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StarFearNewsSecond Playtest Live Now!
Community

Second Playtest Live Now!

StarFear · published 31 Aug 2026, 13:42 UTC

All newsPlayers around this dateRead on Steam

We're online!

Now until September 30th.

► REQUEST PLAYTEST ACCESS ◄

We'd love to see you on Discord, where we're posting internal progress updates regularly.

Recap

At the end of our last playtest in May:

  • The game was too hard.

  • There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for another run.

  • We needed to be better prepared to make significant balance changes partway into a playtest.

What have we been up to?

Our development focus has been:

  1. Difficulty, where we introduced difficulty tiers, a secure slot, and rebalanced the sandbox

  2. User Interface, which has been largely replaced and greatly simplified

  3. Progression, where perks and unlocks have been decoupled and simplified

Additionally, there are quite a few other tweaks, refinements, and additions, such as:

  • Missions overhaul -- now found in-raid and expanded beyond proof-of-concept

  • Enemy concentrations -- where you're rewarded for opting into more challenge

  • Hub rework -- with (still largely POC) interactable kiosks and simplified interface

  • Ship identity -- name your ship and feel suddenly more attached to each bucket of bolts

We also welcomed a new member to our development team, BlackBox, who has been hard at work expanding our item sandbox for more variety, particularly in the early game:

More from StarFear

Other announcements

All news
Community21 Aug 2026Next Playtest: SeptemberHello there! We've been hard at work since May applying (hopefully) what we learned from our last playtest, and we're ready to invite more people in for round two: Our next playtest will run from August 31st to September 30th. ► REQUEST PLAYTEST ACCESS ◄ Recap At the end of our last playtest in May: · The game was too hard . · There isn't enough variety or incentive to keep coming back for anot…Community30 May 2026First Playtest ConclusionsThank you! First of all, thank you to everyone who participated! It is now clearer than ever how valuable crowdsourcing feedback and collecting analytics are to understanding what's working (or not). Up until the first Steam playtest, we'd only seen friends & family try the game out, so this was our first check against a real audience of regular players. We really appreciate everyone who took t…Game update10 May 2026Early Game Balance PassWe've been analyzing some of our analytics for first half of the playtest so far and it's clear we have a problem: No one is making it out of Act 1 (~Threat Levels 1-5): I like the direction of the difficulty trend line, but it's too many walls too early. Let's look at the culprits... Changes: · Act 1 · Turrets · Decrease HP from 60 -> 40 (2-shot kill with starter weapon now) · Decrease rate of…