The Long Slog to Beta

Been a very busy couple of weeks here at Tundra. Rapture is really getting close to Beta and playing well. Here’s a few of the areas that have been worked on.

Tutorial
We now have a complete tutorial in place that will hopefully make the game easier for people to understand. The initial version of the tutorial was quite in-depth. It’s been a difficult balance to keep the tutorial friendly enough so as not to put off new players and at the same time provide enough detail to allow players to appreciate the depth of the game. In the end we decided to strip back a little, make sure the basics are shown first. We’ve then added a tips system at load, so players can get useful, but not essential, help each time they go into the game.

Play Testing
We’ve had a couple of people trying out the game and got some great feedback; mostly to do with understanding how the game plays. We’re hoping the tutorial will help with that. We’re also rearranging some of the in game HUD to make it easier to understand what everything does and also make it a little more polished.

SpaceScapes
We’ve spend some time improving the various unlockable SpaceScapes. There’s 28 scapes to unlock – there’s a good variety with some fun novelty ones thrown in.

Difficulty and Game options
The game was getting much too easy, especially for Tundra peeps who have obviously been playing for a while now. The AI has been substantially beefed up and will now jump on you if you leave regions unprotected. And there are also customisation options available going into game.

We’re hoping this will be the last round of changes required before we’re at Beta. At which point we hope to get more people testing the game and giving us feedback. This will focus mostly on the AI and controls, which might have some further tweaking

If you haven’t seen it yet please take a look at our preview trailer!