Beta Progress

Hi everyone!  It's time for a progress report on the Beta of Before We Leave!

The reason that I haven't posted for a while is at the end of each week heaps of stuff has happened, but it's all largely heaps of undifferentiated 'making stuff betterer', so it felt hard to post about, plus so much had happened over the week that my brain was fried and I didn't want to post!  But I promised myself that today I'd break that, so here I am!

The Beta for Before We Leave has been going awesomely!  We've spent a large chunk of the time since it was released fixing many many boatloads of bugs, both in some of the larger features that changed in the initial Beta release, but also tackling some major things that we just hadn't managed to work through before the Beta. The game is way more stable and fun to play than it was, which is awesome!

We've also done huge amounts to finish and polish features that hadn't had enough love pre-Beta.  Info Pins, UI, Buildings, Graphics, Optimisation and all sorts!

A few highlights:

• Shipping resources between islands has been really hard to get right, but I think we might have finally nailed it (although more work on the UI to make it all sing is needed)  
• We're one technical hurdle away from having lots more interesting detail lighting in the game, especially at night  
• We added some more info pins to display some really useful feedback to players, and added a setting to allow you to hide the most common ones  
• Elevators in particular had so many edge case bugs, and we've squashed nearly all of them  
• We've started to get in a heap more sound effects for buildings  
• Proper graphics options are in  
• Warehouses and Ports sort their list of stored resources by category now  
• and on and on and on!!

Next week we're (hopefully) going to change direction.  We've hired a Community Manager who starts on Monday, so a chunk of the week will be getting her settled into various things.  And we're going to dedicate a large chunk of the week to just playing through the game, looking for balancing issues - where are things too slow or too fast, not fun enough, buildings that are too expensive or too cheap and so on.

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