Greetings, Spacefarers!
January is already in the books, and it’s time to dive in and talk about February, and the current focus for the team. With much of the planning now taken care of, the team is hard at work on several of the core elements of the game. We have settled back into the groove, with sprints back to their normal cadence. Our new team members are already making outstanding contributions to developing Echoes of Empire. Currently, that means a great deal of work going into combat and its supporting mechanics, and ownable PoI’s and the feature sets for those aspects of the game.
Combat will represent one of the most challenging features to develop, due to the way it will impact the feel and flow of the entire game. This is a set of mechanics that are critical to get right, and to continue to balance over time. The systems embraced in this work include both PvE and PvP combat, defenses, encounter mechanics and more. While PvE content will not be present for the launch of beta, work is still underway on those features alongside the broader combat development.
Work is well underway on the claimable POI’s as well, and this is a feature that we know the community will have a great deal of interest in. This, along with combat, are two of the features that will be included in the community testing program, allowing landholders to offer feedback and help shape this critical feature set. We want to ensure that landowners find the interface manageable, and that the experience is fun when interacting with your POI’s. Landowners will be able to progress buildings similar to the homebase, along with features such as setting tax rates, defenses, options for your mines, and more.
In addition to these features, the team continues to digest all of the feedback and issues that were reported during alpha testing. We saw fantastic engagement with the test over the course of the week, and were able to gather valuable data and analytics as well as insight into how the community is feeling about the game. This information is helping inform changes and improvements to the game, and the team is taking community feedback under careful consideration as we continue to address bugs you found, and some of the excellent suggestions we received. The high quality of information contributed by the community was one of the drivers for starting the testing program. It gives us great confidence to know that the community is this passionate about the game, and we’re excited to be able to get landholders back into the game sooner than beta.
In the coming weeks, we will be putting out in-depth articles on these features and others, continuing to share the game’s progress with the community. We will also have more information on the recently announced community testing, with more details on what to expect as the program comes together.
Stay awesome, and keep an eye out for more news and updates!