Hold your breath, Pongarena goes into Early Access the 22th of July, but we are already planning a better "day one".
During the last month, the team has been fixing bugs, testing, tweaking, and adding features.
Today we are "ready" to include more beta testers in our program.
If you want to be involved in the creation process, if you want your feedback to be noted and to see how it affect the game, it's time to roll in and join one of our servers, Discord or Overtone.
Why making a beta before the "official Early Access release day".
An Early Access without bugs sounds impossible, but even so we want our game to be as stable as possible.
And to do that we need your help to stress test our servers and features.
For us the Early Access is a way to improve the game with the power of a growing community, not putting on the table something unstable and unfixed.
What is your Early Access updates schedule?
We plan to release a build every 2 weeks.
The new release goes first on the "beta" branch, and 2 weeks later this build comes to master (default branch).
And every 2 releases: features, contents, or other new things will be added to the game.
So basically, 2 times a month you can expect a bug-fix release, and every months a "bigger" features/contents build.
During "crazy weeks" we will release some new game modes or completely OP stats, just to see how it goes and how much you like it or not, this will be live for a limited time.
Those tests will be announced before it goes live.
How can I be included in the process
Join one of our servers and express yourself in the right channel.
For now we have a "feedback" and a "bug-reports" channels on Discord.
A public Trello Board where you can see all the known bugs.
For ideas and suggestions, we will use polls and will organize some "big scale testing" with our testers.
We also stream the development process from time to time on our Twitch channel.
Come say hello and drop your questions.
Is it possible to join the beta tester program after the 22th?
Yup, feel free to join the Discord or Overtone servers whenever you want and bring your friends.
It's also a place to find others players to fight.
How is the current state of the game development so far?
For now the game is pretty stable and we are looking to make as many fixes as possible.
The pilots feature is nearly complete but require some polish and debug, it is not testable yet.
We only have European servers at the moment, but US servers are coming before the 22th.
The dev-team is looking forward to play against you 😆
Come challenge us, you might win some cool things if you win 🤐