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