Pax early dev

Racer1 · May 2014

So, what did the UWE team think about getting a pre-alpha build polished up and ready for play at PAX? Was it enjoyable to be working on an official-unofficial release so early in development? What did you learn? Would you do it again?

ellnic · May 2014

Apart from what Hugh posted, is there any more footage floating around of the actual PAX gameplay?

Decoy · May 2014

I'm one of the PT Leads for North America. I didn't do any work on the actual game, just tested it for the days leading up to PAX.

It was honestly amazing to see the dev team work. A few weeks before PAX, the game was very rough around the edges and not really even playable to due a number of missing features. Watching what the team pulled out in the last week or so before PAX was seriously astonishing. I've never seen a game polish up so quickly.

One of my favorite bugs was one where you could get submarines out of the water... so you could just drive straight up at the surface and then you'd come leaping out like Free Willy.. It was pretty fantastic and definitely worth some laughs. It also got fixed quickly

Sure, it was enjoyable. It's neat to see the game take shape and new things be added. I'm a sucker for early release games though. This build in particular was interesting because we were looking for big issues that would make the game unplayable or unenjoyable. It was also a bit different because we were migrating bug reporting systems (worst timing ever) so we were reporting everything into our Subnautica Playtest chat room and then for the final builds we were in teamspeak with the developer team so we could get everything reported and fixed as quickly as possible.

You really gotta hand it to the playtesters - They were testing Subnautica, Combat, and the Kodiak build for the month leading up to PAX. We had additional playtests + they were doing Subnautica on free time. Super proud of them for doing so well!

@ellnic - I haven't seen anything but I haven't been scouring google, either. I feel like if there was anything particularly good it would have been posted here already.

ezekel · May 2014

@Decoy is there any official footage we can check out? I haven't really seen the concept of the game yet just screenshots

Decoy · May 2014

ezekel wrote: »

@Decoy is there any official footage we can check out? I haven't really seen the concept of the game yet just screenshots

I don't believe so. I'm sure if there was, Hugh would have posted it on the front page. I'm not in a position where I can choose to release anything, you'll have to wait on one of the devs for that!

Comprox · May 2014

@ezekel‌ This post by Hugh in another thread explains where there is no video or high quality screenshots out yet.

SteveRock · May 2014

It definitely forced us to polish the game to a certain state, which we would not have done otherwise. Was that good to do at this stage? I think that's harder to answer. Probably some good some less good. We certainly would have had to do a lot of this eventually, so it's not like it's wasted work or anything, but it definitely did take 3-4 weeks out of our normal schedule that we would've otherwise spent adding more core features. The visuals definitely got a huge over haul (thanks to a lot of help from Max), so it was good to have that nailed down more for the art side of things. It also forced me to address some performance issues (of which there are still a shitload), so that's good as well.

Pax early dev

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