Morning everyone!
First, we'd like to thank all of our external playtesters who tirelessly helped us discover some bugs we missed, as well as great feedback that is going to help us polish the levels going forward. Thank you for all of your support and patience!
We finally passed a big internal Beta milestone last week, and this means that our workload going forward will be:
1. More polishing. A lot more polishing.
The fun part about cleaning up an immersive sim-style game like this is how all of the attention to detail needs to go in at this stage. This means tweaking physics so not everything breaks with a single collision ("elephant in a china shop," was one of the most popular phrases passed around between the Backer Alpha and the playtest builds), cleaning up and tightening more of the levels, and then tying together the world with hand-placed narrative and making sure we review each of the levels with the updated state of the world changes.
Here's a sneak peek at one of the passes "Volcanic1" is receiving (an internal nickname so as to avoid spoilers). Note the importance of verticality...
2. The Backer Beta build! This is still being polished up, and I'm gathering all of the documentation necessary to make sure that returning players from the Backer Alpha have a list of changes that have gone in, as well as some instructions for any backers who are less familiar with how UA works.
3. Newsletter! This should launch the same day as the Backer Beta... that's all I'll say for now. :) So keep your inboxes open!
4. We're still working out an exact date and time, but sometime this month we'll be holding a Reddit AMA with some of the members of the OtherSide team! We'll be gathering questions in advance for anyone who can't make the date or time live, and post a link here once we've gathered more information. Now might be a good time to start brainstorming...