Hey there, Ghost Hunters!
Welcome to our latest weekly update!
We miss playing with everyone!
It was such a blast to play during the recent alpha test and at the PAX West booth. We can’t wait for the next test!
I know it’s frustrating that we don’t have the game up all the time so you can get your Ghost Hunting fix.
WHYYYYYYYYYYYY DOES THE ALPHA HAVE TO BE CLOSED?! I WANT TO PLAY!
There’s a few reasons why we only do short tests.
The main reason is that we are still in an alpha state and we have limited content available. Only a couple maps, a few weapons, and so on. On release, we will have much, much more.
It makes more sense to have short intense bursts of testing as we really start to nail our core gameplay loop, and then focus on content afterwards. When that happens, longer tests are definitely in the cards. There will be simply more things to test.
On top of that, maintaining the alpha servers and functionality is rather time intensive. We’d rather have the team be working on making the game better instead of maintaining an alpha test longer term.
However, there will be longer tests in the future once we have enough content to test. Stay tuned for that!
Ok, cool, makes sense! what has the team been working on?
We’re glad you asked!
A bunch of stuff, really. There’s even somewhat big tweaks in the works - we’ll get to that when we are ready to show it off!
One thing that’ll be fun to talk about is our new voice chat system.
If you remember during our recent alpha test, our voice system didn’t work super well. We were using Unreal’s built in voice solution in conjunction with Steam Voice. There’s a number of issues we encountered, including jittery audio or just not even working.
And, of course, there was no team chat. No support for that in the engine, unless you want to mute the other team on a loop. So there was just a lot of confused yelling and screaming.
It’s just not a super configurable system without deep diving into the engine code, so we started looking for an alternative service.
Luckily, Discord offers high quality voice chat through their SDK. Birdm’n and Kite have been implementing this SDK over the last week or so. Thanks, Discord!
Lobbies are automatically set up on join, and we’ve got separate channels for Ghosts and Ghost Hunters. We’re also looking at the possibility of an optional global chat, as it was rather fun to yell at the opposite team at choice moments.
The audio quality is really, really good. And you can keep having Discord voice going out of the game too. don’t override anything. It’s configurable as push to talk or voice activity.
Only requirement is that you have Discord installed and logged in. Seems fair enough!
So that’s just one little preview of what’s to come in the next test. Stay tuned next week for some more!
Thanks for sticking around! We’ll see you in the next test!
That’s it for this week, Ghost Hunters
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