Crashlands 2 comes out on April 10, which is merely 4 weeks away. I want to take a moment from the million wrap-up tasks we have left to give you an update. The most important update is that we're on track for our release date and don't expect any delays!
🧪 Beta Test Wrapped
We'd filtered 900 applicants down to 100 testers, and gave them three weeks to play as much as they could. Three weeks isn't very long for a game of this size but our intrepid testers put in an impressive effort, and a surprising number made it all the way to the end!
We got so much great feedback, and we used it to make *tons* of fixes and improvements. Some fun stats from the beta:
- 100 testers
- 360 Pets Hatched
- 470 Pet Embiggenings
- 3,900 Player "Deaths"
- 45,600 Consumables Consumed
- 86,800 Items Crafted
- 2,045 Total hours played
- 20 Hour Average Playtime
- 95 Hour Top Playtime (that's 30 hours per week!)
- How far did people get? (Note that these times are biased towards the fastest players)
- 50% Completed Act 1, taking a median of 14 hours (ranging 8-40 hours)
- 30% Completed Act 2, taking a median of 31 hours (ranging 20-62 hours)
- 20% Completed the game, taking a median of 41 hours (ranging 28-88 hours)
- How well did it go on each platform?
- People beat the game on PC, Steam Deck, Android, and iOS!
- We had a lot of testing time on every platform
- Rumpus worked perfectly to sync people's saves across devices and platforms
- We had a lot of performance issues on mobile at the start of the beta, but by the end the game was playing well on nearly everyone's mobile devices
🔤 Translation Nearly Complete
We're now at the "String Lock" phase of development, which is the fancy gamedev way of saying, "The text (a.k.a. strings) are not allowed to change anymore."
This is a super important milestone for a game, because translation always lags behind the text. Games always have to go into String Lock a fair bit before launch to make sure translators have enough time. And Crashlands 2 has 148,500 words (!) so there's a lot to translate!
So... what's left?
While the game is now "done" except for those last bits of translation, there's still a lot of other stuff to do.
On the game side, most of our time is going into performance boosts, minor bugfixes, and small quality of life improvements. We won't make any major changes because everything in the game interacts with everything else, so each change we make requires a LOT of testing. So that's the other thing we'll be doing until launch: an absolutely bonkers amount of testing!
But game launches require a lot more than just having a complete game. We have to coordinate all kinds of marketing activities, shore up all of our store pages, make plans with business partners, and take care of a billion odds and ends.
Fin
And with that I'll leave you until launch, unless I can squeeze in another Ballyhoo in a couple of weeks. I'm SO EXCITED to get this game into your hands after these looooong 4.5 years of development! As always, you can stay up to date with how things are going by listening to our podcast and hanging out in our Discord.
💖,
Adam Coster
Webslinger @Buticanfeelit Shenaningintheairtonight