Hello everyone,
Our Discord Playtesters are putting the full campaign co-op through its paces, so we’re keeping a keen eye on any issues that crop up from that!
As mentioned in last month’s Dev Transmission, we’ll follow the same template as we did with the combat co-op build, where we tested with increasing group sizes until the open Steam test. This worked really well in that we ironed out a lot of issues before the majority of people got to play it.
While we’ve currently got enough testing coverage, we’ll likely welcome another swathe of Discord members into the Playtest role in January to accompany an updated co-op build, so if that’s of interest head over and keep an eye on the Announcements channel.
The Autumn and Winter sales have recently added a lot of new members to the SENTRY community, so if you’re interested in playing the combat side of co-op now there are instructions here:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1252680/view/4438953498491486247
While co-op has been a large focus for Adam this month, we’ve still been making progress on some new features we touched on in the November Dev Transmission, including:
The vendor needed a vessel to be represented on the Navigator, so we’ve been concepting that:
Sticking with the vendor, our original plan was to just make the top half of the character for when they’re shown in the UI panel while selling their wares – however after discussion we felt it safer to make the full body to give us flexibility later (it’s a lot more efficient to make the full character in one go rather than add a bottom half down the line) – but what does that bottom half look like? Here’s what we’re currently deliberating between:
Alex has also made the character models for the three new enemies we showed concepts for last month. I got her to stick all our enemies (minus a few visual-only variants on the larger characters) in a lineup so you can see how the roster is shaping up:
We also started concepts on another new enemy, but I’ll show those once we’re further along.
From the Community!
As always, we finish off the Dev Transmission with some cool stuff from the community.
This month Discord user Waste-o-Spacebar made us laugh when he shared this clip of him and a co-op buddy placing a lot of barrels before igniting one – it goes about as well as you’d expect…
Here’s a bunch of useful links to where you can reach us:
The end of the year is a natural time for reflection, and we’ve loved seeing how you’ve all reacted to the Early Access release of SENTRY.
Aside from people generally enjoying the game (which is ultimately why we’re all here) it’s been great to see your comments have been thoughtful, cohesive and aligned with our own plans. This helps us know we’re all pulling in the same direction. That’s important because being such a small team means we only have so much ‘muscle’, so a big thank-you to everyone who acts as a force multiplier and spends the time letting us know your feedback.
While co-op has certainly taken longer than we’d like, we’d rather not rush such an important feature and risk disappointing everyone who is keen to play it (this approach has thus far paid dividends with the co-op combat test). We’re conscious that any delays incurred here shouldn’t impact our plans for the main game – so rest assured it won’t have a detrimental effect on the rest of SENTRY. We’d rather take a bit longer to add everything we want than stick to some arbitrary date – the game is the most important thing after all. The eagle-eyed may have noted the Early Access blurb on the store page has been updated to reflect our current thinking, changing from our original estimate to Summer 2025. We’ll update this as we hone in on full release.
We’ll be taking the week between Christmas and New Years Eve off, but I’ll be keeping an eye on the forums in case anyone needs assistance or has questions.
However you spend this time of year, everyone at Fireblade wishes you a great end to 2024 :)
