Hello folks, happy belated Easter!
This week's update aims to give a bit of an outline of our next major milestone - Beta, and the direction we'll be taking with the game for the next couple of months.
State of the Game
As I mentioned in our post a couple of weeks ago, we're now officially past our Alpha milestone with all our major puzzles base functionality ready and pending some additional art and QoL passes coming up.
During Beta, our aim is to get each of these areas playable in a single contiguous experience, and to expose the puzzles we've not yet shown off to some testing audiences (more on that in a future update!) to help give us an idea on adjustments we'll need to make, or important bugs we'll need to iron out in the lead-up to our Gold milestone later in the year.
So, with that said, the most important details for us in the coming weeks include building the areas of the station that connect our major puzzles together, testing for issues in our current puzzles, continuing casting for VA's as outlined last update, and lastly, improving the overall soundscape of Outpost Rhea.
To summarize our criteria for Beta:
Major Puzzles connected by spaces that are sufficiently detailed and make reasonable in-universe sense to be there.
Critical bugs are minimized to reduce programming workload leading to launch.
VA Casting completed for all Major and Minor roles, with Major roles recorded and pending any required script changes/re-recordings.
Player and Puzzle-specific SFX recorded, most ambient and other non-priority sounds pending.
Testing data on puzzle difficulty and readability ready to inform possible changes.
We're more than happy to go into a little more detail on any of these points in our official Discord, so if you've got any questions feel free to ask us there! (Or in the comments on this post, too!)
That's all for now, as always we'll keep you guys up-to-date on any important developments - 'till next time though, here's a quick sneak-peek at a before/after update Brandon's been working on for the Hydroponics Bay's plant life.
Hydroponics Plants Before
Hydroponics Plants After
The full plants!
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See you all next time!
- Ryan