Developer Diary: Closed Multiplayer Beta results
Hello, racers, and welcome to our second Developer Diary! In these diaries, we’ll be taking you behind the scenes of Battle Racers’ development — how we are bringing the game to life.
For this Developer Diary, we discuss last week’s Closed Multiplayer Beta, when we opened the game for 48 hours to select beta testers. We’ll go through what happened (the good and the not-so-good), the feedback we received, and what we learned moving forward. If you missed the beta, read on for a full recap.
Opening the gates
The Closed Multiplayer Beta took place over 48 hours, from 10AM of May 8 to 10AM of May 10 (GMT+8). We had a total of 124 beta testers sign up for our beta, more than what we originally thought.
We put up a super secret web URL that only beta testers with whitelisted Metamask addresses could access. Using the link, testers could walk around the Battle Racers arena, choose sample cars and weapons, then race against other players in real time. We had two multiplayer tracks available, plus Garage kiosks if they wanted to pre-select their loadout before a race.
We wanted to stress-test our servers, and immediately, we got our wish. Some players reported lag / choppiness, and a few couldn’t load the game at all! We were on full tech support for the first few hours, and made server improvements multiple times until we got it right. Stress-test success!
Since the game was using Decentraland controls, we wanted to make sure testers knew how to move around and interact with objects properly. We posted a step-by-step walkthrough on Discord, and also hosted four official playtimes where we’d be available on voice chat. We thought we’d have to tour them around, but realized people didn’t need our help — once they loaded the game, everyone just made a beeline for the tracks! We had robots (our temp avatars) clump around each track, spectating races or lining up for the next ones. It really felt like an arcade.
3… 2… 1… RACE!
Another thing we discovered was if someone started racing, they usually stayed for another race… then another… then another. Players would experiment with different cars and weapons, or try and beat their own times. We had some testers racing for an hour straight, and come back the next day (or multiple times a day!) A busy time slot would have up to 10 people milling around and racing; even at dead hours, we’d drop into the build to see one person quietly racing there against AI.
Races got really competitive. You’d hear people goading each other in our voice channel (all in good fun, of course) or challenging each other to race in chat. We hadn’t put leaderboards yet, so players made their own: they would take screenshots of their best times per track, and share them with each other on Discord. Comparing best times became such an in-demand feature that we have decided to add leaderboards for this milestone :)
The metagame
The third thing that emerged from our beta was the metagame. Much of Battle Racers depends on how you build your car, with its stats determining how it performs on a track. Since our cars auto-steered, we wanted to add a way for players to interact with their cars (and each other) — so we added weapons. We wanted to see if having equippable weapons was enough to add strategy to races.
Beta testers figured this out faster than we thought. Within the first day, players quickly found their go-to loadouts, discussing them in our channels. While mileage varied, two stood out as crowd favorites: the Guerilla Bravo car and the Boost B weapon. People said these were overpowered or downright unbeatable! We’ll be checking these and other stats to make sure everything is balanced for launch.
We also found that players would change their loadouts based on their performance in the previous race. For example, if they saw another player using traps, they would equip shields next. This was great behavior, and we now know that players really cared about choosing the right weapon for the race. Moving forward, we’ll be taking a hard look at how our weapons economy is designed, to make sure weapons stay strategic and rewarding.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Best of all, we got amazing feedback from our testers. Feedback was honest and specific, ranging from bugs and feature requests to how addictive the game was. We were able to upgrade our servers, find some pesky bugs, and identify what we still need to work on, all within two days! And at the end of the day, everyone had fun — that’s all we could hope for as a game studio.
A big heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who participated in our Closed Multiplayer Beta! We hope you enjoyed playing Battle Racers and that you’ll race with us again when the game is out on Decentraland.
If you missed the beta, or just want to relive the moment, check out some of these streams by our community members:
- The PBTV Show #5 | Crypto, Gaming and Battle Racers — PBTV
- BETA BATTLE RACERSSS — Franken
- Battle Racers Beta Testing Guide! — CloudWhiteWhale
- ❤ Battle Racers BETA ❤ — catdicax
- Battle Racers Multiplayer Beta! Pre-Sale Hype!— Wolven
- Axies, Battle Racers & PIRATES — LtZonda
And here are some articles discussing the beta:
- Battle Racers Preview and Battle Racers Weapons Loadouts Guide(BR Beta) — nurdADD
- Beta | Thoughts, and ideas — Mutation
- Battle Racers Beta Walkthrough — ledeir
- A Quick Lap with Battle Racers — felblob
- Battle Racers Beta Gameplay and More — Dapp.com
There’s more content being posted every day. Check out our bounty campaign to find out how your content can get you free crates!
Don’t forget — May 21 is our item pre-sale! Follow us on these channels, and please clap or share if you like this article.
Battle Racers: https://battleracers.io
Discord: https://discord.gg/gfEPSra
Telegram: https://t.me/battleracers
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/battleracersgame/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BattleRacers
Thank you for reading!
