Blog 36

Felix here with a slightly overdue blog post.

With the alpha milestone behind us, we’re now shifting focus to building content and scaling things up. That said, we’re always working to improve the core mechanics of the game—and with that in mind, we ran a smaller, focused playtest just one week ago.

Over the weekend, our closest community members—those on our mailing list and Discord—were invited to take part in a more compact test centered entirely around combat. We set up a new test level where players could freely equip themselves with Tier 1 and 2 gear, and quickly jump into conquest and raid scenarios. The idea was to let people fight a lot and give us targeted feedback in that area. For the first time, players could also try out multiplayer and interact using our new Helldivers 2-inspired emote system.

With a more limited scope and a smaller group, we naturally got less feedback overall—but what we did get was much more focused. That’s exactly what we were hoping for. It's always refreshing to get fresh eyes on systems we've been staring at for weeks, and a lot of the comments pointed out things we knew, deep down, weren’t quite right—but couldn’t fully articulate ourselves.

I spent last week tackling one of the most pressing issues: Players weren’t always sure which enemy they were going to attack unless they actively locked on. We’ve got a system that auto-selects the enemy closest to your aiming center, but in a crowd, it could feel unpredictable.

So—with some high-quality programmer art (meaning: it will look much better once Jens and Tim take a pass)—I added a highlight for the current target and made sure your character always faces the enemy they’re about to strike. It’s a small change, but it made a big difference in how the combat feels. I’m really happy with it, and I hope it’ll feel much better the next time you'll get your hands on the game. (And yes, there will be a next time!)

These playtests have also been a bit of an experiment for us—to see if the feedback justifies the effort—and honestly? It absolutely does. So expect more chances to test the game in the near future. Most will be small and focused like this one, but we’ll also be doing larger-scale testing as we approach release and our Steam Next Fest slot. That big public demo? We’ll definitely community-test it first.

Until then, happy Easter to those who celebrate—and as always, back to the pixel mines. ^^

Cheers, Felix