Battlefield Briefing 5/15/15

Latest Servo Build: 302

The Week

It definitely felt like a busy week for us.  Our first update to Servo went out on Monday, adding a bunch of new content/fixes to the Founder's Alpha - a lot of which seem to have been well received.  We've read some very useful feedback in the forums, thanks very much to everyone that has taken the time to leave their thoughts and comments.  If you haven't done so yet, it's certainly not too late.

Mid-week we were very focused on playtesting everyday and getting down to some of the finer details in preparation for the next milestone for Servo.  We still have some time to polish some aspects of the game for that, and certainly it's looking/playing better of late.

What kind of polish items are we looking at right now?  Annoying, confusing, and un-fun things  - but most importantly things that can be fixed in a day or so.  It's a bit of a change in mindset from our usual playtest feedback, and everyone comes to the post playtest feedback meeting armed with their three must fix issues - which are then added to the to-do list depending on how long they'll take to get fixed.  It's then rinse and repeat the next day with a new build of the game that has a batch of new fixes.  The end goal is a more polished version of the game.


Play With the Developers

Thursday, May 21, starting at 7pm CT.  We're inviting all of Servo's Founders to jump online and play some games with us, the development team.  More details to come but we hope that you'll pencil us in for some games or just swing by to chat for awhile.  We'll be hanging out and playing games for an hour or more.

If you haven't already, you might want to join the Servo Gamers Steam Group to help organize some games with your fellow Founders: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/servogamers#


Developers' Progress Reset

With the update to the Founder's Alpha this week, Founders had their progress reset.  That means starting over again from the beginning of the game with one Servo and zero credits.  Not to be left out of the fun, in the middle of this week we had our own progress reset internally.  It was great to have one last playtest session with all of our cool gear before starting over again.  Truthfully though, the gear on my Servos was so junky that starting over again was almost a blessing.  All of the other guys at the office were back at square one and I immediately felt more competitive in games.  When we do get around to really putting in the nuts and bolts on our matchmaking system, it's going to be an interesting challenge to create a system that will keep matches fair and competitive for players of varying skill and varying levels of gear.  Some of us have been down before starting back on Age of Empires III, but we have some good lessons learned over the years that will help us avoid the potholes.