Hello Riftbreakers!
In last week’s article, we answered one of the most prevalent questions about the Co-Op mode in The Riftbreaker: “Will the campaign be playable in co-op?” Today, we will focus on the second most popular topic in the community: “Why is the game in closed beta? Make it open beta!” We will try to explain to the best of our ability why we chose the closed beta route, how it benefits the development process, and why we can’t transition to open beta just yet. We will also give you a rough estimation of when said transition could happen and when you can expect to receive your beta key.
Our playtests have led us to several conclusions. One of them is: we have too many effects on our screen and we need to fix that,
First of all, let’s clarify why we chose the closed beta model. We had no idea what to expect when we started our testing. We have never played The Riftbreaker with anyone outside of our office. There was a slight chance that everything would go well, but honestly, we were expecting failure. In our experience, nothing ever goes right the first time. Only a handful of people were given access since we were ready to spend the next few weeks diagnosing connectivity issues, game-breaking bugs, and crash reports. In such unknown conditions, it is often the case that more than half of all common problems are caused by one or two bugs. We were prepared for things to bomb and didn’t really need hundreds of reports about the same couple of issues.
When you have friends along doing work, it is easy to fortify your base to the fullest.
To our surprise, none of that happened. Of course, the game had its fair share of issues, and it still does, but nowhere near what we had expected. We instructed our small group of players to focus on functionality first and report all the bugs and broken features. They co-operated and created cohesive lists of issues with as few duplicate error reports as possible. This allowed us to identify the critical problems and assign people to solve them quickly. Having a detailed list of issues and assignments without a vast, nebulous backlog looming over on Discord allowed us to push out patches rapidly. As we mentioned in our previous article - a small team like ours works best when we can focus on a smaller fragment of the game and work toward the ‘big picture.’ In other words, we try not to bite more than we can chew. Working with a small community allows us to set goals and work efficiently.
Big hammerroceros came prepared with personal bodyguards in the form of small hammerroceroses. It didn't help at all.
The closed beta period also allows us to test very specific game elements in a controlled environment. Each update that we release adds a couple of new features or gameplay changes. Our beta testers are informed about the upcoming changes in advance. By staying up to date with what’s happening within the dev team, they know what to expect from each update, which areas they should focus on, and what kind of bug fixes they can expect in the future. Not everyone has the time, and perhaps more importantly, not everyone is willing to put as much time into this project, which is completely fine. Keeping the beta and the testing group under key and lock for a little longer will allow us to continue this iterative development cycle. It has produced good results for us so far.
Playing with friends allows you to get a strong economy and build massive bases in a couple dozen minutes.
Now, let’s discuss what we still need to do to take The Riftbreaker to Open Beta. As you know, we utilize the peer-to-peer connection architecture. This means that people playing together are virtually linked, and all file transfers happen between their PCs, with no servers in the middle. Of course, that is a giant simplification, but the point is that we don’t have any matchmaking services or world servers to maintain. However, that doesn’t mean that the network side is completely maintenance-free. We have a server running 24/7 that acts as a central hub for the server search screen in the game. If the server went down, you could only connect to friends using the Steam friends list or by directly specifying the IP address that you want to connect to. At present, our server is more than capable of running the server search, but we have no idea what the maximum capacity is. If we opened the beta to everyone, we would likely find out the hard way. Before we do so, we need to implement more scalable and robust tools.
To compensate for the stronger economy, attacks get more dangerous as well.
Another disadvantage of open beta is that people will most likely get bored with it too quickly or get the wrong impression. We don’t want people to rush in and try The Riftbreaker in its unfinished state and form the first impression that it is broken and plagued by technical difficulties. We also don’t want you to get burned out by playing the same survival map for a couple of weeks before we add another biome to the list. The beta is not the full version experience. We want to make this distinction very clear.
Some things, however, are still dangerous, even in co-op. Meet the canceroth boss. It's nasty.
Some of you have been asking questions about the rate at which we’re releasing keys to the public. Generally, we try to release between 50 and 100 keys a week. At present, we give priority to those, who signed up earlier and who are present on Discord. Discord is our preferred method of instant communication with the community. It allows us to quickly address concerns and offer workarounds to issues before we can patch them. If you do not have Discord, you’re still eligible for a key. In fact, we will get keys to everyone who signed up for the test. As the game gets better, we will increase the pace at which we send out keys. It is going to take some time, and we are sorry about that. Please believe us when we say that we are not gatekeeping out of spite - we are gatekeeping to maintain an efficient process.
Perhaps we can't see things well yet, but it's still very fun!
As for when the transition from closed to open beta might happen - we don’t really know, but it won’t be this year. It is quite likely that the open beta will last for only a couple of weeks as a final rehearsal before the release. We are looking into several additional options to let you try out the game early to some capacity, though. We will share details about them in advance so that you can schedule around those events. In the meantime, we will do our best to keep you in the loop about everything on the development front.
Remember to sign up here:
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Have a great weekend!
EXOR Studios