Good morning to you forum gurus and fellow lurkers!

I am proud to announce that BorderStrain, my Open-World 2D ARPG is now listed as Coming Soon on Steam and we will now be starting invited Beta Testing!

The Steam page can be found at: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1007070/BorderStrain/

The Webpage for the game can be found at: www.BorderStrain.com

BorderStrain is a Multiplayer 2D Open-World ARPG developed by me and me alone. This is my first game developed and released so it is quite a learning experience! Working on a limited budget and doing all the graphical assets as well as engine building and game-design all by myself has meant that development has taken quite some time but I think it is now time to start sharing the game and getting some invaluable feedback to keep improving it in preparation for launch!

The game is programmed in C++ using OpenGL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du2ukNvOB-g

I am currently looking for active and eager Beta Testers to join and get a free copy of BorderStrain!

If you would like to join Beta Testing there are a few checkpoints that I would like you to take a look at before sending your request to join Beta Testing

Checklist:

• This is still Closed Beta, as such I expect you to honour this and keep any gameplay suggestions, bug reporting, reviewing etc within the Beta Testing Group only until we are ready for public testing, reviewing etc
   
• Both Single Player testers and Multiplayer Groups up to 5 People are invited. As the number of Beta Testing Slots are limited initially any group which will also test in Multiplayer will take precedence. If you want to join Beta Testing as a Multiplayer Group, please send all details in a single request mail.
   
• If you join as a solo tester, please state in your join request if you would be interested in being paired up for multiplayer testing or if you simply want to try the game out in Single Player mode
   
• The webpage is being reorganized right now and have a closed forum which will be accessable by all Beta Testers. If the forum is too limited for feedback, experience sharing etc we will organize a Discord server but for starters we will use the BorderStrain Forums.
   
• Please be aware that since this entire game has been a solo development with a custom engine there will be bugs! Although I have tried to to as much debugging and playtesting as possible I am sure (and actually hoping!) that you will discover more bugs. Please keep this in mind and I will work as hard as possible to correct any bugs found while playtesting
   
• The game comes with a custom Map-Maker which can be used to make sharable custom expansions which can be selected upon starting a new Server. Please state in your request email if you would be interested in using the Map-Maker to try to design your own custom expansion
   
• One prerequisite for being allowed to keep you Beta Key after release and aquiring a full copy of the game upon release is that you have at least 10 hours of Beta Testing logged. This is just to encourage active testing which we would really appreciate, and if you do not reach the target number of hours you will still have had a chance to playtest the game during Beta
   
• Since I am posting on this forum and I only have a limited number of initial Beta Tester slots I will be sorting applications based on forum activity. If you are not an active forum user and still feel that you would be a valuable Beta Tester, please give a short motivation in your email as I could very well make exceptions to this

How to join:
Send an email to admin@borderstrain.com with the following details:

• Your forum username here (used to do a rough activity check)
   
• A short presentation of yourself any why you are interested in joining Beta Testing
   
• Your email
   
• Your PC Specifications
   
• Your availability (rough estimate only) for Beta Testing
   
• Any replies to the Checklist above

I will gather join request during the weekend and the upcoming week and as soon as I feel I have a good pick I will email back replies and, if selected, Beta Keys which can be used to access the game

And of course, any feedback from you guys directly related to the BorderStrain announcement and Steam Page is alwasy welcome, regardless if you are interested in participating as a Beta Tester or not! Please provide any questions, feedback or thought below!

Best Regards, BG109!

I like the look of your game and if I had more free time i would definitely help.

Your announcement and the info given here are great, and that should stand you in good stead. Don't give up though as it's hard work to even get people to try a game for free - it's taken me over a week to get a reasonable number of testers for my own game via steam news posts etc.

Good luck!

Thanks a lot guys, much appriciated!

Yeah, I do expect it to take quite some time to try to build a small community but hopefully it will pan out ?

I have started getting a few join request but I hope to try to get a couple more, I guess now all the big effort into various social media starts so that will be quite a learning experience as well!

Again, thanx!

//BG109

Dear All!

Due to the large number of join requests for the BorderStrain Beta Test we can unfortunately not accept any further playtesters at this point as I will be fully occupied handling the once currently joined

I am very thankful for all the interest and will update this thread with further info regarding Beta Testing if we will open a second test-window prior to launch

I will of-course still be active in this thread to answer any questions

Thank you!

Well... That went south pretty quickly... ???

I thought I would post a short update on the Beta Progress, it might be of interest for other devs out there as well


After a lot of searching the web for beta-testers I manage to hit a few gods spots and join requests was pouring in! Yay! ? Or, so I thought...



Any experiences dev would probably have identified all the myriads of license-key phising mails, and I did try to sort it out... However after the first round of Beta testing the results are in, and they are not quite what one would have hoped..

Number Accepted Testers: 16 - I wanted to be able to handle all testers and provide feedback/fixes so I limited the number of seats to this number

Number of Active Players: 4 - Thankfully the Steam Leaderboards allowed me to keep track of player activites. Out of 16 players joined only 4 had actually started the game after 2-3 weeks

Number of Active Players Actually Playing the Game: 1 - Well.. Out of the leaderboard scores only 1 of 16 players had actually played it for any significant time

Number of feedback reports received: 3 - Not to bad considering the above. 2 were from the active player, and they were generally good with some good feedback which let me improve the game. I am very thankful for this! The last one was from a player who had issues with starting the game, something I as also happy to know! Unfortunately, after I fixed the bug he did not seem to actually play the game. But I was still thankful for his report!

Consensus: Even after screening literally hundred of licensy-key phising mails I unfortunately still caught mainly bad fish... I am very thankful for the players who actually tested the game though! But the first Beta-Round was kind of a bust...



I guess I need to start a new push for Round 2 now. As a new Indie Developer it is quite a realization how difficult it can be to manage/initiate a closed beta when you are yet trying to build up interest around the game, not quite unexpected but still!

I did try a bit of both carrot and stick, with reminders to inactive players and also announcing a small in-game competition with some small rewards, however in the end neither seemed to have panned out quite well....

This time around I will require a bit more effort from interested Beta-Testers before accepting join requests, I guess a lot of the issues were sort of self-created in my naive eagerness for having people play-test the game


Well. I will try again, and if any of you guys have some good suggestions feel free to share them! They would be much appriciated!


And of-course:

Anyone interested in joining Round 2 of Beta testing feel free to send me a message!

//BG109

Finally starting to get a good amount of really valuable feedback

Big thanks to all Beta Testers this far!

The main things fixed so far includes:

1) Better/More advice/info for new players how the game/controls work

2) Some graphical bug fixes

3) Added cutscene support as well as audio support for dialogs (only a few actual audiotracks so far)

4) Some graphical improvements such as blood splatter

5) Various small fixes

There is quite a backlog left now but working hard on it ?

There is still room for more testers to join if you feel like it! Just let me know!