Hi everyone!
Today, we’re thrilled to share the results of The Hexadome’s 1st Closed Beta Playtest!
After our Alpha playtest in February, we quickly got to work thanks to the community’s helpful feedback. The last couple of months were filled with working on the tutorial, adding champion challenges, creating emotes, skins, VFXs, environment art, and much more.
While the team was working hard, we also attended PAX East in Boston, where we got to share The Hexadome in person for the first time. It was an exciting milestone for us and we talked about in our last dev blog.
There was no time to waste when we returned! We announced the dates to the closed beta playtest, unveiled our official trailer, and revealed our participation in Turn-Based Thursday Fest! All that to say, we’ve been very busy since our previous playtest and we’re thrilled that you joined our playtest from April 4th to 9th!
We want to take a moment to truly thank you for your incredible support during this time. Thank you for sharing your feedback, for streaming our game, for spreading the word, and just your encouragement overall.
That being said, let’s share the results of the latest playtest!
- The new and improved tutorial
- The champions' designs and VFXs
- The new emotes
- The core gameplay
“It was quite fun to play. Obviously there is a lot to learn, about champions, their synergies and so on, but I still enjoyed the matches I played.” @neveresttt
“The character designs and core gameplay seem solid so far.” @Syncroniam
With the tutorial, it had a revamp since the Alpha playtesters had their hands on it. We decided to split it in two parts where one focused on getting to know the champions and their abilities, how to score points, utilizing their energy points, and more. The second tutorial dove more into the core mechanics of capturing sponsors, advancing in timeline with time steps, and learning the synergies between your team’s champions. We got lots of feedback that even though it ran long, they found the mechanics to be clearer than in our previous playtest.
“The new tutorial and challenges are very good now. I understand the mechanics better than the first time. And the challenges are good to know more some characters.” @Morrigan
As always, our champions stole the show and players fell in love with the updated designs, VFXs, weapons, tactics, and unique abilities and ultimates. We were surprised that Wild Bill was one of the most popular champions used during our beta as his skin is not finalized yet. His golden bullets must’ve caught their eye!
One of the biggest updates in this beta was Laxmee’s new skin reveal with her stunning VFXs for each of her abilities. Don’t underestimate her low HP, as many players described her as being very overpowered when focusing her teammates or stunning her opponents.
We’re currently working on more character skins, and we’re very excited for you to see them in the near future!
“Big fan of some of the updated animations! Laxmee just looks fantastic, has me excited for getting Parvati and Hannibal animated.” @Crusadia IX
Another new element to the game were our brand new emotes! From Maximus’ GG to 8-ball's crying Noo, these emotes allowed the players’ to communicate in an intense match. We’ve already gotten suggestions for Hexx3r and Señor Massacre.
“The emotes are super fun!” @anonymous
Overall, the feedback we received was very positive, with players expressing their love for the art style, the arena’s environment, and the addicting core gameplay.
- Improve the tutorial. We have lots of game mechanics and don’t want to overwhelm new players with too much information. We’ll work on splitting the tutorial elements for players to redo them in the tutorial main page. For example, if they need a refresher on how Cheers works, they can redo the Cheers tutorial there.
- Improve the game mode for a better, smoother, and shorter game.
- Make the Timeline, Time Steps, and Scoring Zones clearer!
- Clarify how Energy Points work. One tip with energy points is that sometimes the best move is not to move in that moment.
- Create a singleplayer mode for those not wanting to battle it out against another player.
- Champion overview page on the main screen to showcase their unique abilities, tactics, stats, ranges, lore, and more.
- Add timers in certain areas (for example: when picking the team of champions).
- Define more mechanics: “!”, stars on Champions, Line of Sight, Golden Bullets, and more.
We’re taking all these suggestions into consideration for our next playtest!
We want to take this time again to say a huge THANK YOU to all our playtesters and community members for your support on The Hexadome’s latest playtest. Thanks to your feedback, we’ve already started tweaking some of the game mechanics for our upcoming playtest.
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!
