Closed-Beta Post-Mortem
After our Rocket Rumble closed-beta we definitely learned some things. Our community gave us some amazing feedback including: dying too often, the music being too loud, matchmaking issues as well as a ton of bugs for squashing! We’ve taken that into consideration and we’ve been working hard making this game the best it can be by following up on some of this feedback!
To deal with dying too often we’re implementing a new bouncy health system! HP will be added so you won’t die as soon as you hit something and instead you’ll bounce off of obstacles.
We’re happy to say we now have some awesome audio folks from Studio13 helping us out with the sound for the game now. No more blasted ear drums when you open the game!
Matchmaking may still be an issue when we do an open-beta, but we have some ideas on how to deal with this at least a little though we’ll have to see.
Our beta was an opportunity to reach out to our community on Twitch as well. We did daily streams with the dev team so we could ensure there was definitely a time where people would be playing matches but also to share our thoughts and look for bugs as well. In some ways it was probably nice for our programmers who did a real push right before the beta began!
One thing we learned for sure is 2 weeks is too long! We had originally thought that it might not be long enough but it turns out 2 weeks is actually quite a long time. We had a significant turn out for the launch of the beta, but by the time week two rolled around it had lost a bit of steam. Next time we’ll do something a bit shorter.
We also probably could have waited before launching the closed-beta. Just before the date we had some game-breaking bugs and an entire game-mode had to be removed so going forward we’d like to be a little more prepared.
That said, all-in-all we consider our beta to be a good success! We gained a lot of valuable input and learned about some new bugs which really was the goal. Our community was really supportive and we can’t wait to take what we learned and have a successful open-beta in the near future!