Building a Beta World
Hello everyone! We at Hell Hounds hope you are all doing well and staying safe. In early January I released footage of our prototype. The prototype was just to show game mechanics and would be the foundation on which our final game would be based on. Our Prototype showcased: 1. Character Selection 2. Game Mechanics 3. MMOG game play (showing what the start would look like with all 32 players on board)
Then on the first week of February, I released some Alpha screens to build some momentum. Just to show a few things: 1. How development of our game was going an update for our community. 2. The functionality of our menu and some character color changes and how that would look like. Further note, upon release of the final game, changing the color of your character will be free of charge.
The next step was to show some alpha footage of the game play which I had told the community I would release at the end of February. However, I decided to take it a step further without much fanfare and hype I decided to announce the cancellation of our alpha footage due to the non-stop efforts of the team we released the Beta instead on the last week on February as opposed to the first week of March as initially discussed, keeping in line with my philosophy of under promising and over delivering. We successfully launched our beta test for our platform runner in our discord group. The second game is code named Project: Audax. Audax in Latin means “Bold” and that is the direction we are taking. Project: Audax, is a hyper casual MMOG. We are aiming not just for mass adoption but we are focusing on a fun player experience, a minimalistic and easy to use user interface, as well as replay value. In order for us to do execute this properly it isn’t just enough for me to just show game play on my end but to get the community involved as well and show we have a working product well on its way to its final stages of completion.
Beta testing our first game Cassian’s quest was almost a solitary experience as I had some folks test it out who all had to sign NDAs for confidentiality agreements. This time for our second game I wanted to reach out to our growing community to get their thoughts. As I firmly believed they would see things which the team and I would have missed. Our beta showed some surprises which I had not discussed previously as I love to continually surprise the community instead of infusing them with hype of things to come. Our Beta showcased the following: 1. A newly refined menu 2. Improved Character Selection featuring uniquely designed custom characters for the game 3. A never before seen dismemberment feature in a MMOG obstacle course battle royale (which surprised pretty much all the beta players and added to the hilarity of the game) 4. Last but not least improved physics, as graphics is key to a great experience, but user experience and physics are key to completing that puzzle.
The Beta test continues as the community is heavily involved in testing the game and some have involved their families too! Our beta testing objective is to not only uncover as many bugs as possible before release in a controlled environment and to increase our exposure showing a working product but to engage further with the community and listen to their feedback to help make the game an even bigger success for all involved truly making it Beta world!
With that I want to give a big thank you to our community who absolutely rocks, our mods for their unwavering support, our devs who continue to build 24/7, and our beta testers for their time and efforts! Let’s keep it up Hounds!
— TheLoneRaynger
