Daily Archives: December 8, 2014

Beta 2 : looking for Beta Testers

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1st room of Level 5

1st room of Level 5

So finally, the Beta 2 is here !

It contains 8 levels (the 1st Beta had 4, the Alpha 1 & 2 an incomplete one), and 4 Specializations’ Talent Trees done at a bit more than 50%, and it requires about 7~10 hours to complete.

All in all, now it gives a pretty accurate idea of the final gameplay (if you can put aside the unpolished GUI, the sparse sounds & Visual FX and all other little stuff that will make their way into the final version).

So the result is pretty good, it’s nice to play it, but I’d like to make it even better, and for that, I’m looking for a couple of new Beta testers to bring some fresh eyes & opinions on the game. To be a Beta tester, you must have good analytic skills and be verbal about your impressions, and be familiar with RPG games, and/or Dungeon Crawlers, and/or World of Warcraft ;  If you’re interested, point out any review, critique, analysis of such games you may have made in a Forum or a Blog (or simply copy/paste it in your message) and write me from here : http://www.managames.com/mail_en/?subject=Dungeon Guardians – Beta Test .

A notable amelioration over the Beta 1 is that if you start at an advanced level, your party will get some decent gear, and thus it makes it much easier to test a specific level without redoing all the levels before it.

And let’s finish this page with a bunch of screenshots from the Beta 2 !

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3rd Weekly Update : Unity Roadblocks & Beta Testing

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Hopefully Temporally Loading Screen

Hopefully Temporally Loading Screen

Already the 3rd Weekly Update !

Unity Roadblocks

So last week was spent on testing & tuning everything to build up the 2nd Beta of the game.

I quickly ran into a couple of roadblocks brought by Unity.

Unity is the game engine I’m using to create The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians. It’s a great engine at 80%, an ok engine at 15%, and the last 5% are “what the heck is that?!?”. So last week, a lot of my time has been wasted on the last 5%. Mainly, I ran into a limit that makes it impossible to have the whole dungeon active at the same time. I still can load it all in memory, but I have to activate only one part at once. Moreover, activating/deactivating parts is slow like hell.

So far, it was working ok, except for my save/load system, so I was forced to put a temporary loading where stuff is activated/deactivated till everything is ready for play & available for save. So now, the game takes nearly 20 seconds to load on my PC, instead of less than 5 seconds.

The good news is that Unity 5 should be released before Dungeon Guardians, and it’ll remove the limit that gave me headaches last week, which means I should be able to update and get back to a fast load time (else, we’ll get near of 1 minute when all the 20 levels will be there).

The other roadblock1 I hit is that there’s no automatic way to save/load the current state of animation of the new Unity animation system. In Beta 1, I was still using the old one, but I partly moved the dungeon creatures to the new one as it offers some interesting features (mainly: reusing animations on different creatures). Anyway, I had to find some ruse to make the save/load work for it, and it ate some of my time as well.

 

Beta Testing

It’s official, Beta testing my levels take me much more time than planned, almost 1 full day of work per level, while playing normally requires around 1 hour per level. There’s always stuff to fix, small bugs, tuning to do, and boss fight to balance, so all in all, it’s pretty slow.

Moreover, I changed a bit the save/load system, so I had to restart a playthrough from the 1st level. Fortunately, the tuning needed for the 1st 4 levels wasn’t too big, as they didn’t suffer much from the changes since the 1st Beta.

 

Anyway, Beta 2 is all done and the result is pretty nice ! There are 8 levels now, and our party Toons get enough abilities & talents to make the gameplay feels more or less complete, so it’s getting pretty close of the final result (although there’s still a ton of new abilities & talents coming in next Betas, so the game will still get better!).

See you in next post for more details & screenshots about the Beta 2 as a whole !

  1. more of an hiccup actually ↩