Dev Update: Alpha Recap

Overall, it was a tremendous success.

We went from complete stealth mode into a studio announce and game announce to running a public Alpha playtest all within the same month. We were also lucky enough to build a community of gamers who are as passionate about The Legend of California as we are.

Highlights: The game played well, people had fun, and engagement was through the roof. The average tester in the alpha played for 9 hours… which is kind of crazy, in the best way possible.

But was everything a success? Well, no.

We came up very short on our concurrency and performance goals for the Alpha playtest.

Even pre-Alpha, our internal stress testing revealed that our concurrency goals were too high. To make for a better Alpha experience, we tried to lower concurrency caps to 45 (players) per server. On some highly impacted servers, we lowered the concurrency caps even further to get performance back during the last few days of the Alpha playtest. The end result was that there was often a lot of lag, the number of players per server was much lower than we planned for, and there were noticeable “hiccups” whenever someone new would log in. (I’ll let Tim or one of the engineers expand on why things were not performing up to par and why we didn’t catch it during our internal testing in a future post. Lots of it had to do with the total number of unique players per server and not just the concurrency per server.)

Our Alpha testers were the best, though. They were so gracious and understanding. Shockingly, I didn’t read a bunch of feedback about the lag or performance. Our testers mostly just had fun taming the California wilderness, building their ranches, defeating bandits and… well… getting owned by boars.

So what are we going to do about it?

Our original plan was to take the feedback and learnings from this Alpha playtest, go “heads down” for a few months, and then host a Beta playtest sometime this summer. However, our game currently doesn’t hit the level and quality of performance for a modern, high-quality, multiplayer experience. So, we’ve made the decision to keep the game in Alpha at least for one more milestone.

The entire team has prioritized, and is now focused on, performance improvements (client, server, graphics, physics), bug fixing, and polish over new feature development. I can’t give you an exact date for the next Alpha playtest. If you were invited to the last playtest, though, you’ll be invited to the next one. If we can, we’ll try to get additional folks in, too. This test will actually be with fewer people and fewer servers. (On a related note: 69% of our Alpha invites were through Steam Playtest signups. We pulled our initial wave of invites from our friends & family and a handful of creators that applied. We wanted to make sure servers were stable before turning on the big Steam invite faucet.)

Don’t worry! A Beta is still happening. The Beta playtest will include a larger pool of players and will also feature more content than the next Alpha playtest. The next Alpha will be light on new content because the main focus is getting the game to run better.

Ok, enough about testing and performance…

What are our thoughts on the gameplay coming out of the Alpha?

Overall, the game played as we expected it to play. Even though our concurrency cap was