Alpha - 1 Debrief

Oh baby, our first Alpha weekend! Over the last three days, 121 testers wound up playing 261 rounds, spread across 18 different maps, collecting a total of around 830 hours played. Defenders came out as the clear winner with 161 wins. The difference in wins could be due to the influx of new players, as Attackers take quite some time to learn, while map layout could have also been a culprit. Unfortunately for us, Friday was hamstrung by a critical bug that locked the Defending team to the map screen if a round timed out. We identified the cause and pushed a hotfix early Saturday morning which cleaned things up nicely.

Gif City

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Another shutter play, brought to you by teamwork

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Shotgun Flanks

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An excellent hold, followed by betrayal.

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And now, a word from our Creative Director

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MAWPing it up as an Attacker

Maps Aplenty

Every weekend we include a relatively small amount of maps so we can focus on certain changes or features we are adding into the level generator to see how they effect gameplay. We also place hidden cameras into every tile that take screenshots when a level is baked. Here are a few pictures from levels that were played over the weekend!


Always Working

So what are we working on this week? We’re adjusting how we bake lightmaps, which should yield substantial performance gains. Recently, we had to make a lot of trade offs with our old system since we were running purely with real-time lighting. With this change, we can have more detailed lighting that doesn’t affect gameplay, such as exterior lights, and bake them down into their own lightmaps. This will free up resources for the lights that matter: the ones you can shoot out to change the tactical value of the environment. These tweaks should also allow us to scale our visuals to both high and low end systems, allowing more players to enjoy the game.

If this update goes well, and our frame-rate doesn’t accidentally drop to the level of a power-point presentation, we will be sending out more keys for this weekend’s test. Keep an eye on your inbox, and join our Offical Discord server if you haven’t already. See you all next week for another update!