Hello! Welcome to the second edition of GG News. First off, we have shown a small teaser for the Maps in GG [previewyoutube=tGBWU8LtFkc;full][/previewyoutube] 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..., [strike]REDACTED[/strike] 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. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/42595078/99f7f366e478fcb6cdaa656da9bdb4a85a64142f.png[/img] 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 [b]YOU[/b] 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: [list] [*][url=https://twitter.com/PlayGrandGate]Twitter[/url] [*][url=https://www.tiktok.com/@grandgate?lang=en]TikTok[/url] [*][url=https://www.instagram.com/playgrandgate/?hl=en]Instagram[/url] [/list] And as always, this is a labor of love from us. We'll deliver the best game we can. This is Azeros, out.