Arena of Suffering News

[p]We're going to bring down the Playtest at the end of next week. Thanks to everyone who got to play the game. For anyone who is dying to still have access, contact us and we'll see if we can keep you on in the Closed Beta. The game had zero reported crashes during the test (heck yeah). We added a few features that were requested, and we're 100% still on target for releasing in January. I'd bring it forward, but competing during the holiday season is not for a first-time dev, especially a small indie one. Wish us luck, and I'll be excited to see everyone at release. :)[/p]

[p]It took so much more work than I thought to get the game talking with Steam. But, it does now. There are 25 achievements so far, and they seem to be working. We can't test those directly during the Playtest (Steam rules, oddly). But, I have a private branch and things seem to be working really well there. Nice.[/p][p][/p][p]Soon, I'm going to start on a public demo. Playtesters have more access, but the demo will have achievements, and the whole thing will still be available to everyone even after the Playtest is done.[/p]

[p]I'm trying to get a patch out the door today to address the comments from this week that I've gotten from the internal testers. Typos (no biggie). A random jerk ogre who was out of position should disappear from the forest. Small stuff there.[/p][p][/p][p]Added Feature: There will now be a NPC Speech toggle in the options menu. Turn it off and you won't hear the "Memememee" type of sound effects while talking to NPCs. Some testers enjoyed this, but a couple found it distracting. So now they won't have to turn their sound off to avoid it! :)[/p][p][/p][p]A couple reports of Cloud saves not working on secondary systems. That's ominous, so that's the feature I'm trying to hit before I push this build. Fingers crossed.[/p][p][/p][p]EDIT (11am). The patch(es) are live. NPC Speech has a toggle in options that worked during initial testing. Let me know if it does for everyone out there. Cloud Saves might/should be working for everyone. That was scary and tricky. On my first load after fixing it, I got a Steam "STUFF CHANGED" error. Clicked through that, and everything has been butter ever since. Again, let me know if that isn't the case for anyone. My first tester didn't even get that error. Whew.[/p][p][/p][p]Install size should be much smaller now. Found a massive error in how the game was uploading to Steam. Footprint should be down to 600 MBs.[/p]

[p]The full trailer is online now and is displaying on my Steam page, so I think it's up for everyone. Yay! I had no idea how long trailers take to make (first one). I've made videos of gameplay before, so this was tricky. Anyway, I hope people enjoy it. Please leave a review and let me know how the playtest is going! And have a great day everyone. :)[/p]

[p]Our store page goes live today! I'll spend the next day getting the Playtest up and running through Steam so that people can start using this is our base of operations. The biggest concern will be to make sure that our Steam Cloud saves are working before people put any serious same into the build here. Hopefully, we'll be running at full speed by next week.[/p][p][/p][p]Oh, and the trailer isn't up yet, so don't worry if you can't see anything. I'm still working on editing the darn thing. :)[/p]