Week 1
Hi and welcome to the first development blog for Unleash!
Unleash has been underway for more than a year, but yesterday marked the beginning of the run-up to Early Access, by finally publishing the Steam page for Unleash. Currently, as we have mentioned everywhere possible, Unleash is in free open beta. This means that anyone can try out the game for free in its current beta version, simply by requesting a Steam key through our website. But you probably already knew that!
Marketing
One of the main themes for this first week has been marketing - getting the game out everywhere and making more people aware of its existence. To that end, we have released our first gameplay trailer, as well as setting up and starting to post from a range of social media profiles. We want to engage in lively communication with our players, so feel free to give us a shout or start up discussions everywhere you find us (and other places too, if you like!).
Content
In regards to new content, one addition is a new anti-air tower we call “Flak 88”. The tower is brilliant versus large groups of lowly flyers, which previously has proven to be a very strong strategy. This new tower serves as a counter against that strategy, by dealing damage in a large area (splashing).
(The new “Flak 88” anti-air tower with splash damage. While concepting, we called it “Flak Cannon” as shown here)
Game Modes
The lobby settings in Unleash already provide a range of customization options for each game, affording different game paces or play styles through the choice of lobby options. This week we added a new option to the mix: The amount of lives each player has in-game. By exposing this setting, it is possible to play “Sudden Death” mode where each player only has 1 life. There are already settings to control the frequency of income, the amount of starting income and resources and more. These settings allow for different pace of gaming in Unleash and different starting points.
(Unleash Beta current exposed lobby settings, affording different ways of playing Unleash)
Bug Fixes
A range of errors have been fixed. Among them was an error that occurred on only a few machines, which resulted in an unplayable state due to a particular fmod sound plugin not loading correctly. Since all menu buttons play sound, no buttons could be clicked if this occurred.
Remember… Monsters never come alone.