Hello Hexadomers!

For us over here at Blindspot, it’s been an incredible couple of weeks!

We launched and hosted our 2nd closed Beta and were greeted with a significantly larger number of players and sign-ups than ever before. We are extremely proud and excited to take steps towards improving the game based on the feedback we’ve received.

Before we hop into the data and details, we wanted to extend a massive thank you from our team to you for helping make this playtest even more special than the last. This time around we made LOTS of changes, check them out in our latest patch notes. You’ll see we mixed things up with improvements on our Sponsors, Cheers, and Scoring system, and more. Suffice to say, we are thrilled to share the results of our 2nd Closed Beta.

Closed Beta Playtest Results

Over the period of the playtest, we gathered all kinds of feedback across different platforms. Our data excavation tools were through an in-game comment box and rating system after matches, as well as a bug submission tool that sends information to our Jira directly. Additionally, we scraped socials, including our Steam Community Hub, Discord channels, and livestreams for further information. Lastly, we had a survey players could fill out available.

Here’s what we learned:

What players liked

• The art style of the champions, their animations, and VFXs.
• Music and SFX.
• Challenges were a ton of fun!
• The toughness of solo mode when playing against AI.
• The passion and dedication of the devs shown in our Discord by answering questions, releasing patch notes, jumping on bugs, and listening to the community.
• The new mechanic to gain more Cheers on the fly: Hype!

When comparing this Closed Beta to our previous one in April, we noticed a bump of players, going from 1700 subscribers to 6575 subscribers in less than two months. Crazy to think how far we’ve come, and how the hard work continues to shine to new playtesters.

“Almost finished with my first game and WOW- My hype was worth it.” @Nayder

As always, we learnt many things along the way! With an abundance of new playtesters looking at The Hexadome, we received impactful feedback that can help us develop next steps in our upcoming playtests.

One memorable moment from our Discord community was when our most dedicated member asked to include hedgehogs in-game. What started off as playful banter on the Discord channel ended with our co-founder, Vincent, going rogue and adding in jumping hedgehogs to our main screen.

Shout out to Nayder who contributed the most during our playtest, to whom we wanted to say thank you with happy hedgehogs. While working on other bug fixes and patch notes, this was one of the reasons that we received many positive comments that our dev team truly cares and listens to the community. Although, we can’t promise that these hedgehogs will be featured in our next playtest…

“So far the dev team has been fantastic on listening to everyone and taking things into consideration. Never have I run across a more interactive development team which definitely makes me wanna support this game more.” @Mira Morgrist

What could be improved

• Improve the tutorial and better explain our Overwatch mechanic.
• Improve the tutorial to be less overwhelming.
• Improve the RNG. We received mixed feedback on this mechanic as some players felt like they were unlucky with their rolls, and this led to them quitting matches earlier.
• Add pop-up tools and include full list of stats in the Champions’ Page. Players want to see their Champions’ range and stats outside of a match to better strategize for future games.
• Clarify the sponsors mechanic, its progression, and the rewards. We received diverse feedback on the sponsors needing to be clearly to explain how and when they should receive their sponsor rewards. We’re still working on the sponsor system and will improve it for the next beta.
• Create a glossary of keywords and keep the wording consistent throughout the game.
• Define more mechanics: “!”, stars on Champions, Line of Sight, Golden Bullets, etc.
• Add timers in certain areas. For example: when picking the team of champions.
• Create an automated way to end a match when there’s no possibility of winning. For example: if a player is winning by 6-0 in the 3rd round, the losing player cannot comeback and is tempted to surrender. Even though we have a surrender button, it’ll diminish their progression points in the leaderboard.
• Shorten the cutscenes and animations of our Champions.
• Create a visual reminder that the unfinished skins aren’t bugs, but skins that we have yet to work on. Maybe a shirt for our Champions that says “Still in progress”.

We’re taking all of this feedback into consideration and planning out what’s feasible for our upcoming playtests.

Final thoughts

We want to take this time again to say a huge THANK YOU to all of our playtesters and community members for your support on The Hexadome. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve already started tweaking some of the game mechanics for our upcoming playtest.

Our 3rd Closed Beta Playtest is happening from July 11-16! To give you a sneek peak, we’re working on the pacing of the game, reworked tutorial, and the game will be playable en français !

Want to stay in the loop on the latest developments? Be sure to join our Discord, Wishlist The Hexadome on Steam, and follow us on Twitter, Tik Tok, and Facebook for exclusive sneak peeks, playtest updates, and exciting news!