(re)Launch Party!
Last week, we ran a ‘re-launch’ BETA testing party. This was very similar to our ‘pre-launch’ party back in 2012, but of course stress-testing the new features in Caveman Craig and evaluating its potential on the Steam platform.
Caveman Craig is now in the hands of a number of private testers, and we are on the final stretch to release!
The day was a massive success, at least in our eyes – the testers diligently entered issues into a bug tracker *cough* google spreadsheet over 8 hours of playtime. There were some pretty major bugs and errors to fix up, but that’s what a BETA test is for!
Over 200 issues were entered throughout the day – but this includes duplicates and suggestions.
The buggiest part of the game was saving & loading – which presented a catch 22 to players. Do we save our game and risk losing our progress if it crashes during the save? Or do we take another risk in playing through the whole level without saving? This caused a fair bit of frustration amongst the testers.. which was unfortunate but showed how invested they were in the game.
We setup split-screen co-op on the big screen, for people to take turns playing together. Working together to take down the enemy proved to be lots of fun!
Some other key areas to test included..
- Mac OS X – Ran almost flawlessly!
- Steam leaderboards and achievements – It was heaps of fun comparing our scores with other players in the room.
- New dudu forest level – presented a unique challenge, that many spent lots of time on. The level is beautiful and serene, with a fantastic celtic soundtrack by Ricky Garcia.
Co-op on the big screen! The way multiplayer should be..
We had a couple of game developers and professional testers with us, and there was no shortage of merciless, brute force testing of the game. One managed to get a ridiculous tribe size before crashing the game..
And now, it’s time for me to shift gears entirely and complete some contractual app development work. After pouring every spare hour into Caveman Craig for the past month, a well deserved break is going to do me and the game some good. We can’t wait to release the game, and after some meetings and plans, we will be excited to announce something more official very soon.
Regards,
Rhys
