Hello hunters!
As promised, I’ve got an update for you all regarding the ongoing work we’re doing to bring 1v4 multiplayer to you all in Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition. We know you’re all keen to get your hands on the update, which is why we want to keep you in the loop on how it’s coming along!
Internal Testing
Every day after lunch, we get 5 people from our team to sit down and play 1v4 online on the latest internal build for Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition that has 1v4 enabled. As the internal build is changing so often, playing it daily is important to make sure we can feedback on what has been fixed and what issues are still there. With our highly skilled QA team leading these sessions, they know exactly what to look for as well.
Thanks to all this testing, we’ve also been able to firmly confirm that our QA tester Stephen is the best Fury of Dracula player in the whole office. If we had to run some kind of Fury of Dracula tournament, he’d be the one we put forward!
We've also been able to recreate known issues to help narrow down what is causing bugs for our development team, which is a big help with development!
Current Development
Right now, Sam, our official Master of Everything Online, is working on getting 1v4 ready for you all. He’s already implemented a huge load of features, including problematic cards like ‘Speedy Telegraph’.
Whenever our internal testing encounters a bug, we make sure to throw all 5 player logs and save files at Sam so that he can identify what happened to each player, and where the error came from. For example, we encountered an error where AI hunters would move to different locations to different players - the game would then crash once it realised the mistake had been made and it got conflicting reports from different players. With the logs from every single player involved, we can narrow down the exact moment when the bug occurred, and get it fixed.
We’ve already made it so that while in the online lobby, you can see how many people are currently in a single room. Handy for when you want to see if 4 people are waiting for one more player!
As Sam has been doing so much great work, we’re happy to report that we now have most of the features we need to make sure online works with 5 players - which means we can start looking at bugs and gathering information on what currently doesn’t work!
Current Bugs
Speaking of bugs, right now trading between players causes the game to crash for everyone involved - there are a fair few steps involved in the trading process between the players doing the trade, and then making sure that the trade is properly reflected on every else’s games. We’re grabbing lots of player logs to see what is causing issues, which means we’re doing a great job of ironing out these bugs so far.
And while we have made Speedy Telegraph work in 1v4, using it to move to a location that is on the trail also causes a whole heap of issues that we need to resolve. Once we can identify what the game is doing differently when it’s a trail space, we can get to work on making sure it works correctly.
Closed Beta Rollout
As of Thursday, 3rd December, we’ve officially handed over a beta version of Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition to our closed beta testers that features 1v4 multiplayer. This will be a massive help in finding bugs and issues, and just generally giving feedback on how the feature performs.
Our beta testers were massively helpful during the run-up to Fury of Dracula releasing in November, and a lot of them have stuck around to continue helping us out - which we very much appreciate.
Public Beta Rollout
While we do have a good number of beta testers already, we’re well aware that there are a bunch of people who are itching to get their hands on 1v4 and help us iron out any bugs. We’re going to look into how feasible it would be for us to do a public beta, and if one would be needed.
We’ll keep you updated on what we decide to do, as it mainly depends on how development progresses!
5 Copies Bundle?
If Fury of Dracula: Digital Edition is going to be 5 player, it makes sense to put out a 5 player bundle right? Well, it would… but there are some problems with that.
The main one is that according to the lovely folk at Valve, most of these ‘multiple game’ bundles just get purchased by people looking to turn a profit by selling those extra copies on grey market reselling websites. So for the time being, we’re not going to be offering a discounted bundle that includes 4 giftable copies of the game.
So that is where we’re currently at! If you want to stay tuned for more updates, reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook or our official Discord! I’m also lurking in the Steam group chat for Fury of Dracula, if you want to reach out to me there!