Beta Report #2

Originally published May 25th, 2018

Continuing the chronicles of War Ender's beta.

Hello again, and welcome to the second beta report for War Ender! If you haven't seen the first beta report yet, give it a look here. This shall be a direct continuation of this series that will hopefully tide over excited players until War Ender is finally released this Summer. I think the format that we used in the previous Beta Report worked fine, so let's continue using it.

Once again, we'll start with some good old fashioned numbers. Since the last dev blog, I've managed to make a total of just 47 items completed. These items include bug fixes and tweaks, as per usual. However, the reason this number is so much lower than last time is because I've been working on some major changes to certain aspects of War Ender, and thus that work has taken up the bulk of development time. It may seem like it's rather late in the game to be doing any sort of overhaul, but I do believe it will ultimately make the game much better for it. In fact, beta testers have already told me that it's much better!

I can't talk about the big changes right now as there's still a few kinks to work out. However, I intend to talk about it in the next dev blog, taking a break from taking about bug fixes and the like. This time around, the small things accomplished include adding a bunch of new things to the final boss as well as the final bonus level. There's also been some new sounds included in all the new bosses. There's one that can be heard in each boss battle...a special sound that plays whenever you clear a boss phase. In the case of Wall of Lasers, for example, this sound plays whenever you destroy a core.

There were also some humorous bugs that were fixed that I almost felt bad patching out. It was discovered recently that the player could slide along the ground after shooting in the air, creating an...odd looking visual. I kind of wish I got a gif of it, but seeing as I haven't updated the demo yet (more on that in a bit), you could probably recreate it now. This next bug may not be considered humorous by some, but it amused me at the time. For some reason, no matter what you did, the game would not record any checkpoints you destroyed in the final boss. It turns out this was due to the way the game was saving data before [REDACTED].

Like last time, there were also several level adjustments made throughout. Most of it was small, such as adjusting a health pack location or moving an enemy a little bit in one direction or another. It is, as they say, the little things that keep you going, so I want to make sure the little things are as squared away as possible. There were also some small changes made to keyboard controls for the game. Now the left and right shift keys are used for dodging instead of Q and E. I've also set the enter key to be the key used in menus and for starting the game.

I mentioned I would talk about the public demo, and now that there's little else to talk about I think now's a good time to address it. Before writing this dev blog the original intention was to update the public demo with all the new fixes and changes present. However, this got delayed since there arose a need to overhaul a few items, which I vaguely talked about earlier. Now the plan is to finish work on those and then update the demo. I don't have an exact time in mind, but it would at least be nice if it can be updated sometime next week. Unfortunately, these things can be hard to predict, but that's the goal for now at least.

I think that will do it for this Beta Report. Feels a little smaller than the last one, but that's primarily because there's something big just around the corner for War Ender. I look forward to fanboying over it in the next dev blog with all you lovely folk. It should be worth the two week wait. Plus, I'll still be toiling away at the bugs and needed tweaks. War Ender is really shaping up to be something wonderful, I genuinely believe that.

Until next time!

-Lance T.

playthrough.