Play the Battledroid Alpha!

So... we've finally released a private alpha test of Battledroid for you to have a blast on! This was entirely helped by my unfortunate situation (see footnote below).

This is genuinely an alpha test - there are unknown bugs, and known bugs, and a large part of the content of the game - like most of the units and so on - aren't in the alpha, while we concentrate on just making sure all the basic things are working properly as expected without any complicated cleverfangled things making it hard to find out what's going wrong.

At various points we'll have to reset the database, and clear everyone's progress out, and there will doubtless be a wailing and a gnashing of teeth, but them's the breaks for being an alpha tester.

How to get a Steam Key

Join the Discord here. Patroids should be granted the "Patroid" role - if you are one of the elites that furnish us with beans, but don't have the Patroid role, please let me know so I can bestow it upon you like a medal of honour.

Find the #skirmish-general topic, and read the pinned message, which has an email address. Send me an email there and I'll send you a key as soon as I can (normally within a few minutes if I'm awake and at my desk). 

Let's keep discussion about the alpha on the Discord, so we don't have to collate it from all over the internet.

What about Skirmish?

Well... Skirmish sort of is Battledroid and Battledroid sort of is Skirmish, so for now, it's all just going to be Battledroid. Eventually I'm hoping to bring all of the design of the original Battledroid into the game.

Future Plans and Roadmap

In no particular order (well, we might order it, depending on how much you testers clamour for things):

• Totally rewritten pathfinding, because the one in the alpha at the moment is rather poo
• Powerups implemented - consumable buffs that you can apply to your entire army to buff specific stats for a single battle. For example, giving all your units night vision so they can attack at night unseen, or giving them all extra armour, etc.
• Utility buildings - just like in Revenge of the Titans, utility buildings when placed near turrets give turrets a buff to a particular stat. Also cloaking devices and shield generators, decoys and scarecrows, to thoroughly fox invading enemies.
• Fancy pants rain and snow weather effects
• Droid shields to protect against blasters. Well, these are already implemented, but we have no graphics for them, so none of the droids are directly equipped with shields at the moment.
• Tons more unit and turret types, with exotic weaponry and drive units
• More sorts of landmines and stronger barricades
• Datasheet windows for everything in the game
• And most excitingly... the persistent world seen in the original design of Battledroid.

Footnote of Misfortune

O happy day, I got the sack from my job in the oil industry in November. Well, booted out, anyhoo, the side effects of which are that that planet will last another few days before it boils, and I am now very skint but blessed with riches in the form of game development time, so I'm currently full-time on Battledroid - progress has been rattling along at a fair old clip. The trouble is I can't keep it up, I'll be outta cash again in just 3 weeks time.

If any of you lovely Patroids can lure more followers to our cause, by, for example, ranting and raving about how awesome Battledroid is going to be all over social media, that would be grand. Go forth, and multiply! Tell the world! etc. The first port of call might be to tempt them to our Discord where you can rant at them in realtime!