Grand Gate
GG Open playtest #02
We're so happy to announce that on 07/11 - 8 PM (GMT-3) we will open up our second playtest!
The focus of this second test is on the new features we've created and the improvements we've made according to feedback from the staff:
💎 The first version of our TOOLTIPS (the information balloons)
💎 New navigation and campaign progression in the atlas
💎 General improvements to the game's controls and UI (more hotkeys, visual changes, etc.)
💎 New tutorials (Skills tutorial and Upgrade tutorial)
We've prepared lots of surprises for you in-game too, so we'll be expecting you there on the 7th at 8pm (GMT-3).
I hope you enjoy the next version, it's been prepared with great care for you! Tell your friends and bring everyone to play.
And always remember that this is a development version, not the final version of the game.
- GG Team
Open Playtest #01
We're happy to announce our very first open playtest.
You can check out Grand Gate for yourselves on the 17th of August (17/08)
The playtest will be open for 2 weeks.
That's it!
Now go hit that register button in our Steam page. ːpraisesunː
PS: Tell your friends, bring everyone you can.
We'll posting more news when the playtest opens :)
GG News #02 - 31/05/2023
Welcome to the second edition of GG News.
First off, we have shown a small teaser for the Maps in GG
This is just an appetizer for the enormous variety of maps that we have planned. You can expect other types of regions like caverns, swa..., REDACTED I won't spoil anymore :)
The music in the teaser is actually our very own soundtrack, speaking of which we'll have unique music themes for every region in our game and I'm very pleased to announce that the soundtrack will be reactive to the gameplay state, we hope that this will delight your ears as much as it has ours and stay tuned for those guitar riffs.
So about playtesting... turns out it's much harder than anticipated but we're getting there. Here's our current plans:
We're running internal playtests every week to make sure the experience is completely smooth and this will go on until the end of development.
And I say running I actually mean this: whoever is running the test has has 2 jobs: Watch and listen.
And at the end of every test we hand out a questionnaire which is related to that specific test.
In our first playtests we're not exactly looking for feedback on numbers, balance, skills, what we're fishing for is feedback regarding the user experience, controls with the objective of improving the foundations of the game, so the questions here are:
- Were you able to understand the controls of feature X?
- Were you able to understand feature X?
- Was feature X relevant to your gameplay experience?
Our objective is to get the foundations absolutely perfect before moving on into tweaking and spending too much time on things that might not matter that much.
The next phase is the one where we start focusing on the game design itself, so testers will go through our maps with the objective of improving design aspects. Some of the questions we'll introduce here are:
- Did you feel threatened by the enemies in Map X
- Did you feel you had enough resources to recover?
- Did you feel Map X was challenging enough?
- Were the tower skills relevant to your gameplay?
QA or quality assurance is ongoing at all phases. We aim to release V1 of GG as polished as possible :)
So, that's that. This was just a small glimpse at which development phase we're at... one which YOU might get hands-on by the end of July... so keep your eyes open for that playtest button, we're aiming to have it up by mid June :)
In the next GG news we'll cover gameplay features, but you don't need to wait all that time for more news....
Follow us on our social media for more news, we have some tasty posts in Instagram:
And as always, this is a labor of love from us. We'll deliver the best game we can.
This is Azeros, out.
GG News #01 - 05/04/2023
I'm Lucas AKA Azeros and I'm the lead artist and designer of Grand Gate.
We'll be sharing development news and cool stuff we've been working on behind the scenes for the upcoming release of Grand Gate, so, without further ado:
First off, we have revealed one of our enemies:
A cute slime born from the magical dew of the forest of Malta, the Slimes are friendly creatures most of the time but can become aggressive if threatened.
And one of our towers:
The mighty wardens are powerful crystal warriors made of pure crystal energy manipulated by the sages.
In your journey through the continent of Cordis to defeat the Gateborn, sworn enemies of humanity which were born from the Void, you'll face many foes, with the slime being one of the first you'd imagine their threat level to be low, that is correct until you face their combined might inspired by the presence of one their kings...
This is the King Slime, which will greatly enhance the power of nearby slimes and also has a burst skill of his own.
Anyway, these are all the news we shared through the month of march. So what can you expect from us in the near future:
- We'll soon be opening up playtesting registration through Steam. So, keep spamming that F5 key to sign-up ASAP :)
- More gameplay snippets
- More reveals about the enemies and towers of Grand Gate
And finally, what are we working on?
- We're hard at work at upgrading and finishing our UI, which should be fully completed by May, which coincidentally should be our first public playtest date
- wink wink*
- Tower and enemy skills. We've recently achieved our first fully playable Legend in all their glory. Expect an explosive reveal on this one :)
- Steamworks integration
- Explosive barrels - We'll have a blog post on these ones in the future, but Grand Gate players can expect many opportunities to use the environment in their favor, however the Gateborn will also be able to take advantage of these....
- Expanding our small community
So, we have our hands full at the moment! And we'd greatly appreciate help with the following things:
TELL YOUR FRIENDS & SPREAD THE NEWS!
This is a labor of love from us, we'll make sure to deliver the absolute best tower defense game we can.
PS: Follow us on our social media for more news:
This is Azeros,
Signing off
ːpraisesunː
GG Dev Blog #01
In this first Dev Blog, we would like to present ourselves and our game: Grand Gate through some raw gameplay snippets of PRE-ALPHA gameplay and some of our design intents and decisions!
These Dev Blogs will be our main communication tool and will be happening on a monthly basis, we'll also squeeze in some development news containing information about what we're currently working on in between the larger posts.
So,
Check out the full post at our website!
And don't forget to wishlist.
Thank you
- Azeros