By Jason Sams, Lead Developer
As our closed beta is approaching one month old, we’d like to give everyone an update on where we are and what’s coming up.
In the 28 days Spy DNA has been in Beta, we’ve fixed more than 100 issues that our Beta participants and ourselves have found testing. We’ve given priority to any issue that was a potential crash or was otherwise game-breaking. “Game-breaking” in this context means that the game gets into a state that makes it impossible to continue, and you must close it and reload; e.g. situations where you can’t complete a level because of a bug.
We tracked down some hardware compatibility issues, and a few software ones. At the time of this writing, we’ve pushed 20 builds to our Steam Beta channel. That’s just under one a day on average if you count the weekends, and one a day if you only count workdays.
Spy DNA has undergone a few changes since the Beta started. Outside of bug fixes, we’ve added, refined, and sometimes even re-implemented things in response to player feedback.
The equipment system underwent a major internal overhaul. We track both regular encumbrances due to weight, but also due to trying to carry too many items in your hands. To make things easier on the players, items are now put in appropriate storage when picked up and taken from storage as needed. For example ammo gets stored in a belt, pants, or vest first before it takes up precious free item slots.
Pre-mission planning now allows for setting up weapon attachments and packing inventory before the mission starts. These are saved as defaults for future missions, for each uniform type.
Objective and location markers on the screen now support mouse-over tooltips to see which objective or location is being marked.
Added hotkey “o” for objective screen
Right click to cancel orders now also selects the character whose orders are being canceled, to prevent confusion over who is selected.
Character UI hotkey “i” now goes directly to equipment.
Right now we don’t have any crashes or game-breaking bugs in our tracking tool. We have received a lot of feedback we are still working on for improvements to tutorials and making the UX easier to understand.
We have a few things we want to focus on before pushing this to early access. The big things we still need to do are:
Add tutorials for a few more game mechanics. Right now we have enough unique mechanics that some parts of the game are difficult to pick up just by playing.
Add a few more missions so the players have enough to do.
Improve a few parts of the UI where information isn’t communicated clearly to the player; mostly around pausing and encumbrance.
Refine the artificial intelligence controlling the NPCs in the game, to make the levels more engaging and challenging to complete.
As we approach Early Access, the rate of releases will be slowing. During the early part of the Beta we wanted to push out fixes as fast as we could, but now that things are much more stable, we want to put more effort into keeping the release build stable. We have separate channels set up in Steam, with the main branch being a conservative stable build, and “Beta,” where we will continue to push more frequent releases.
Early Access players will have access to both though Steam and will be able to choose the one that fits them best.
Finally, now that we have hammered down the biggest issues, we’re ready to expand the Beta to include more players. We’ve reopened our Beta enrollment form* and we’d like to invite you to join the Beta if you haven’t already. Or, if you know someone who likes tactical combat sims,** feel free to share the link with them too!
*) If you follow the link and find that the form is closed, never fear! Just email us and we’ll be sure to get in touch with you as soon as we can.
**) Examples of such games include: Jagged Alliance franchise, XCOM franchise, 7.62, and Xenonauts to name a few