Hi there! Welcome to our first update for The Anacrusis.
Since we announced the game in June, we’ve been busy working on the game for launch, and we’re finally ready to start showing you more of it. We love having conversations with players about our game, which is why we wanted to show actual gameplay in our initial trailer. We thought it was important to start our conversation with you by showing you the actual game we're making, not a pre-rendered cinematic. (It had nothing to do with the fact that pre-rendered trailers are big and expensive, and often not-quite-but-almost-entirely-unlike-the-final-game.) In the spirit of listening to and acting on feedback, we've already made some changes based on it.
New variations for the common aliens are in the works, including these mid-transformation variants. Fetching, aren't they?
We often say that we're a small team, but we’re making a big game. And a big part of our process is playtesting, both playing our game and other multiplayer games. To that end, we’ve been playing co-op games on our Discord with our community for more than a year now. We’ve also had a continuous flow of outside playtesters giving us feedback on our game since it was first playable. Those streams of information have shaped our work on The Anacrusis, but because the game we’re making learns what kind of player you are and changes every time you play it, we need a large, diverse group of players to test effectively. Yeah, we’re finally ready to open up testing to more people.
It’s easy to wait too long to get external feedback, until the time to make any substantive changes to the game has passed. That's why we’re actively soliciting playtesters now for observed testing sessions. This isn’t a typical demo-disguised-as-a-beta, it's a crucial part of developing a game that's designed to deliver a unique experience every single time you play it. If you're selected, we’ll have people dedicated to watching you play, so we can learn where we need to do a better job—whether it’s explaining the game, demystifying our over-the-top weapons, or figuring out why that one person always chooses to use the pistol.
We pull playtesters from our community on our Discord, which you can opt into by following the instructions in the welcome dialog. For now, you need to be in North America, have access to a computer where you can install Parsec, and have a decent Internet connection. In the playtest, we’ll get four people to play the game without help or hints from us as we silently watch. Again, we’re looking for our mistakes, not yours. Are you new to co-op shooters? Don’t worry! Thanks to the AI Driver, the game will automatically adjust for a wide range of skill sets. No matter your skill level, you are needed!
This heatmap from a level in Episode 1 shows where playertesters were standing every time they took damage. The warmer the color, the more aliens bopped players in those spots.
We're going to be working on The Anacrusis for many years to come, so we expect to be collecting feedback this way for a long time. It has already proven invaluable to us, not only to make sure that the game we’re making is fun, but to ensure that we’re sticking with our initial vision for Stray Bombay’s games.
What's that vision? We have a series of design pillars that make up the foundation of our game. Whenever we add, remove, or tweak something in the game, we ask ourselves if the changes support these basic ideas. They’re big, serious ideas, as befits a small game studio that wants to take over the world. Here they are:
Our games are highly replayable. • Our games are about players working together. • Our games empower players to instantly jump in and be productive. • Our games create awesome and often surprising moments. • Our games are about shared experiences, not the difficulty. • Our games minimize skill gaps so everyone can feel like part of the team. • Friends can always play our games together. • Our games give players enough information to make plans, which can then go horribly wrong. • Players have long-term goals that they can invest in from session to session. • We recognize that trust between players grows over time. • We create opportunity for players, not work. • We do our best to make our games welcoming places, and take explicit steps to reduce hate, harassment, and disruptive behavior.
Clearly these are high-level aspirations, but we regularly use them to make lower-level design decisions. For instance, originally character upgrades, or perks, were simple drops that were placed around the levels by the AI Driver. The first person to find one added it to their collection, but everyone else missed out. This encouraged some players to race through the levels, hoovering up the best gear. It was tempting to blame the players who turned into loot goblins (*cough* Ryan), but it wasn't the player's fault. It represented a design shortcoming that discouraged players from working together. To solve the problem, we moved perks into a new device called a Matter Compiler. Matter Compilers are world objects that the AI Driver places throughout the levels. They present every player with a selection of perks to choose from. Each player gets a chance to select an upgrade that best fits their playstyle or their in-game goals. Now when a player finds a Matter Compiler, they're excited to share their discovery with the team, since it means that everyone gets an upgrade.
That’s how we work. We come up with a new idea and get it into the game as quickly as we can. Then we can test it, learn from it, and iterate on the design. Sometimes this means players get a surprise—the other week some external testers got to try a few new prototype weapons that most people on the team hadn’t even seen yet! (Look, officially we aren’t talking about the rocket launcher that shoots a rocket that shoots even more rockets. But it’s rad and you’re going to freakin' love it.)
So this is where we’re starting. Next week, we’re going to talk about mods, which we think are incredible important to the kind of game we want to make. (Hint: It’s about giving player’s agency to play the game the way they want to, not only the way we make them.) If you have topic requests for future blog posts, hop in the Discord and drop a suggestion in the #dev-blog-requests channel! In the meantime, thank you for caring about the game enough to read this post! We’re really excited about The Anacrusis, and can’t wait to show you more of our game.
