Beastieball's 2024 roadmap

Now that Playtest 2 is complete, we're looking ahead to our final Playtest and launch.

Firstly, THANK YOU to our many diligent players who checked out Preview Playtest 2! We couldn’t be happier with the overall reception the game has been receiving. And we’re already hard at work fixing all the new small issues that players discovered. :*)

Before we vanish back into the bugfixing grind, I wanted to talk about our plans for the rest of the year… including our release (!)

This is all happening in 2024:

• August 24: Vancouver Game Garden

  • I (Greg) am actually one of the main organizers of this event! We’re hosting a one-day arcade of radical local indie developers and studios. If you’re around Vancouver, I encourage you to come check it out. Of course I’ll be there with a Beastieball demo, too.

• August 30 - September 2: We’ll be showing the game at PAX West!

  • We’ll also have some exclusive merch available with us. If you’re in town, we home you’ll come and say hello! :)

• Q4 2024: Preview Playtest 3 (Chroma Sea)

  • This Preview Playtest will include all previous Playtest content, with the addition of some areas of the Chroma Sea.

  • This will be the final Playtest before our release. There will be a substantial amount of content in it - but testing that will help us ensure that our launch is as strong and stable as can be!

• And finally…

Q4 2024: Early Access Launch

This is the launch we’ve been working up to and are still on track for! Beastieball will be available in 2024 on Steam for PC and Mac.

We imagine some folks are surprised to hear our plans are for an Early Access launch. Indeed, as far as Early Access games go, Beastieball is going to be remarkably robust and polished. On day 1, the game will have:

• A complete story. You can play from beginning to the end credits and see the story’s conclusion. Typical playtimes range from 15 to 25 hours, depending on how thoroughly you explore.

• Sidequests and extras. Aside from story completion, there are lots of other sidequests and challenges to discover, including hidden extra areas. Ranked coaches you defeat will be added to your Contacts and you’ll be able to hang out with them to build your friendships.

• A robust post-game. After reaching the end credits, many new activities and challenges are unlocked, including some that can go on forever. You’ll also be able to go back and do anything you missed in the course of your adventure.

• Networked play. You can create lobbies and challenge other players to 1v1 Beastieball matches using your own in-game team. You’ll also be able to upload teams, share them, and download other players’ teams to experiment with different strategies. Not to mention passively challenging other players by sending your extra Beasties onto the internet as an Away Team.

• Diverse game modes. Including multiple randomizer modes, each at different levels of chaos. And multiple ironman challenge difficulty modes, too, which you can combine with randomizer modes as you wish, all of which totally transform the experience of the game from its first moments to the final boss.

• 100 Beasties to discover and meet. In case we haven’t made it obvious, we care deeply about our Beasties and the design work that goes into them. We didn’t want to merely fill in the slots - each and every one of these 100 Beasties are important to us and had a wealth of thought and iteration put into them. We can’t wait for players to discover them all.

We’re 100% confident promising these things because they’re already in the game right now, and have been for months. Our goal for this entire year has been to refine these features, fix bugs, layer in more side content, and improve balance and pacing so that all these features come together to form an excellent and harmonious package. In many ways, we’re treating this as a full game launch - we want it to feel high-quality, complete and satisfying for players in all the ways that matter.

So: Why Early Access?

Even with all of the above, there’s still a lot more that we’ll be working on into 2025 and beyond. Those things include:

• Player feedback

  • Ultimately our goal is to make an incredible game. Rather than toil away in the shadows, hope we get everything right and then find out how players feel about the finished product, we want to engage with our community and make sure that our efforts are focused in the right areas as we add new content or address issues.

• Beastie animation

  • As some players have observed in Playtests, not all Beasties are fully animated to the same level yet. We’re diligently working to replace all our “placeholder” art so that the initial Early Access release has all clean, finished-looking Beasties - but animation is another step beyond that which we’re going to continue working on for a while.

  • Although we believe animation is what takes our Beasties to the next level, we also recognize that its absence won’t prevent players from connecting with their Beasties and having a deeply fulfilling game experience.

  • Animation takes a long time, but it’s also something artists can work on in parallel while we’re collecting player feedback and addressing technical/gameplay issues. Because of that, it’ll be very efficient to have an ongoing Early Access period while animation is still in production.

• Additional content

  • Even with so much in the game, we have a long list of additional things we want to add. This includes new Beasties, new sidequests, and new friendship/bond events with other characters.

  • We have ideas for ways we want to expand on the game’s networked features too. Nothing too crazy, but some things are easier to implement and test after the game already has an established player base and community to build on.

  • We also will be working on The Far Out, an additional area of the game which we promised in our Kickstarter.

• Localization & Other Stuff

  • There are a lot of slow background tasks that typically happen after a game is “done” (content complete) but before it can properly release - including localization. Our goal is to exit Early Access with finished localization so that players around the world can enjoy the final product!

Thank you

This is an unusually long email - I felt I needed to give all of these details because we have a lot of players who are hotly anticipating this game and I want to be fully transparent about what to expect from us. That said, fans have always been remarkably friendly and polite with us… I’m grateful that I get to make games for such a warm community of people.

Ultimately we’re a pretty small team doing pretty huge things. I’m immensely proud of the game we’ve made, now more than ever. I’ll continue to yearn for the day when I can finally fully eject it from my brain and into your hands.

We’ll see you later in 2024!