Today, after almost nine months of pre-alpha development and testing, Disc Jam reaches its alpha milestone! To celebrate, this week’s playtest will last all weekend! Play anytime from Thursday 12pm PST to Sunday at 11:59pm PST.

But first, a thank you!

Before we dive in, we want to thank all of our players, fans, and founders for sticking with us through Disc Jam’s development, for helping us test, and for your patience along the way. When fatigue sets in, your passion and support is what really keeps us going.

We also really want to thank our families and loved ones for bearing with us as we near completion of our first game as an independent studio. Last week, Tim and I stayed in LA over Thanksgiving to ensure we hit our alpha milestone on time and it looks like we’ll be working through Christmas as well. We’re hopeful all of the hard work will be worth it! Thanks for putting up with us!

So what is alpha? How is this different than the pre-alpha?

These days, many game devs define alpha and beta differently. Often these terms are used more for marketing than to actually describe the state of development. To us, a game has reached alpha when it’s feature complete. This means that all of the features that we expect to ship on day one exist in the game. They may be unpolished, buggy, and/or lack content but they’re there. Let’s take a look at the new features coming online this week that bring us to this milestone:

Upgrade to Unreal Engine 4.13

Although our engine is heavily modified, we’ve integrated the latest performance improvements and bug fixes from Unreal Engine 4.13.

Tutorial



We now have an in-game tutorial! It teaches the basics and helps ramp up new players. We will be adding an Advanced Tutorial in the coming weeks.

Custom Discs



A brand new category of content, players can now customize what disc they bring to the court. While playing, the current disc will swap based on whoever last scored.

Tags

Players can now select their own Tag. Your Tag is displayed beneath your name wherever your identity is shown.

Taunts



Taunts are finally customizable! We’ve added a load of them this week and they’re a ton of fun.

Victory Poses



These came online in our last patch, but we’ve added a ton of new content here as well as revamped the victory screen flow so that it’s faster, skippable, and a lot more polished!

Jamoleons, the official currency of Disc Jam

Earn Jamoleons by playing public matches. At the end of a match, you will receive a Match Bonus which takes into account various factors such as the duration of the match and whether or not you won. For every 1000J you earn, you can visit:

The Prize Machine



Put in 1000J and pull the lever to take thefor a spin. Content in Disc Jam is tiered by four levels of rarity. Try your luck!

But wait, there’s more!

We’ve also been hard at work polishing the PS4 version of Disc Jam and we’re proud to show off the alpha in person this weekend at PSX in Anaheim. If you’re going to be there, send us a tweet @HighHorseGames and drop by to check it out!

What’s next?

With alpha in the can, it means beta is right around the corner. Right now, we’ve got our heads down getting the final content and gameplay into the game. In addition to everything you see in this build, we still have plenty of exciting updates in the coming months. Expect regular content drops plus all new characters still to be revealed!