It’s been one week.
On Thursday, April 9th, 2015, March of War: Face Off entered Early Access after months of development. The Face Off team, largely composed of an American core not necessarily involved in the design of March of War classic, spent months agonizing over every little tiny detail. Various calls and discussions happened Thursday morning, the majority of which could be compared (accurately) to parents sending their first child off to preschool.
We were terrified and excited at once. You know how sometimes when you’re so excited, you start panicking? Yeah, that was us.
A million and one things could go wrong. A million and one things could go right. And we’re proud to say that far more went right than wrong.
Of course, releasing a new game into Early Access isn’t an easy experience for any developer. It’s one thing to play-test your game into the ground, and another to let players take it for a whirl., Without fail, players always manage to find the things that slip through the cracks. That’s true of this release, too. The first thing we encountered was a very big bug – Player vs Player desyncing – resulting in players getting stuck on their first turn and someone having to surrender to free themselves. The developers worked day and night, through the weekend, to address this bug and a lot of the problems with it have been fixed. Of course, others linger; fixing it revealed more in- depth problems with the PvP system. We also encountered problems with the AI freezing (still in the process of fixing) or simply never beginning the battle (also still in the process). And, of course, we encountered crashes. Seismic Bombs, anyone?
But over-all, this release has been an extremely enjoyable experience for us as developers. We’ve watched our playerbase grow, gotten a lot of helpful feedback (you’re not blowing up hospitals anymore), and we’ve kicked out hotfixes for a lot of the problems players have experienced. There's even more coming.
For instance…
We’re currently working on a complete overhaul of the chat. We’re well-aware that it’s extremely lacking at the moment, and we’re taking a lot of player feedback into account to make it better. While we can’t give an ETA on when it will be released, it will be awesome, and we’ll show you previews once the codebase behind it is mostly functional.
Another thing we were requested to add is Achievements. Even as we post this, we're putting together a list, from gimmicky ones such as “Kill the Healer First” (goal: Kill a Medic) to more typical “Kill 50 enemy unit” types. Spoon – the developer behind that side of the game (now you know who to pester) – tells us it won’t take too terribly long to add these, so look for them in the next couple of weeks.
As a precursor, here are seven potential names for achievements. Why don’t you try to guess what the objectives for them are, and next week we’ll let you know who has the most correct? (Disclaimer: These are just ideas we’re tossing around – we might well change them later on!)
We Love AoE
United We Stand
No Lions Allowed
Early Bird
All Hands on Deck
Social Butterfly
Genesis
More importantly, though!
Enough about us. Some of our players have been incredible enough to put a few videos of Face Off on YouTube, reviewing the game and showcasing gameplay footage. You should check them out and leave them some feedback. (Check them out, below.)
Reviews
https://youtu.be/KRRPwDrOSiM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeHTNMwstzM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BINovuGaeoQ
Gameplay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxeHdC4hClo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCnH82F3Xw4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lfe0_G1zRkY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcFpVTUwC7c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40EFn8df_PQ
We also have a really nice guide by our own rap star, JosephKoney, which can be found here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=423455558
Let us know whether or not Joe Koney’s guide helps you to be better at Face Off – and if you think you can do better, we dare you to write a guide that challenges his!
We also opened our official Facebook page, which you can find here: https://www.facebook.com/mowfaceoff
We’ll be updating it regularly and we hope to host regular events and games unique to Facebook, so if you’re the type to enjoy that sort of thing, make sure to like us and check it out.