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!