As we prepare for our weekly twitch stream (Friday 2PM EST), we're also wrapping up the week of work, reviewing and preparing for next week. This week was eventful where we deployed the first of a series of performance improvements, hotfixed a coupled of times while we trucked on with creating new maps, working on Eldar, new weapon, balancing and doing optimization passes on one map.
We also have teams on new systems, such as the strategic map, keybindings, PVE, servers (thank you for helping us profile high load btw!) and Art for the Art god which goes into maps, weapons and visual customization system. Yes, quite a few things coming in over the next two months and we're damn excited about it.
While this is all great, we did have some issues, while optimizing performance of a map, it became a bit too impregnable and warp fields made it impossible to throw in grenades through some windows and doors and we disable it in the map rotation. It's fixed but we won't deploy that till Monday - you know - so we're sure we test it more and it doesn't break more than it fixes. Sorry for that.
Big patch coming next week where we deploy the entire "branch". That means all the work of the team goes out and the parts that are enabled all get updates, bugfixes, improvements, the keybindings, a new weapon and other fun tidbits. After our profiling we might even keep the servers running at a bit higher player number (20 vs 20 or a bit higher) as it seems to be more fun and easier to join a friend. By all means, sound out in the forums about that.
It's still Thursday the 11th that is likely since deploying the entire branch requires a lot of testing - but we want this stuff out so you can start the playtesting part - where you tell us what you think and can affect the direction of the development of the game. That's what Early Access is about for us and hopefully for you as well. Game development is dirty, messy, unpredictable, masochistic and fun so being transparent means you see it all in progress. Especially if you tune in to our Twitch. We share bad jokes and cooking tips there.
That's it for now and thank you again for spreading the good word (and the 79% rating! Wooo!!). I and my (chaos) unicorn cry a little every time I see one of you mention us elsewhere and that while we may be a bit buggy we are fun and have potential and that's all we can ask.
Have a great weekend :-*
Nathan