Greetings, Spacefarers!
May is upon us! As October’s beta launch looms closer, the team is hard at work bringing in the content and features slated for the beta build. The Community playtest that just wrapped up has provided us with a tremendous amount of insight and information, as well as helping to identify critical bugs and issues still present within the game. Over the coming days and weeks, we will be analyzing all of the feedback, suggestions, bug reports, and data that have come in over the course of the test period. We are so grateful to all of the players who jumped in to check out the game, and especially to those who reported issues for the team. While we understand that game tests can be fraught with bugs that make the experience rough, having this information allows us to ticket those issues to be resolved before the game goes live later this year. There will be a lot of learnings we can take away from this test!
In the coming months, we will be conducting further test periods, and inviting our landholders to continue to be an active part of the game’s development. We want our community to be on the forefront in seeing and experiencing features as they are ready, as well as helping us hone and polish the game as we tackle bug reports and issues. We will have further information on the next test in the near future, so stay tuned for those details!
On the Community side, the team would like to thank everyone for participating in the community events during this test period! We felt that these events were a big success, and look forward to offering further events like these during future tests and of course after the game goes live. This was an excellent opportunity for us to pilot some of the event types we’d like to bring into the live experience. We would love to hear the community’s feedback on the events, and whether this is the type of activity you enjoyed taking part in.
On the development side, the team is digging in to work on expansions of combat, like chip damage, fleet versus home base, and fleet repair… The learnings from the test will be very impactful as we continue to flesh out the combat from the basic version made available for players to try for the first time. We will be taking feedback on board, as well as working through the bugs and issues we saw in this area.
The summer is going to be a busy time for us here at Ion Games, and we are excited to have our community along for the ride!