Hi everyone!
We completed our first session of alpha testing! For this session, we invited a few members from our community to get a sneak peak and collect feedback from their first impressions. It’s been extremely valuable to start collecting feedback, and we’re looking to host more sessions with more people!
Here’s our very first Alpha Post-Mortem!
The Setup:
Run-through
We had our testers run through specific missions to look for how they managed pathing, level design, obstruction, puzzles, and rescue scenarios before moving on to the next missions. This way, we could get valuable, focused, and actionable feedback related to core level design, difficulty, intuitiveness, and replay. Levels built specifically to different hazards gave rise to opportunities to use specific tools, and wanted to see if players could come up with creative solutions.
NAT Server Troubles
We did a live multiplayer test, and we got multiplayer and Co-Op fully functioning for the Alpha (Hurray!). However, we had a couple server issues where sometimes the server would just drop and we weren't able to connect. This put a pause on a few of our tests, but we’ve since ironed this out so going forwards our Alpha tests will be much smoother.
Learnings:
Ease of Play
Without onboarding currently in the game, we were curious to see how new people pick up the game. This first session isn’t the most indicative as some of the people who tested were very active in the community, so they were already familiar with a lot of the concepts. They were able to pick up the game fairly naturally, allowing us to focus testing on more specific levels, situations, tools, and physics. We did see players struggling with tool selection and toggling at conventions though. In upcoming test sessions, how people manage the input scheme is definitely something we want to keep an eye on.
Lack of Character Limit
One small bug that had big repercussions was the lack of a character limit. We made the mistake of not adding a character limit to player name text field. This caused some players to crash as they exceeded character limit. This is a bug we’ll be fixing with the actual UI in place.
New Game Mode - Salvage
In the test session, everyone wanted to haul stuff out of the burning houses and buildings, and we definitely took notice. It wasn’t just perceived valuable items either. People were having a lot of fun hauling burnt furniture, broken TV, and even trash out of the houses. It was… hilarious! So we took inspiration to spec out a new game mode code named Salvage.
You’ll soon have the opportunity to haul out any valuable or junk to return to client, or make a bit of extra cash. Clients may assign valuables that they would pay extra for, and those may be priority rescues.
Electricity
One major issue we found is with the current presentation of electricity. When there’s a lot of fire, a player usually didn’t know where the electricity is coming from. We saw players just sprayed water, and all of a sudden there was electricity everywhere. In the test build, we did a bit to help players identity where the live wire was, but not the circuitry or the source. One of the effects update we are doing with electricity is to give players better visual cues as to how electricity travels and where it originates from. Here’s a peek at what we’re doing:
Once we have this in an upcoming test build, we’d love to see how players react.
Bug-to-Feature
We saw a case of someone jumping into a window or jumping down onto a trampoline, and then proceed to bounce sky high in the air. That was definitely a bug. But! People had so much fun with it that we’re turning that into a new tool, code named Launch Pad. Stay tuned!
Zany Bugs
Boobytrapped Floor: In Mission Papa, the floor in one of the rooms was missing, and it could cause players to snap and teleport. This one we caught and fixed.
Missing Blue Zone: In Uniform, when playing multiplayer, sometimes the blue zone went missing, and people had to quit the mission and restart.
Joke Text Stayed In: Sometimes in a mission, the joke text we left in dev build didn’t clean up, and it would remain on screen for the rest of the mission, sigh!
Time Zones
Because we started small we had a few issues getting everyone together at once to fill every slot for a testing session, we hope that we’ll have more than enough people in the Alpha to make sure everyone gets multiple chances to play with a full session next time.
We want to thank everyone once more for participating in this past weekend’s session!
More Embr Alpha Testing is coming in roughly THREE WEEKS!!
We’re getting a build ready to Steam as we speak to allow for smooth distribution and easy updates! As soon as that's ready we’re going live with alpha!
To join an upcoming session and follow our progress, be sure to wishlist us: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062830/Embr/
And join our Discord: https://discord.gg/G46NDhq
We'll be getting some groups, pairing people up, and doing more organized testing sessions. You can also play Embr with us! We'll be in voice chat hanging out while we all test and gather feedback together!
Get Hyped!