Survival Alpha Development Update!
This dev blog covers our ongoing move to a Full-Blown Survival Alpha, Changes to Indiegogo, alongside the Xsolla Launcher Swap for Alpha and Beta. I’d like to say a special thank you to our dedicated testers who have been helping us with the survival pre-alpha. We’ve had some nasty bugs and our testers' persistence in helping us sort these issues has been hugely important. Thank you again to all our backers and double to those dedicated folks who put in that little bit extra (You know who you are). Likewise, a big shout out to the moderation team here on our discord. It’s been a little while since our last update, but we’ve not been idle. Let’s get into it.
Survival Alpha!
So the big news is that we’re moving steadily towards our first Stable Alpha build featuring the Survival gameplay loop. We still have a lot we want to add, change, and improve but this build represents a big goal for the community.
Our new Dev Vlog takes a head on look at this topic and covers:
-Improvements to the building system with new textures, redoes of older tiers and the Stone External Wall Implementation.
-New customization and Play Model Changes.
-New Weapons for the T0/Primitive Level of gameplay
-A focus on the new Survival Build as a whole.
-An overview of the new progression system and how Silver is used as a raiding resource.
-Points of interest including the new Castle Event
-How Barrels and the road Network functions.
-The new underground cave network
There’s also discussion on some of the new quality of life features we’ve added, AI changes and more. A link can be found here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Alpha vs Beta?
One topic I want to face upfront is how we’ve decided to address Alpha vs Beta. We’ve been working hard to get the survival gameplay implemented in a fun manner which accurately represents the end game we want to make.
However, we’re very aware there are several key features/mechanics we still need to add such as Cavalry Warfare, Worker Buildings, the “Renown System” itself to name a few. Likewise, there are multiple areas we still need to re-do and improve such as Animations, The UI and various small but meaningful optimizations.
By drawing the line down the middle, we’re able to get players going (on what we hope) will be a fun experience, which also directly helps us by providing invaluable testing data. Likewise given we’ve always been set on making a Survival game its very exciting for our team to have reached this goal, even if there’s still a lot to be done.
Big questions regarding the Xsolla Launcher, Indiegogo, and Beta Access.
As we’ve said many times, we’re extremely grateful to our community for their very generous support of our work.
I’m sure folks will have plenty of questions regarding the new update and changes. We’re always around here in discord if you want to ask.
That said to head off any misinformation, I’m going to do my best to answer some of the more glaring questions.
1. What’s with Steadfast Backers getting testing keys now if its an alpha?
We’ve decided we’re going to allow early testing access for our previous Steadfast Backers. Given how we’ve decided to deploy the Alpha, and that it may still take a while before we reach beta, we didn’t see any reason to punish folks who have already helped support our work in the past. This also allows us to do a small expansion on the tester base in a controlled manner. You should be receiving your testing keys via email in 1-2 days.
2. What happens to Beta if that's no longer for sale?
We are absolutely still going to be doing our Beta Phase release when we get to that stage of development.
That said, given the confusion this has caused over the last few years we’ve decided to remove the ability to purchase Steadfast and Proud Backer tiers from our site going forwards.
3. What’s the deal with this new launcher then? What about Steam?
This is something we’ve been slowly required to do as our community has grown.
Steam limits the number of testing keys it's willing to distribute. By these rules we’re very much already at the upper limit of what they’ll offer us.
By swapping to the Xsolla launcher, we can ensure that tester keys keep coming to our backers and that we can honour our promises regarding the spare beta keys. It also means we’ll never have any issues regarding running out of keys again and ensuring that keys are always sent immediately on backing.
We want to be super clear:
-The game is going to return to steam for Early Access.
-This is only an intermediary stage for Alpha and Beta before the game returns back to Steam.
-When we return to steam, you’ll receive your full game key with attached cosmetics, Titles, and the like.
Customers with steam keys should be fine to keep using them for the foreseeable future for testing. We’ll be updating the Xsolla and Steam Builds in tandem and it does not matter which launcher you play from; both connect to the same servers.
Again a huge thank you to all our amazing backers, our community here on discord and the awesome moderators who help keep it all together. Now that we’ve gotten past this big goal we’ll be doing more regular updates to let you know how's it going.
Till next time!