We started working on the main menu. And we did some work to improve the onboarding experience (when the user logs in for the first time). If a user is playing the game for the first time they have to pick a nickname. Afterward, they will be redirected to this main menu.

We decided to go for in-game usernames instead of using your Steam name. One reason for this decision is that we might want to release the game on different platforms in the future. This way names are unique no matter what platform you are playing the game on.

Another reason is future leaderboards and statistics pages, it would be nice if you could search for players by their name. Steam names are not unique so it is hard to find the right player when you search for a name.

Happy new year! A new year full of exciting things is waiting for us.

📌 About playtesting

Here is an update for the playtesters and people that are interested in playtesting. Currently, we are implementing a lot of online multiplayer features. Because of this, we have to rewrite some of our core systems. Meaning we don't have very stable builds (a lot of bugs and broken features) at the moment.

People who already own the game on Steam can just access the game as usual. For other people who showed interest in playtesting, we have added you guys to a list. We will do some more serious playtests around Q2/Q3 of 2020.

🔨 Technical progress

We finished migrating from Unreal Engine version 4.22 to 4.24.

By upgrading to this version of Unreal Engine we were able to make proper use of the built-in system called the Gameplay Ability System, instead of a custom made system.

At this point, we decided to take a good look at the systems that were created during the game's initial development. Most of those systems were created specifically to test mechanics in an offline setting. Now that we have started working on multiplayer we need to rewrite some of those systems.

🎯 Goals for this year

We hope we can expand the team with a character artist and an environment artist. Currently, there is a lot of focus on the technical sides of things, but we hope we can find the right people to guide this game in the right artistic direction.

Here are some goals for the game. We already stated that we want to conduct more serious playtests in Q2/Q3 of this year. By the end of the year, we want to have all core multiplayer functionality, a few playable maps and at least the 1 versus 1 duel game mode finished.

Also with the help of a character and environment artist we want to design our Steam page so we are able to reach a broader audience. Currently, we are getting close to three hundred awesome mailing list subscribers, we hope we can top the one thousand at the end of the year.

Of course, it is fun to be able to kill each other when playing a multiplayer game. So we gave each player some health.

We needed a quick way to get into sessions with each other, so we created a very rough server browser.

We conducted our first multiplayer tests. Pretty much the only thing the playtesters were able to do at this point was to move their characters around.