Bit Battles: March in Review

["What's Bit Battles?" you say? Visit Fanatical Games for the answer!]

A bit late on this one. Unfortunately it's been a busy month filled with quite a long list of non-game development "stuff." Nevertheless, March was an important milestone for Bit Battles as the closed beta officially began! Armed with a modest group of testers, I set out on a mission to slay bugs, fix problems and generally get the game done. Here's the up-and-down story of my month-long adventure...

At the beginning of the month I talked about how the beta would be conducted. This largely meant structuring the test using a series of phases, each lasting approximately one week. The phases would act as guidelines for the testers to focus their attention on certain aspects of the game. While they could certainly test any part of the game they wanted, the goal was to encourage all of them to test specific portions of particular interest to me. As each phase concluded, I asked them to do a small write up summarizing their thoughts.

Sounded like a great idea that seemed to work well right off the beta; within the week I pushed out the second beta build of the game which contained quite a few fixes, many of which were found by the testers. For more info about the way I structured the beta, click here.

By week two, things were really going well. The team had found a slew of minor issues which I had taken care of. And then we hit a snag. One of the testers found a way to exploit the vehicle collision system and "warp" through the walls in the training levels. Not good! After a ton of hair pulling, I managed to get the exploit sorted. Luckily all it took was a bit of tinkering with the vehicle datablocks and the collision hull. More about my near death experience can be found here.

Week three was all about maintaining motivation, both for myself and the testers. After a week of dead silence on the forums and setting up the first "official" multiplayer test of the game only to have no participation, things were looking grim. All of the folks who had so eagerly offered feedback the week before had mysteriously vanished. Some had taken the time to sign up and get accepted to the beta only to never return to actually test the game! By week's end I was both frustrated and more than a little discouraged. More about this here.

As the month came to a close and with still no word from any of the testers, I offered more thoughts on the disappointing participation and look ahead to April, a crucial month for Bit Battles and the MyDreamRPG contest. I briefly talk about focusing on the slew of non-development "stuff" required to get the game done as well as a potential solution to the beta testing problem. For more, click here.

[Miscellaneous Links of Interest]
Fanatical Games
Bit Battles Development Blog
Bit Battles GGE Page