starsentineltactics

Thanks. I've had a trickle of more beta testers, but I'll be glad to see some more join. There's altogether too little negative feedback so far. It's nice not to be suffering a bruised ego, I suppose, but at the same time, I can only make things better if people tell me what they don't like. Actually, there's still enough time left in development that people could encourage me to include a few things they do want too.

Heh, well I'm not quite up to giving away graphics cards with the beta, but it does (somewhat surprisingly) work on some of the Intel onboard chipsets, so it's reasonably compatible. You can ramp the settings up quite a bit further on a relatively modern Nvidia or ATI card though, I must admit. I've recently released a trailer which might be interesting. It's all made from WIP footage because the game is probably six months from release, but it should give an idea of how it looks and plays. Various streaming and download options according to your preference and bandwidth. YouTube (HD) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1shzgAIYF4&fmt=22 YouTube (SD) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1shzgAIYF4&fmt=22 Vimeo : http://www.vimeo.com/5631712 Or download the original untouched HD version to play locally : http://www.starsentineltactics.com/t...STTrailer.mpeg I'm keen to hear feedback from anyone and everyone. I've had quite a bit of feedback from other developer forums so I have a good idea of some things which need to be done before release, but I'm always keen to hear more.

Thanks guys. I've actually had very little interest from anyone wanting to beta test, so I guess the closed nature of testing is putting people off. Or maybe they don't want to bother for a one level demo? I'm currently evaluating a few options for how I can make this more attractive to testers. One option would be to go with a "Mount And Blade" style open development beta, where people can "buy in" at any stage of development, and start playing immediately, but also get all updates until the game is finished, with some kind of early adopter discount as an additional reward. This would be a full 25+ level game beta. The upside for me is more testers, less timewasters (who wants to pay to slag someone off?) a bit of extra money to help finance development and testing of the entire game. The downside is a dramatic increase in pressure when people have already paid money, and it would be another couple months before I would be ready to do this. The other option is to just make the 1 level plus tutorial beta public. The upside is that I get the most testers and I can do it right away, but the downside is that I probably also get a lot more timewasters, no money and probably a lot more pressure anyway. So I'm leaning towards the first option but if anyone who saw this, considered testing and thought better of it would care to indicate why they thought better of it, what put them off, what would make them reconsider and which option they prefer, I'd love to hear from you.

Hello, I've been beavering away on a turn-based tactics game for a while now, and I feel like it's at the stage where I need to start getting some feedback and some testing. I wasn't really sure whether I should post here or OT, so I hope I picked the right forum. Also, I hope this isn't viewed as advertising. I'm not trying to sell my game to anyone (it won't even be going on sale for quite some time yet!) but I am looking to get some feedback from people who are into turn-based tactics games and when I asked around for people who play the sort of games I love to play and make, this is where I kept being pointed to. Anyway, assuming that I've followed protocol, here's the website: http://www.starsentineltactics.com Here's a screenshot, because I'm a visual guy, and perhaps you are too. http://www.starsentineltactics.com/screens/screen4.jpg It isn't intended to be an homage to any particular game, but I'm sure that I've garnered inspiration from Rebelstar Raiders, Laser Squad, Breach, UFO, XCom, Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm,etc along the way. A friend played an early demo and declared it to be "Stargate meets Laser Squad in 3D", and while that infringes on trademarks I dare not touch, I wouldn't be too unhappy if people got that impression. I'm aware that the website doesn't "sell" the game very well, and it could certainly use more screenshots and a video, but I'm not really at the "sell" stage yet. I want to get the game much closer to completion before that. If the screenshots and the description do look and sound at all appealing and you would like to help me fix, tweak and mould this thing into a fun game, I'd love some people to sign up as beta testers. I'm really looking for people who are prepared to put in quite a lot of testing and to test new versions as they come out. This demo only has one mission plus the tutorial mission, but subsequent betas will have more missions. You can sign up here: http://www.starsentineltactics.com/flash/news4.html I would like to add that Star Sentinel Tactics was designed from the ground up to be moddable. You could certainly create your own missions and indeed campaigns for the game, and all the graphics and sounds may be changed also, so I guess you could pretty much create your own turn-based tactics game from scratch if you wanted. Nothing in my game is hard coded, everything is in XML and lua, so I guess at the very least, you could make a game roughly equivalent to mine with the tools. Albeit that only people who buy the game would be able to play it. However at this point, I have to concentrate my efforts on releasing the game and so I won't be releasing the tools or offering any support for modding at this time. If you want to have a fiddle and see what you can figure out though, you're more than welcome. At the very least, it might give you a head start on modding later. When the game is released, I do plan to release the tools, and possibly write some documentation and generally help people create mods for the game. Thanks for your time, and if I need to amend this post in some manner to comply with forum rules, please let me know. Regards Phil