Just because the event ended, it doesn’t mean we have to stop giving out free stuff. We’ll leave the alpha demo up at least the rest of the week since a lot of people are staying home to help flatten the curve [Warning: Multiplayer may still not work for some]. If you wishlist the game, we’ll continue to mark you down for the exclusive hat and jacket when the game releases.
Stay in the Embr Respondrs Group to get your FAX Outfit key when Embr releases later this year!
In the meantime, if you want to follow our progress, please feel free to join our Discord.
Alpha Demo Summary
Thanks to everyone who checked out the alpha demo! And here are some stats:
Downloads: 9,509 Median Play Time: 17min Daily Active Users: 1485 Top 10 Places where people downloaded the alpha demo: China, USA, Romania, Russia, Canada, Germany, UK, Brazil, Poland, Taiwan
On the bug front, the in-game bug reporting feature was used 139 times, for a report rate of 1.5%. While some people just used it to say hi or tell us to subscribe to people’s streams or Youtube, some other people did encounter bugs of varying severity. There were 11 unique bugs, and the most severe are a few that are multiplayer related. Here are all the bugs people found:
Level doesn’t load, but stupid ads do. When playing multiplayer as a joining player, one can get stuck in loading screens. For some players, the level would load, but the loading screen would stay on, blocking view unless they hit ESC.
Falling through the ground (As a joining player in multiplayer when level starts).
No LAN Party. Trouble connecting in LAN when playing multiplayer.
Stuck together. Players stuck together when loading into a multiplayer mission.
Stuck at mission end.
Stuck in a staircase.
Hose and water disappeared.
Launching into orbit (from top of cars), and landing outside of the level, dead.
Electrocuting the screen. Graphical glitches caused by electricity in game.
Silent Movie. No SFX for joining players in multiplayer missions.
Monet Mode. Possible camera texture leak causing some asset models to turn psychedelic.
Thanks so much everyone for putting up with and reporting the bugs. And thanks a ton for giving us awesome feedback! We’ll get these bugs fixed up asap. We’ll have updated builds and regular test sessions leading up to Early Access. If you didn’t get a chance to play last week because of the bug(s), please feel free to join our Discord. We’ll get you into the game.
Thanks again everyone! Stay safe.
- Embr HQ
Free Alpha Demo! Plus Wishlist for Free Exclusive Stuff!
Greetings Prospective Respondrs,
For this week only, Embr now comes with a free alpha demo!
Launch Guns of Icarus to receive your FREE Embr Respondr Bundle
Download the Embr Alpha demo and go fight some fires!
Stay in the Embr Respondrs Group to get your FAX Outfit key when Embr releases later this year!
DecEmbr Steam Alpha Post-Mortem
Greetings Respondrs!
Over the past few weeks, we’ve been hard at work on our first Steam Build for Embr! This last friday we distributed steam keys to our more active community members and organized a playtest where we ran through a selection of content (the first three levels of Embr) to get some thorough testing of the basic gameplay loop, core mechanics, and current menus and UIs.
Here’s how it went:
The Setup:
Run-through Our new build had a plethora of exciting new features and bugs (Space travel has never been so easy). Upon redeeming their steam keys and loading up the game, Respondrs can now open up a multiplayer lobby level where they can chat with their friends, play basketball, organise their tools, and test out new upgrades!
Things we’re testing We’re focusing our testing on the first 3 levels, the new multiplayer lobby, and server capacity!
Goals We want to look at players’ experience with those first levels and see how long it takes new players to get through them. We implemented a feedback survey to track bugs and comments to improve the game.
What to change in future: We found some new features aren’t obvious to players, in particular the new upgrades system. We’ve added an FAQ for alpha testers in our Discord server to help them find and test this system!
Dev Blog #1
Greetings, Respondrs!
Matt took some time out of his busy day to tell us all about the history of Embr - specifically the way water looks!
A bit over 2 years ago I started on a journey to make this co-op firefighting game, game jamming while stuck in 6 hr traffic back from MAGFest. At the heart of the game are fire & water, two of the harder elements to tackle in game development. While the game is still a work in progress to be more polished, varied, and zany, I thought it’d be interesting to share how water in the game has evolved so far - from graybox cubes to the splatters of today.
When I first started, all I needed to start testing was rotating some square particles to get the feeling of water across. Water and fire were really just different colored squares.
After learning about and creating particle systems for 1 week, I thought I was prepared to take on water. I was wrong. I spent the next two weeks, 14 hours a day, researching and testing solutions for water without making much headway. In the end, I just settled on a very similar solution to the first sample, using circles with a secondary particle fx. Sometimes, spending a lot of time doesn’t necessarily mean a lot of progress...
Circling back to water last month, I added extra particle feedback. The white foam at the end indicates whether the water is hitting or not, and where it is hitting. Hopefully this helps from the lack of depth perception that came with the blue cartoony shader. I also added a bit of liquid smear to make the water more believable. The world now has a reflection tint to understand how moist the area is. When I have more time, I definitely want to poke at improving the body of the water stream itself. So little time and so much to do!
- Matt
If you have any questions or comments, let us know! Thanks for reading!
Join us for Dev Fireside Chat!
It's almost time for our weekly Dev Fireside Chat!
We'll be answering your questions and chatting about our week and Embr news!
Water Minigun Giveaway!
First we gave away blowtorches. Now that you have a way to start fires, you need a way to put them out!
Click here to enter our new giveaway for a chance to win a Water Minigun*! This hand-powered item shoots pellets filled with water to extinguish those far-away fires**!
*Not a firearm **May not extinguish fires
First Alpha Test Complete!
Hi everyone!
We completed our first session of alpha testing! For this session, we invited a few members from our community to get a sneak peak and collect feedback from their first impressions. It’s been extremely valuable to start collecting feedback, and we’re looking to host more sessions with more people!
[previewyoutube="NmObz5rQ9Y0;full"]
Here’s our very first Alpha Post-Mortem!
The Setup:
Run-through We had our testers run through specific missions to look for how they managed pathing, level design, obstruction, puzzles, and rescue scenarios before moving on to the next missions. This way, we could get valuable, focused, and actionable feedback related to core level design, difficulty, intuitiveness, and replay. Levels built specifically to different hazards gave rise to opportunities to use specific tools, and wanted to see if players could come up with creative solutions.
NAT Server Troubles We did a live multiplayer test, and we got multiplayer and Co-Op fully functioning for the Alpha (Hurray!). However, we had a couple server issues where sometimes the server would just drop and we weren't able to connect. This put a pause on a few of our tests, but we’ve since ironed this out so going forwards our Alpha tests will be much smoother.
Learnings:
Ease of Play Without onboarding currently in the game, we were curious to see how new people pick up the game. This first session isn’t the most indicative as some of the people who tested were very active in the community, so they were already familiar with a lot of the concepts. They were able to pick up the game fairly naturally, allowing us to focus testing on more specific levels, situations, tools, and physics. We did see players struggling with tool selection and toggling at conventions though. In upcoming test sessions, how people manage the input scheme is definitely something we want to keep an eye on.
Lack of Character Limit One small bug that had big repercussions was the lack of a character limit. We made the mistake of not adding a character limit to player name text field. This caused some players to crash as they exceeded character limit. This is a bug we’ll be fixing with the actual UI in place.
New Game Mode - Salvage
[previewyoutube="mQU4X75rTsQ;full"] In the test session, everyone wanted to haul stuff out of the burning houses and buildings, and we definitely took notice. It wasn’t just perceived valuable items either. People were having a lot of fun hauling burnt furniture, broken TV, and even trash out of the houses. It was… hilarious! So we took inspiration to spec out a new game mode code named Salvage.
You’ll soon have the opportunity to haul out any valuable or junk to return to client, or make a bit of extra cash. Clients may assign valuables that they would pay extra for, and those may be priority rescues.
Electricity One major issue we found is with the current presentation of electricity. When there’s a lot of fire, a player usually didn’t know where the electricity is coming from. We saw players just sprayed water, and all of a sudden there was electricity everywhere. In the test build, we did a bit to help players identity where the live wire was, but not the circuitry or the source. One of the effects update we are doing with electricity is to give players better visual cues as to how electricity travels and where it originates from. Here’s a peek at what we’re doing:
Once we have this in an upcoming test build, we’d love to see how players react.
Bug-to-Feature We saw a case of someone jumping into a window or jumping down onto a trampoline, and then proceed to bounce sky high in the air. That was definitely a bug. But! People had so much fun with it that we’re turning that into a new tool, code named Launch Pad. Stay tuned!
Zany Bugs Boobytrapped Floor: In Mission Papa, the floor in one of the rooms was missing, and it could cause players to snap and teleport. This one we caught and fixed. Missing Blue Zone: In Uniform, when playing multiplayer, sometimes the blue zone went missing, and people had to quit the mission and restart. Joke Text Stayed In: Sometimes in a mission, the joke text we left in dev build didn’t clean up, and it would remain on screen for the rest of the mission, sigh!
Time Zones Because we started small we had a few issues getting everyone together at once to fill every slot for a testing session, we hope that we’ll have more than enough people in the Alpha to make sure everyone gets multiple chances to play with a full session next time.
We want to thank everyone once more for participating in this past weekend’s session! More Embr Alpha Testing is coming in roughly THREE WEEKS!! We’re getting a build ready to Steam as we speak to allow for smooth distribution and easy updates! As soon as that's ready we’re going live with alpha! To join an upcoming session and follow our progress, be sure to wishlist us: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1062830/Embr/
We'll be getting some groups, pairing people up, and doing more organized testing sessions. You can also play Embr with us! We'll be in voice chat hanging out while we all test and gather feedback together! Get Hyped!
We've been nominated!
We've been nominated for an award at Game Connection Europe, and we need your help to win!
All you have to do is like this post on facebook before the 25th of October!
We'd love it if you share this post with your friends and family too!
