Hello there fellow developers and gamers!

In this article I hope to improve your understanding of how to 1, get the most out of playtesting as a developer and 2, be as helpful at playtesting as possible as a gamer. We’ve learnt most of this while developing our game Battle Siege Royale, an upcoming free to play (but no microtransactions) siege engine battling game taking place in medieval times. If this article turns out to be useful for you please consider wishlisting BSR on steam as it really helps. Without further ado let’s begin!

(TLDR) If you read nothing else in the article read this: Empower a player to express feedback w/o reservation. Make it easy for them to give feedback which is honest.

Our Playtesting so Far

So far we’ve given out roughly 75 keys for playtesters of our game Battle Siege Royale. The majority of our playtesters have found about us through regular discord announcements but we have also been reaching out to streamers and asking if they would be interested in livestreaming their playtest. Become a playtester for us on our discord. It’s very useful to get streamers to play test as not only get publicity but also get live reactions to game. We often therefore instantly give streamers keys when they follow us on social media/ join us on discord to make the process as frictionless as possible and avoiding unnecessary back and forth in emails.

Prefer offline to online.
Getting to see someone in real time to see how they react is so important. You can see a little bit with 30fps which is standard streaming speed but with facial expressions happening at 100s of fps in real time. Which is why you can get a better idea of someone IRL. Same for Online Dating, lots of subtle clues that you may not have noticed while texting.

Playtesting Strategies for Online Vs Offline

Offline

The key is to offer as little handholding as possible. I tend to watch and takes notes on where they get stuck and on which parts they enjoy. It needs to be easy for the average player to navigate situations in the game without assistance which is why playtesting is so important.

Online

Since most of our playtesters come from our discord it’s usually relatively easy to hop into a call on discord and then start doing screenshare. Screen share allows you to watch them play in realtime- Realtime is key. For example if someone says “The Ballista should move faster” and they say this while moving uphill you don’t know unless you’re watching real time that what they really mean is that the Ballista specifically needs to move faster while going uphill.

What makes a good playtester?

Try to be really transparent, expressive and vocal while playing so the developer can better understand how you feel about their game. It’s also important to be happy to tell the developer things that they may not hope to hear. If all a developer hears is that “It’s Great” then they may be fooled into thinking a certain feature is popular when it’s really not.

Make sure that you actually want to play the game as you will be able to provide keener insights if it’s in a genre that you enjoy or are experienced in and if you don’t want to play let the developer know why– it may be a tell tale sign that something about the game needs to change if people don’t even want to playtest it.

As someone who has worked on gaming review sites it’s always important to let people review games they enjoy. This applies to playtesting too. Not only will they have a better time playing but if they play a lot of games in that genre then they will have experience and can use that to provide more relevant and useful feedback.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you in our next update!

The images in this article are development screenshots from our upcoming game Battle Siege Royale.

Hey Folks!

I don’t want to be one of those robot like developers you know nothing about so I’m going to start off this week’s devlog with something I’ve been doing in my spare time while not developing. This week I’ve been doing a lot of wood working, you may think this a strange hobby for an indie game developer but actually it’s quite similar to programming. How? Well it requires the meticulous attention to detail that I use while bug hunting in my code. I enjoy working from home on this kind of stuff, and getting a bit of cash on Etsy for my crafts. I’ve been thinking about making some PC cases out of antique tube radios from 30s, 40s & 50s as my next project. I’ve attached an example of what they look like below.

As always if you enjoy this update please go ahead and wishlist the game over on steam! IT REALLY HELPS :D

New: Flint Castle

History

Wait, you wanted another castle? Well... have we got news for you! We just added the most impressive castle in the game to date. Flint Castle was built by the English as part of the “ring of Iron” which was a group of castles that were used to suppress the Welsh uprising.

Development

Before taking a brief sabbatical from castles to focus on other areas (as you’ll hear later on in this article) we managed to get the 3D model done for Flint including 3 cottages and the palisade wall.

Gameplay

This is the most well defended castle you will face head to head in Battle Siege Royale. It’s so strong because you will have to use your siege engine to breach not 1, not 2 but 3 walls. First there’s the outer palisade wall which we’ll discuss later on, next the inner stone wall and then finally the castle wall itself. If that sounded easy to you it’s also surrounded by a river, so players will be forced to make a frontal attack. All while being blasted by enemy AI including catapults and trebuchets.

New house models

This week we also created a few models for houses specifically in flint shire which is the area around flint castle as a means to add a bit of visual diversity. In terms of placement of these buildings Jordan actually placed each one individually rather than randomly spawning them. This way we were able to make sure that each one felt like it wasn’t out of place.

Palisade Wall around city

Wooden palisade wall which is slightly easier to get past than flint’s stone wall in terms of hitpoints. Flint is actually the only BSR castle so far that has such a palisade. Inside the palisade there is a village which you can pillage on your way to the main castle wall.

Gamepad Optimised

Jordan did a lot of work on the main menu and pause menu to make it more intuitive for people on controllers. Our recommendation at this point is actually to use a controller as we have put so much work into it. In other controller news; Players can now use a mouse to turn their siege weapon. In addition, we added a turbo speed mode as play testers found siege weapons to be really slow. With Shift or left trigger you’ll now get 30% more speed, it’s even mapped out so harder a press leads to faster movement. Finally, we also optimised options menus. All of the small changes above were due to the feedback of our awesome playtesters.

That's all for this week folks, join us on our discord if you have any thoughts on this weeks issue.

Limited Early Access for Discord Members
We just put out a new build on steam which includes loads of new features including a brand new siege engine model AND a new map based in Wales. You can get access by requesting a key on our discord server. If you don’t have time to play right now go ahead and wishlist the game on our steam store page so you will get reminded before launch.

Game Launch Date and Price
The game will now launch later this year with finished multiplayer as well as the East Conwy map finished. In addition, we will also be sure to localise to a few popular languages and port to mac and linux. We are also glad to announce that the game will now be releasing as free although you will still be able to support the development by buying extra maps as we design them for the game.

Compass and Minimap
In the new build we added a compass that will make it a lot easier for new players to find the enemies which only chase you when you get within a certain radius.

The mini map may end up looking something like the below aerial photo with different colour markers for players and enemies.

Graphics Settings
If you were worried you wouldn’t be able to run Battle Siege Royale we’ve added several graphics settings to allow as many players as possible to enjoy the game. There is now low, medium, high and for those with extra beefy machines, EPIC settings. Below you can see the difference between highest and lowest settings.

Lowest Settings:

EPIC Settings:

Added Death Screens
Previously it wasn’t too clear that you had died in the game and there was just a spectator mode with no feedback. To remedy this we’ve gone ahead and added some fancy looking death screens just to be clear that you have.. you know.. died.

Added new map
While the base map is kind of a hodgepodge with no specific historical date the new map is has an actual historical location with backstory. The new map which you can test out in the latest build is based in East Conwy, Wales.

The title is “The Reclaiming of East Conwy” and is a campaign based around the Welsh independence of the 1250s to 1280s.

But don’t worry the original map won’t be going anywhere! It will now be the main tutorial map for the game to help introduce new players to the ways of the siege. However, more than anything, I was using the map to test the programming before we got serious about making real historical battles.

Sign Posts
The new map will be pretty massive so on top of the compass and mini map you will see some more traditional methods of navigation in open world games. We are dotting several sign posts around the map to make sure players never feel lost in this big world.

New Conwy Church Model
Finally, you can see in the below images we’ve added a new church including it’s very own graveyard. In case you’re the kind of siege engine that requires solemn moments of reflection – we’ve got you. St. Asaph Cathedral as it is called is a heal zone but is still destructible if you are feeling particularly brutal.

Thank you for checking out this week’s dev log and we’ll see you next week.

Limited Early Access

Many of you have noticed the full release of the game has been pushed back to April 30th. We will still have a limited Early Access on Christmas day as promised, but we're only offering this Early Access to members of our Discord community. It's free to join and you'll get access to the game before anyone else! Go to https://www.skjold.net/discord

Gamepad

The game now supports 100% gamepad utilization. The only thing you'll need a keyboard/mouse for is to log into your computer!

The joystick now supports input sensitivity. Before, when you would press forward/back you would go at full speed regardless of how much you were pressing the joystick. Now, if you want to creep up on enemies and sneak out of some bushes, you can! This offers a tactical advantage the keyboard/mouse cannot.

All user interface is 100% controller accessible. Before, anything past the main menu needed the mouse to close the interface. We've now added an "press A" option to close menus.

Campaign Mode

We've added the start to the single player campaign based on the battles of Welsh independence during the 13th century. Our new map is absolutely massive (like open world level of massive). We're also adding several obstacles to make gameplay more interesting between combat sequences. We're super proud of our new level and think players will find it fun and impressive.

Tutorial

Our original "test" map (the one you've been playing on all this time) is now our tutorial map with an in-game guide. This tutorial is still a work in progress, so expect updates to the tutorial (although most of you know how to play the game enough already you won't need it, lol).