feeling while playing.
We've since moved to an alternating track list where the game will play an epic song and then a low tension but still suspenseful track that isn't as attention grabbing. This will keep the music flowing without breaks and also prevent over playing of the handful of epic tracks we have finished right now. Here are a few more from Garrett: Characters
We have a few new outfits to show along with two more head variants. Keep in mind only some outfits will be available with the first introduction of customization, and we'll be adding more as they're rigged and added to the game.
Hair is still a work in progress
Alpha 1 videos
Some great videos were uploaded during the first alpha, here were some of our favorites:
Next month
Next month we will have all new animations for the players and you will have a few options to customize your character (more will be added in further tests). Along with this we will be introducing our true melee combat to replace our current placeholder hammer-sword. You can also look forward to the possibility of two new weapons!
The pace will begin to pickup in July, as that's a wrap for some of our most demanding core features. After that point we will begin flooding the game with more content each test. New gamemodes, weapons, music, and outfits. The frequency of tests will begin to increase as well. -Tyler & Dakota Comments are closed.
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