HI brawlers
Welcome to the very first Behind the Brawl, a development series where we'll be looking at challenges, considerations and behind-the-scenes of how HyperBrawl Tournament is being developed. This first part will specifically look at what we learned during the most recent beta - and where we go from here.
We recently ran our first PC beta of 2020 right here on Steam and as we’re currently working on the next one, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the key takeaways and look at where we’re going from here.
We received a ton of feedback from everyone during the beta, which highlighted both known and new issues, as well as general things for us to consider going forward in development. Let’s dive into some of these!
The pros
- Players told us they had a great time during the beta and made sure to inform us of specific instances where the game needs adjustments. We’re working on those right now!
- Our multiplayer technology performed really well with minimal lag during online matches. Score!
- Players brawled with both controllers and keyboard/mouse. While we’ve always recommended playing with controllers, it was great to see that both options are viable in the arena – and that the player skill level was super high on both!
- A ton of players were really good! Almost too good, though, as even the developers lost countless matches. We need to practice!
- A lot of you put in the work and hit the level cap! Maybe we should increase the cap for the next beta...
- Many players mastered the HyperCurve while others never used it at all. We need to show everyone just how awesome the HyperCurve really is! Case in point:
Thanks to Olda Robot for the original clip
Make sure to HyperCurve responsibly though, or this might happen...
Thanks to Olda Robot for the karma-filled original clip
The cons
- A number of things didn’t quite work as intended, and while much of this is expected in an unfinished game, we still discovered and were told about new issues, that we’re now working on. Some of these will be addressed for the next beta, while others will be fixed closer to launch later this year.
- Some players seemed to miss the fact that you can take control of your AI team mate, keeping the action entirely in your own hands. We’ll be looking at ways to ensure that this is more clear, so everyone knows that you can either switch characters manually during the match, or set it up to change character automatically to whoever has the ball.
- The Sentry Shield quickly became “meta” and everyone picked it, because of some of the unintended ways it could used…
The above is just a small part of the feedback we received during the beta and we want to thank our players once again for taking part and for sharing your thoughts. This is what will ultimately help us create an even better game that we can all enjoy both during the betas as well as at launch later this year!
So, what's next?
Firstly, the team is currently hard at work on preparing our next PC beta, which we'll be talking a lot more about in the weeks to come. For now we recommend signing up to our newsletter or following us on Twitter (or maybe both!), so you'll know as soon as we've got beta details ready to share!
Secondly, we're looking into ways to bring more HyperBrawl to your screens! And no, we're not making a movie, but we may have ordered some livestreaming equipment... Stay tuned for more on that!
Finally, keep your eyes peeled for our second Behind the Brawl dev blog where we will be diving into weapon design and development, while taking a look at how we may adjust the Sentry Shield so it isn’t quite as overpowered at launch. Here’s a sneak peak…
Looking forward to more HyperBrawl? Be sure to WISHLIST here on Steam so you never miss a beat. It really helps in making sure that more brawlers discover the game and gives us more poor souls to take down on our way to the top of the leaderboards! *Evil laughter*
See you in the arena! (ง'̀-'́)ง
https://store.steampowered.com/app/591760/HyperBrawl_Tournament