Beta progress

Beta1 is now done and off to be play-tested. Beta2 is being worked on next. We are aiming for Beta2 to be ready before end of July. Beta2 will be the version we will then use to demo the game to press, potential endorsers, youtubers, twitchers and future designers we want to hire and bring into our team. It is also the version we will be using to record our Kickstarter video.

Beta2 features:

The main features we are adding in Beta2 include:

Preset balanced 1v1 maps with various terrain and planets for 3 different sizes

Improved hand-UI and targeting system, to make playing and targeting cards even more intuitive

Improved tech-pool (sideboard) graphics and UI

Larger demo decks with about one to two dozen new cards to play with

Beyond Beta2

After Beta2 we will still have one more revision to make before the Kickstarter, which will be Beta3. The main goal of Beta3 will be to add some additional tool tips / help screens to help people play without someone coaching them. Beta3 will be the version we use at gaming conventions and should be the final one before we go off to get funded!

Hiring needs

Our loving NeoCrux Ltd. family has now grown to 25 people on the core team, and another two to three dozen contributing artists, musicians and play-testers.

But we still need a few more people to help us… Our biggest need right now is for a couple additional QA TESTERS. Do you want to get an early view of the game? Do you have experience doing QA testing with bug tracking tools? And do you have at least 10 hours a week to help us with testing?

If so, please contact us today.

Kickstarter Planning

We still don’t have a final date for Kickstarter, but we are tentatively aiming now for mid to end of August to start our campaign. If we need more time however we could make this be September instead. We will know a lot more by mid to end July!

Music progress

Sam Watson, who is in charge of our audio production and sound design, has been collecting a long list of prospect music for the game, by the end of this week we should be contacting musicians to ask if they want to be a part of our project. The end result will be a sound track we hope to have compiled together that will play with our game. If the stars align we also plan on having the game’s audio track available on our kickstarter!

For now I can already tell you we are working with Erik Peabody from Viking Guitar. He has been kind enough to work on some custom ambient tracks for us in the vibe of Asteroid fields and Nebula clouds.

3D modeling progress

The ships in our game continued to make good progress, below are some of the renders for the Sylith Cruiser, Coalition Dreadnaught and the Coalition Frigate in our battle-scene. The last image is the draft version of the Sylith Dreadnaught. A floating mega city with a giant tree in a glass dome:

Kickstarter Video

Editing on the Kickstarter video continued this week. Lorcan has been busy working on our galaxy collisions. We’ve also pulled together further material for use in the video, you can see some stills of the animations below: