Alpha 6: The Next Step — Part 1
There’s no time to rest; development on the next big release is ongoing and we have a lot of cool stuff to get finished!
A few areas raised some concerns during the last EA test, so we’ll address those first. Prepare for quite a bit of text — make sure you’re adequately hydrated before proceeding!
Part One: Moving Forward
Early Access To Alpha
When Virtuverse was starting out, we wanted to distribute through Discord as a way to keep our community close to where they could install and play the game. This was useful for several reasons: easier support, better ability to set expectations, and provide updates. However, a requirement for distributing through Discord was that they didn’t allow Alpha titles to be put up on their storefronts. That’s why our Early Access (EA1–5) naming convention was born.
This does, however, have some issues with setting expectations as to the level of development of the game. While Early Access, Alpha, Beta and many more terms exist to describe games in different states of development: Early Access doesn’t accurately represent the average community member’s expectations of Virtuverse.
Because of this, we’ll be renaming our tests to Alpha-#, with Alpha-6 being the next test.
Bugs & Bug Fixing
Bug fixing is a developer’s constant companion! Despite the amount of testing that the Virtuverse team does internally on each new mechanic, the sheer combinations and numbers of players during a public test will always find a way to expose unintended behaviour.
We currently prioritize bugs based on several different categories:
- Game breaking: Duplication bugs, crashes, rollbacks or things that seriously negatively affect the experience of the game.
- High Priority: Very obvious visual problems, subsets of mechanics or quests that aren’t working as intended, Control or input issues, and generally anything that affects a players ability to progress in the game.
- Low Priority: Minor annoyances, visual or sound glitches.
Our priority is always on fixing the first two categories as soon as possible. For lower impact bugs we need to balance the effort of fixing now, especially if we aim to change how that particular mechanic works in the future.
For EA5 we had a group of Colonists that were an awesome help in collating and categorizing all the bugs raised, and massively increased our time we could spend fixing instead of diagnosing.
Content Creation
There are two threads to game development: the raw mechanics of the game, and then expanding on the content of those mechanics.
An example of this is a mechanic like Achievements: After Achievements have been implemented, there’s an almost infinite amount of work to be done to increase the number of available achievements and expand on the rules and logic that can be applied to allow players to get cool new achievements.
Some of our EA tests and specifically the latest EA5 were heavily weighted towards many features' internal mechanic development. This has a downside from a Colonist’s perspective as there’ll be less new content for them to play with.
This is an area we’re looking to work on to get a better balance going forward. While we want to be able to continue full steam ahead on our roadmap, we also want to continue to develop existing features and expand on them.
24/7 Servers
We’ve been looking into this for quite some time now, we want to find a way to allow for continual access to have better detection and fixing of bugs over time.
There’s always two challenges when it comes to supporting a live running game: hardware cost and human cost. We get thousands of direct messages when the servers are up and running, a combination of praise, support and suggestions. While we love getting all the feedback: it can significantly reduce the time we can spend on developing the game during our testing windows!
Our current plans are to have the servers up, and accessible 24/7 for backers, using a combination of the backer donations and advertising revenue to support the game. We aim to have this done by the start of Q3 this year.
We haven’t yet decided on how it will work for new backers joining after the switchover date (as we are currently looking at moving our donations away from Patreon to another provider). But we will 100% honour all the supporter rewards for any Patreon backers that have backed before the date of the switchover.
Part Two: Alpha 6 Roadmap
Internal Changes:
Internal changes are all things that can require a significant amount of effort but are not something that directly materializes as a mechanic or feature that players can interact with. But these are all essential for the long-term success of Virtuverse:
- Unreal Engine 4.24 → 4.26 upgrade
- Internal UI overhaul and Lua plugin/addon capabilities.
We’ll be announcing more on this in the near future, and publishing some documentation on how to work with our addon system.
You can find the start of our plans here: https://github.com/Virtuverse/CustomAddons/wiki
- Enhanced error reporting & logging
To help assist in squashing bugs, we’re going to be overhauling mechanisms for displaying errors more clearly to testers during the Alpha tests. This will also help us find solutions to more prevalent issues that have been historically harder to resolve.
- New Programmatic Advertising Pilot
We’ll be looking at integrating a new Advertising partner. This will help offset development costs and in the future help significantly reduce the cost to play (and increase in-game returns!).
Mechanical Changes:
All things that will directly affect players’ interaction with the world:
Behind the scenes work on a new location:
Which is a secret for now!
Removal of Missives:
The advent of daily quests means that missives serve less purpose
Team Overhaul:
Similarly to missives, we need to bring our team system more up-to-date.
Content Expansions:
Where we can we will be implementing new content for all of the below mechanics and areas within the game:
- Quests, Armour and Weapons, Schematics, Fishing, Talent Tree, Achievements, Reputation.
Combat Expansion:
There’s currently quite a big issue with damage mitigation in the game. Players either protect against an attack or not. This has led to combat being either a tank and spank where they take 1.0 damage a hit, or their armour is woefully inefficient and any hit would instantly kill any player.
- We’ll be addressing the armour existing in the game, and rebalancing protection values.
- We’ll be rescaling all combat damage done by enemies.
- We’ll be completely redesigning how damage reduction works under the hood.
- Significantly expanding on the Talent Tree to include passives which scale the defensive options available to Colonists.
- Introduction of Blocking, Resistance, and Evasion as three separate defensive layers.
- Introduction of Shields as an equipment type.
- Introduction of Shield power as a player resource type.
- New abilities aimed around defensive cooldowns and threat generation.
- Concept of left-hand and right-hand equipment slots.
(Might be seeing dual-wield pistols in the future!)
This is to help balance out the new dungeon changes we’ll also be looking to introduce as part of Alpha-6.
Balance Changes:
We want to provide a smoother levelling curve and experience for players, with better progression through the passive tree. No more buying a drozian rifle and strike Mk.2 armour on day one!
Dungeon Master:
- A new profession.
- A significant expansion of our procedural dungeon system.
- Ability to modify dungeon keys with extra modifiers and content, scaling the difficulty (and reward) of our dungeon instances.
- [Stretch Goal] Dynamic dungeon events and quest objectives within dungeons.
- And general improvements to dungeon generation, enemy pathing and dungeon rewards: Such as mining nodes within the caves.
Economy & Loot balance:
Fixing some issues around mining loot returns and providing a more consistent return from other activities.
From everyone on the Virtuverse team, thank you for being with us and joining in on the playtests! We are eager to show off what we are working on in the coming months and can’t wait for Alpha 6.
— Fin & the Virtuverse Team.
