Spaceteam is a co-operative iOS game for 2 to 4 players where you shout technobabble at each other for a couple of minutes before you all die. It’s not finished yet._ Read more here…_

Sunday Spaceteam Potluck

Last weekend was the inaugural Spaceteam Potluck/group playtest which went really well. We ran several games (some even simultaneously!), did a lot of shouting, and many fascinating new bugs were discovered. Thanks to everyone who came out!

I’m planning another one for this Monday (it’s a holiday!) so look for an invite soon if you’re a tester, or ping me if you’d like to come but aren’t signed up to TestFlight.

Shadow Players

Some shadow players ruining the party.

There were a bunch of network issues causing “shadow players” to show up in waiting rooms and prevent multiple games from running at once. I’ll try to evict them for next time so we can get some rival Spaceteams competing against each other, for fabulous prizes*.

Apple’s peer-to-peer support in GameKit is alternately awesome and really confusing. I’m looking forward to not having to deal with networking in my next game.

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(* Please bring fabulous prizes to the test.)

Upgrades

For the last week and a half I’ve been fixing many, many bugs, getting mired in the details that I successfully avoided for the first few weeks, and adding pre-game screens like Loading, Title, and Upgrades.

The Upgrades are the least well defined part of the game right now. Because of its nature as a multiplayer-only game that works best when shared and shown, I’m offering Spaceteam itself for free. But I want to give people some way of donating money to help support me. I’m leaning towards an “Unlock Full Game” option (for a dollar) that lets you earn Achievements and includes a handful of new designs for the control panel (aka “skins”).

There are also a ton of potential gameplay modes/mechanics/features that I could add, but I’ll wait to see how much interest I get and maybe offer them later as additional downloads.

I’m also vaguely wary of adding anything that makes the game easier or harder because it will make it more cumbersome to informally compare/brag (“I got to level 13!” would become “I got to level 13… using upgrades A and B, but not C”). I don’t know though, is this important at all? Maybe it’s a silly thing to worry about.

Here a sneak preview of one of the skins… hopefully there’s more to come!

Spaceteam is a co-operative iOS game for 2 to 4 players where you shout technobabble at each other for a couple of minutes before you all die. It’s not finished yet._ Read more here…_

My beta/polish week has come and gone, and it’s clear that I need a bit more time. I got a lot of great feedback and made some important changes, but there are still bugs and I want to do more playtesting. I still haven’t even played a 4-player game yet, which I need to do at least once before the release 😉

Here are some great things that have come out of the beta so far:

Instruction Display redesign

The simpler display allows for larger, more legible text, is less confusing, and the horizontal timer is easier to keep track of in your peripheral vision.

A New Look

My friend Jeremie made a fantastic looking skin for the control panel, ship, and threat. Thanks Jeremie! Here’s what it looks like in game:

I’d still love to have more skins, so if you know someone (or are someone) who might be interested in helping, please get in touch. The more variety the better!

Team Stats

After the game you can now see various statistics about what just happened to your team. I’m choosing not to show personal stats because I want to promote cooperation over competition.

However, the game does judge your personal performance and awards you a medal based on something you did particularly well (or poorly, it’s never totally clear).

For example, you might get a medal for your “enthusiasm” if you made the most unnecessary control changes :)

Declawing the Threat

I’ve made a lot of little tweaks here and there, but I wanted to call out one simple gameplay change in particular.

One of my testers (thanks Michel!) mentioned that he failed a level while in the middle of trying to complete an instruction (ie. the timer hadn’t run out yet) and it felt wrong. This can happen when the Threat catches up with your ship: it just triggers a game over if it gets too close.

So I tried changing the behaviour so that even if the Threat catches you, you still have to fail an instruction before the game will end. It starts a sort of “sudden death” mode. If, once this happens, you continue to successfully complete instructions without any failures you can still make it all the way to the end of the level and beat it. I think this really adds to the tension and provides a glimmer of hope even when you’re about to lose. I really like the way it works.

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All these ideas and changes came from suggestions made by my testers. You’re making the game so much better, thank you!

Spaceteam is a co-operative iOS game for 2 to 4 players where you shout nerdy things at each other for a couple of minutes before you all die. It’s not finished yet. Read more here…

Today I put the finishing touches on the Beta build to send out to testers. Thank you everyone who has signed up so far!

If you’d like to get in on the test, you can sign up here: [Spaceteam is a co-operative iOS game for 2 to 4 players where you shout nerdy things at each other for a couple of minutes before you all die. It’s not finished yet. Read more here…

Today I put the finishing touches on the Beta build to send out to testers. Thank you everyone who has signed up so far!

If you’d like to get in on the test, you can sign up here: ](http://tflig.ht/QiBqGL) It’s better if you have a friend (or two or three) with an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch to play with, as the game officially supports 2 to 4 players (although the beta includes a single player mode for testing).

I got all the Alpha features finished that I had planned, and did a few bits of polish along the way. I did have to stop myself from working on details a few times and say “Stop! That’s enough, I’ll work on it later”. Of course, now that a week has gone by, “later” is now.

Some of the sounds are still placeholders (usually consisting of Sara going “nyaarrrgggghh” into a microphone) but most of the important events now make at least some kind of noise.

The Threat, Random Events and Wormholes are all working as intended and each add something valuable to the game.

I’ve also identified a couple of important features that I can’t afford to complete before the first release, so I’ve decided to release an update after version 1.0 goes out. Those features are:

• A 2-player split-screen version for iPad
• Localization**

Split-screen

This was another great suggestion from Ben. The iPad screen is big enough that I can effectively have two iPhone-sized screens side by side (but with one upside-down) allowing two people to play across from each other on the same iPad.

This will be a great way to introduce the game to a friend without getting two copies, or just to play when you don’t have network or Bluetooth access.

However, this is going to take me a couple of days to get working. Not only do I have to clean up the sloppy graphics code that assumes the panels take up the whole screen, but also the sloppy networking code that assumes one player per device. As much as I’d like to get this in for the first release, I think it has to wait until version 1.1.

Localization

One of my first playtests was with some francophone friends, and since my random name generator is very English they had to deal with the additional language barrier on top of the regular chaos the game threw at them.

Translating the game to French (and other languages) makes sense but it isn’t trivial because of how the names are put together. After I came up with the initial word fragments I spent several days running the generator and hand-tweaking the lists and rules to avoid bad combinations and encourage good ones. A decent translation will have to go through a similar process.

Luckily, Sara had an idea that I really like. I’m going to make a web-app that will let you edit the word lists and run the name generator so that anyone can play around with different configurations and submit variants. Then I can (hopefully) crowdsource any translations I might need by directing people to the app and asking them to play with it for a bit. I think it’s a great solution.

But those things are yet to come… right now I need to focus on polishing what I already have and getting feedback from playtesters. Please sign up if you think you can help!

Spaceteam Beta test: http://tflig.ht/QiBqGL