By Carneros & Rod
TEST ONE!
On Saturday October 19th, we ran a world exploration test in Stars Reach. In this pre-alpha version of the game we haven’t tuned for difficulty, are using many placeholder artworks, and are aware that we still have bugs to deal with, but that is fine at this stage.
We gave players several new tools to play with and very little information on how to use them. The players split up and started to test out the game in various ways. Some of them explored the new Ranger skills and exploration game play.
We got a lot of great feedback on the exploration part of the game. Several players managed to completely map the planet. Those players found a trophy labeled “a sense of pride and accomplishment” in their inventories. They then usually lost it when they next died, oops.
Other players equipped a weapon and proceeded to hunt the creatures around the map. And a few players were content with setting the trees on fire and watching the world burn!
In the screenshot you see below, every tree is the equivalent of a mob in a traditional MMO. They can each run individual behavior scripts, they grow and die and burn and can be chopped. They even throw off seedlings so the forest can spread.
As you can see, it was a pretty dense forest! One of the topics of discussion on the Discord afterwards was that the forest fires don’t spread enough, so we will work on tuning that up so that it spreads more and feels more dangerous. During every test, the dev team hangs out on a Discord voice channel with the testers, talking through what testers are experiencing. Feedback like the above is exactly why we run tests.
TEST TWO!
Not long into the test we ran into an issue where large groups of players near each other were being disconnected all at the same time. On top of that many of the players that were disconnected were then facing a crash bug on trying to log in. The development team jumped into action and began to dig through the server and crash logs as they came in to start to identify the problem.
By Monday morning, we had identified some possible fixes and built them into a new hotfix client. The problem we faced is that the issue was hard to reproduce and required more players then we could muster in house. We turned to our faithful testing Discord for help. With a simple announcement in Discord we were able to get 30 people to log into the game with only short notice. This allowed us to validate our fixes and help us identify some of the remaining ones.
The bug itself was elusive, only showing up during combat and often hiding from single-player sessions. But with enough players fighting monsters at once, it became far more frequent. We asked the community to dive in and engage in as much combat as possible. After 30 minutes of intense monster-slaying, we were thrilled to see the bug squashed-Discord saved the day!
Of course, the players had one additional note for us: “The monsters need to be much deadlier.”
This test showed that we were successful at fixing the crash that we had originally identified. Sadly, the test also resulted in reports of players crashing on login to the game. In fact, it was severe enough that it affected the dev team, who couldn’t even log in to end the test! (We did eventually get in, and close the server down, to the dismay of those testers who had planned to just keep playing…)
TEST THREE!
Once again, the development team dove into crash reports, player and server logs to research the issues. Everything pointed to an issue with our visual effects and how they interacted with DirectX and Vulkan. We quickly came up with some potential solutions and turned to Discord for help – pulling off two tests in a single day!.
The third test in three days brought more insights, and while we’re still working through those fixes, it’s clear how valuable these quick, spontaneous Discord tests have become. We’ll keep leaning on our community for these unscheduled playtests, and though we can’t promise instant fixes every time, the progress we’re making feels great—and sometimes even faster than expected!
