Development Summary - June 2025 & First Playtest Was A Success!

Hey!

This month was a lot about preparing the first Playtest.
I invested a bunch of time into making sure that the playtesters have a somewhat smooth experience.
I'll give a short conclusionof the playtest after the development summary.

TFE Development Summary - June 2025

🛠️ Implemented Nvidia DLSS
🛠️ Implemented percentage distributions for good production and unit recruitment (backend)
🛠️ Offensive Combat Power is correctly applied based on where the unit is (inside or outside home territory)
🛠️ Made Building placing a bit more responsive
🛠️ More direct camera movement
🛠️ First iteration of a simple Bot AI that gathers its units around the start landmark and attacks the player after a given time
🛠️ Balancing (e.g. adjusting start good counts, lower amount of beds per residence, etc.)
🛠️ Improved performance of workarea circle tool
🛠️ Fixing bugs (always)
🎨 New visuals for workarea circle tool
⊞ Show available harvestable ressources when selecting a harvesting building
⊞ UI Screen Popups only show for the player and not for e.g. AI opponents
📔 A lot of organizational stuff regarding playtest (setup NDAs, manage testers and their feedback and bug reports, conduct a post playtest survey, etc.)
📔 First evaluations of the playtest

First Playtest Was A Success!

This was the first time, that people from "the outside" have played The First Explorers and this was an exciting experience for me.
I do have a couple of people who battle test the game frequently, but they're doing this already for 1.5 years and they know the game inside out.
So it was super interesting to see external people play the game for the first time and how they perceive the current pre-alpha state.

I'm pretty satisfied with the results I analyzed so far. The testers found a good amount of new bugs (thanks for trying out the wildest stuff I would never have thought of) and came up with some cool ideas how to improve the player experience further.
Of course there are a lot of features missing (it's still early pre-alpha stage) and some mechanics feel clunky and some felt a bit off, but the overall sentiment was pretty positive and excited for what will come further down the road.

What made me especially happy was the fact that most of the playtesters classified the current game pace in an area where I actually plan to go with the game. Game pacing is really hard to get right, so this made me very happy.
I also asked the testers what they think the unique selling points of the game are and this is the second thing that made me pretty excited: Most of them agreed that The First Explorers is hitting the sweetspot between city-builder and RTS very well and that there is not really a game that is serving that niche at the moment. Awesome feedback for me!

So this was only a very short rundown of my perception of the playtest. There will be further evaluations of the playtest down the road and of course there will be more playtests sometime in the future, to make the game even better.

Until next time :)
Sebastian