Arena of Suffering News

[p]The Demo is through with approvals, and it should be live and running now. Please let me know if anyone has hiccups with it. :)[/p]

[p]Arena's demo is going live today. It needs to be ready for Nextfest, but I thought it would be awesome to have it ready for anyone who still wants to try things out now. Except a number of quick patches throughout the day as I test and get any final bugs out of the way (there have been a few). I'm still working on a scrolling text issue. By tomorrow, it should calm down a lot. Take care! :)[/p][p][/p][p]EDIT: 9-18[/p][p]When I said going live today, what I should have said was going live (for me), getting some awesome bug fixing done, and not realizing that Steam has an approval phase for Demos even if the main game and store are already greenlit, lol. So, the public-facing side of the Demo is going to take until early next week. But I played through the whole thing yesterday, and every blip we encountered got squashed, and there weren't many "Hmmm, that's not right" moments. A major sound problem that's been a thorn in my side is now gone. Environmental sounds grow and fade properly with distance. Before they were . . . eccentric.[/p]

[p]In the next hour or so we'll bring down the Playtest. Thanks for your help everyone. People who are still working on their game: you can copy your save files just to be safe. They should transfer over to the main game later on, but it's always nice to be extra careful. I have associated the saves w/ the main game's App ID, so hopefully the Cloud Saves will be okay. Question Mark? :)[/p]

[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]