To Arms!

WEEKLY UPDATE

It's a short one this week.



I have just sent out the PM with the beta to my testers, aprilschild, otokonoko, DE, edchuy, and Orpheus. The beta is in this case, actually a beta, i.e. a 99% complete build, not an alpha like most COMPLETE demos are. I have already tested it BUNCHES. But there are a few final coats of varnish to apply.

Beta Testers Still Wanted

I could still use a couple more testers. I have expanded on their "duties" that I talked about last week:

1. Testers
A. Tell me what you like about the game. What is working? If you can't think of anything, this needs more work than I thought it did. This is where you tell me what you thought of the graphics, story, etc. This is the easiest part, by far.

B. A list of any bugs...from typos through fatal errors...that you encounter. Since there are several skills I didn't get a chance to test, I am most interested in skills that don't work the way they are supposed to or don't work at all. (Many skills might work in a way that is quirky or counter-intuitive but still what I intended. But I don't expect you to be able to differentiate this from the above with 100% accuracy or anything. Likewise there is so much going on in To Arms! in terms of skills, combatants, and status effects that it might be easy to mistake something that is not a bug for a bug. For instance if your spells are always missing, maybe your Arcanon is blind. If your attacks are doing no damage, maybe your attacker has Strength down or your defender has Defense Up. But I'd rather get a dozen false reports and one real one than no false reports and no real ones.)

C. Try every possible combination of classes for the four generic characters. I mean try four knights, four archers, four arcanons, four engineers, four alchemists, four war priests. And then try every possible combination of mixed parties. Everything from a knight, an archer, an arcanon, and a war priest to two alchemists and two engineers. Play the game with every possible build you can think of, and compare how easy/difficult the game is to beat with each of them. None of them should be so easy it is automatic, and none of them should be impossible. In theory. Let me know how that works out in practice. Try to break the game balance as hard as you can. No class should be innately better than any other class.

D. For the classes you have (and the mains) use your earned JP to check out every possible combination of available skills you can think of. I really do need someone to check out all of these. I've tested 80% of them myself and they worked, but 60% of those were tested before I made other changes to the game, and 20% just have not been tested at all. Try to break the game balance as hard as you can. I need to know what is too powerful and what is not powerful enough. Some things that might seem like they are not powerful enough are plenty powerful in the right combos...likewise things that are balanced on their own might be too good in certain combos.

E. Send me a detailed report with all the info you can gather on all of the above.

Sounds like a lot, I know, but testing, like pimpin, ain't easy (b***h). Besides I am starting to believe some of my previous games were seriously undertested and I do NOT want to make that mistake again.

You can still sign up here, for another week at least.

Classy

You may have noticed I am a bit behind on my class blog posts. I will try to finish those up this week. Culminating in a preview for the 10th class, the "Recruit", which every generic unit begins the game as.

Finishing Touches

Sir Subtle is hard at work on the OST.

I have asked arcan to begin work on some supplementary sprite poses.

AprilsChild is going to complete a handful of lightmaps for some night time scenes.

And I will of course be taking feedback from beta testers into account and fine-tuning the game balance.

That's all for now. Tune in next week!