Time is an illusion. Release time doubly so.

© Douglas Adams about Soldiers:Arena Hi, friends. Today's diary is quite important one. I bet that you will not need 10 million years to understand what kind of question we are talking about. We will also talk about how and when playtests are going, about holy wars and memes of the Alpha and how they help us to find the right solution amongst a lot of wrong ones. Here's a working version of the portrait of an infantry commander to stretch your eyes before reading.

Played, understood nothing, but I will play again

Twice a week we gather alpha testers for playtests to get feedback from them about the innovations in the game. Further down we’ll include the best quotes from these reviews. These are our first critics and we appreciate their help immensely. Among them there are both seasoned players and baby seals. There are those who without regret cast their lives on the altar of the game-god, and there are those who play for a couple of hours a week. To someone, the game seems too fast, to someone else, on the contrary, too slow. Often this opinion is the result of the player's temperament multiplied by the chosen commander. ’He plays the slowest commander. A fast combat in this case is possible only if you misclicked and accidentally picked up something lighter than IS-3’ - about one fan of heavy tanks. Artillery for fans of infantry combat: ’Played this stuff, too calm for me. Lazy clicking all the game’. Someone hates the building assaults, because ’Have you seen how the buildings are being stormed? Crushing with tanks! TANKS, Carl!’. For others, storming is not a problem in the presence of high-explosive AT-grenades, flamethrowers, or simply ’take ten to fifteen submachine gunners and arrange an exterminatus for the whole area.’ Someone tries to avoid the fights in the field, while someone with tears in his eyes remembers the infantrymen who were thrown into the meat grinder of city battles ’I remember one fight where 50 people were killed in one f***ing house".’ One thinks that the infantry is too strong, the other that ’if the enemy gives you the opportunity to kick his ass with infantry only- it's his own fault’, and only one thing is important for the third one - ’artillerymen must suffer!’.
While artillerymen suffer for themselves, someone suffers from suppression, trenches, storming buildings, slow-moving guns or too mobile tanks. Some suffer from health bars, but they no longer sharpen their pitchforks, cause ’health bars aren’t so terrible as they look like’. We collect user reviews in special albums, decorate them with stickers and reread them in rare moments of rest. ‘I like that the game gives a big set of roles: an anti-tankman, an artilleryman, an infantryman, a heavy-tankman, a defensive guy and attacking guy, and at the same time is aimed precisely at the teamplay’. ‘Well, I ran into the house with 15 submachine gunners - but f***ing calliope rolled out from the corner and blew up everyone. That’s how cooperation works’. ‘I like: bots, that fight better than the personal guard of Ivan the Terrible; lot’s of units already at the stage of closed alpha; the artillerymen sufferings. I dislike: healthbars of the tanks and cannons, artillerymen as a class’.
Feel free to speak in defense (or vice versa) of artillerymen and share your pics on our facebook page.

...it has the words Don’t Panic inscribed in large friendly letters on its cover

© Douglas Adams again The described disputes and contradictions are the essence of the development process. Do not think that the alpha test is an opportunity to play before everyone else. No, friends, this is work, and quite nervous work in fact. But this is an opportunity also to participate in the development of the game and to influence the final result. Many features have been changed under the pressure of the alpha testers, and some of them appeared only thanks to them. Now we see that the main gameplay is formed and the game gives different opportunities to different players within the same session. Everyone can find his place and his tempo in the game. The same combat mission can be performed in a variety of ways, depending on the nature of the player, his preferences in units, the chosen commander, team-mates, etc. And most importantly, it requires cooperation. This means that the game becomes that which we envisaged in our dreams. Earlier, we said that as soon as we determine the date of early access - you will know it first. Our spouses and children are still unaware waiting with the hope of the release date, as a happy time when their loved ones will be freed from night hours and festive bail-outs. Do not tell them that after the release even more work will appear... Please. We plan to enter early access in the first quarter of 2018. If someone seems to think that the development of the game has been going on for a very long time and the key to it should have been at your email yesterday or even earlier - here's a small thesis on why unicorns do not exist:

• We are a small team working without a publisher.
• It takes a lot of time and effort to create a game in which the user will spend a lot of time with pleasure and enthusiasm, instead of simply plunging into his pillow and pray to Apollo to have his eyes mercifully shed with divine arrows after the first game to never see such a sickness ever again.
• We burn ourselves on games with early access and believe that at this stage the game should give joy from something more than finding a bug.

The exact date of early access start, we can say 2-3 months before its release. Do not get lost, everything will only become more interesting. Wish you all the best!

[ 2017-06-29 18:26:26 CET ] [ Original post ]