We’re back with a brand new blog for you all. We hope that all of you in the US had a nice Memorial Day! The second beta for Sky Noon has been and gone. It was great to see so many people giving our game a go, helping us to find those pesky bugs and test new balance changes. We have gained a great amount of information and feedback from the beta which we are putting to good use.
Overall we are pleased with how everything performed, barring a few bugs like the Teleporter sending people into walls. This and other such bugs will be fixed as soon as possible. Some tweaks to certain weapons and abilities are necessary but the balance is stable. We are happy to see that the revolver is no longer dominating the sandbox yet is still strong in its long range niche. It’s also great to see the hand cannon getting a lot of love. We have no specific weapon or ability changes to mention just yet, but if changes are made then they will definitely be in the patch notes before you can next play Sky Noon.
Thanks to everyone for playing on the dedicated servers. We were more or less happy with the stability, for our Early Access release we want to have more locations around the world allowing everyone to join games with a low ping. We heard the concerns of players who had to play at higher ping. We have been making changes to smooth out projectiles on high ping and will be making further changes to interpolate the character movement which should smooth enemy movement and player grappling.
Maps
As for maps, we saw a great deal of very important feedback. We learned that players felt that Hightown wasn’t as dynamic as Towers because of the more simplified two layered play spaces, so we are looking at ways to improve the verticality. More importantly, however, is that we have come to the conclusion that Bridge as a map didn’t work as well as we had hoped. We learned that flatter maps in Sky Noon don’t flow with the combat like one with greater verticality and space between landmass does, such as Towers. As it was, Bridge was underwhelming and didn’t showcase the Cart mode well enough. Bridge will be receiving a massive rework before early access release.
What’s Next
The next major goal is our Early Access release on Steam. We will be announcing a date and price soon. While we don’t have another beta planned as of yet, you should keep an eye on our Discord server for potential “opportunities” as they may or may not arise between now and Early Access.
Some Cool Clips
We shall end this week’s blog with some of our favourite clips from the beta. Remember to post yours in the #clips-steams-videos in the discord. Enjoy!
A special shout out to Bryonato for being so awesome and playing around 70 hours of Sky Noon already, all during our closed betas. Here’s a fantastic montage he made.