These past few months the team at LuGus Studios has carefully gone over every single line of code of the physics and flight behaviour systems in Liftoff: Micro Drones. While at its core Liftoff: Micro Drones uses the same simulation technology found in other Liftoff simulators, many systems have been redesigned with the micro drone class in mind. A few small errors in the system have been fixed and some parameters have been tweaked. We are now ready for testing them on a temporary Experimental Branch.
What and why?
While Liftoff: Micro Drones is still in Early Access, we want each public version to offer an enjoyable and stable experience. This puts a lot of pressure on our development team whenever we are pushing for crucial updates that can have a big impact on the game. The Experimental Branch allows us to release experimental features (such as physics updates) much faster for testing, without having to worry too much about polish yet. It also allows us to break the game to a certain extent if needed, and try out features that we are not sure should make it to the final game yet. For the development team it means we have more freedom, for the player it means they can have an even bigger impact on the development and progress of the game.
By testing the Liftoff Experimental Branch and giving us feedback, you help us, and weigh in on the decisions we make for the future of Liftoff: Micro Drones.
Experimental Branch: what you need to know
- The Experimental Branch (EB) should be used for testing purposes only.
- At any time you can switch back to the main version of the game. We recommend doing this after testing.
- Versions on the game on the EB can be expected to be unpolished, buggy and unbalanced.
- It is to be expected that not all game features work on the EB.
- Features and updates available on the EB are not guaranteed to make it to the main branch of the game.
- The dev team cannot give dedicated support for experimental game versions available on the EB.
How to get access to the Experimental Branch
- Right click on “Liftoff: Micro Drones” in your Steam Library
- Click “Properties”
- In the “Properties” menu, click the “BETAS” tab
- Select “Experimental Branch” in the dropdown menu
- Restart Steam to trigger the download. Happy testing!
In order to switch back to the normal version of Liftoff: Micro Drones, follow the same instructions, but instead of selecting “Experimental Branch” in the last step, select “NONE - Opt out of all beta programs”.
What feedback do we need?
Very simple, our primary question is: does this feel better? Yes/No?
Answering that question will allow us to learn if our fixes and tweaks have worked. If the answer is a clear YES, we can push these improvements to the public version of the game. Any additional feedback is more than welcome! We'd love to know in more detail how you feel about the flight behaviour, where exactly you think things feel strange, at what scale things feel different etc.
If you encounter any bugs, weird behaviour, or if you have more general remarks about Liftoff Experimental Branch, please contact us through:
The dedicated Steam Forum
The official Liftoff Discord server
The Liftoff Community Group on Facebook
Thank you very much for your help, and happy testing!